Talk with 南瓜: 马伊琍's Food-Delivery Question, Holding On to Stand-Up

Summary

• 南瓜’s pivot was not a one-off stroke of luck in which a delivery rider happened to be discovered by a show; it was a career transition built jointly by an industry window, high-frequency reps, and a singular trove of lived experience. He wrote bits while making deliveries and hit as many as 3 open mics a night in Xi’an after clocking off; he eventually finished No. 12 nationwide on The King of Stand-up, but says he gave it “8 lifetimes’ worth of effort and put his luck on the line.”
• The delivery job gave 南瓜 a hard-to-replicate supply of material, but raw material does not automatically make a good product. Early on, he only said that after a cake was damaged in delivery, he had to eat it himself and ended up “celebrating 3 or 4 birthdays a year”; later, he first established the shared anxiety of supposedly free work that still comes with constant worry over damaged orders, making it easier for more viewers to enter the story. The security-guard and rider back-and-forth was later identified by 黑灯 as “mutual harm among people at the bottom,” and 南瓜 explained that he redirected at security guards the anger he did not dare vent at customers.
• He attributes the biggest external variable to the timing window: when stand-up was just scaling up, persistence, talent, and method could be enough to earn an entry ticket; now a mature supply of performers has raised the bar for newcomers. He says entering the business 3 years earlier or later might not have produced the same outcome; joining the Xiaoguo training camp in 2021, which selected only 50 people nationwide, felt more like a fateful turning point than meeting 周星驰.
• What truly changed the quality of his output was moving from “telling experiences” to a trainable method of writing premises and taking a position. The training camp exposed him systematically to writing, improv, and Sketch; it was only after 王子涵 taught him to write “a view on a thing” that he could turn watching a rider work from a car into “a boy turning into a dragon,” rather than merely recounting the scene.
• The show’s exposure brought some bookings, but failure under the format and real market feedback delivered 2 different diagnoses. After a first-round exit on Rock & Roast, he thought he had “lost to the format,” not the audience; only the polarized response to his later nationwide tour forced him to admit that rider material had both distinctiveness and “the limits of the everyman,” while urban audiences cared more about education, work, relationships, and family of origin.
• The delivery job offered immediate cash flow and a low barrier to entry, but pushed risk and wear-and-tear directly onto the body. Earnings of RMB5, RMB8, or RMB12 per order felt tangible, but some colleagues slept under bridges to make more money, while others ran themselves into the ground for an urgent RMB100K; 南瓜 himself developed an eye condition involving photophobia and tearing after years of delivering into the wind. 卫诗婕 said many people trade away “health, including life safety” to cover basic needs, and 南瓜 agreed.
• When 马伊琍 asked whether he would still deliver food, 南瓜 refused to romanticize the fallback and said only that he would “hold on tightly to stand-up comedy.” The rider label helped him get noticed, but it is not an identity he wants to build his life around; he now takes occasional delivery shifts for inspiration because “I had no choice before, but now I do”（之前没得选，但是现在有得选）, which also means he finally has a choice.

Deep dive

1. He still takes delivery shifts, but the job has become a source of creative field samples

• 南瓜 took a delivery shift 2 days ago, no longer to make money but to “get his feel back” and look for new bits; his earlier work grew out of delivery life, so he still needs to return to the scene.
• His path is straightforward: a native of Baoji, Shaanxi, he encountered stand-up while delivering in Xi’an, then went to Shanghai, delivering while performing, and finished No. 12 nationwide on The King of Stand-up in 2024.
• When 卫诗婕 first met him, she saw only a socially anxious young man in a gray hoodie, head down over his phone. 南瓜 admits he “doesn’t like going out or talking,” making the contrast between his stage persona and offstage self especially stark.

2. “We have everything at home” was an Ah Q-style coping mechanism born of inequality

• 卫诗婕’s favorite joke is 南瓜 seeing supercars in Shanghai and saying, “I’m not that envious—my family has everything.” The punchline is that his father makes paper replicas of all kinds of offerings at home.
• 南瓜 does not frame this lightness as equanimity; he calls it “Ah Q spirit, self-deception.” When material comforts are out of reach, he says, the only option is to change direction and metabolize the shock.
• In high school, he first felt the gap between his rural family and classmates from the county, so he shifted the competition to basketball. In his senior year, he injured his meniscus and ligaments, then joked that he seemed to be just one disability grade short of getting a certificate—and that with one, he and 黑灯 could enter the disability lane.
• He scored 250 on his first gaokao and 230 after retaking it, admitting he had essentially guessed his way through the multiple-choice questions. When 卫诗婕 said he could have done stand-up after college, he pushed back: he might have followed a conventional path after graduation and “missed this train.” When his mother asked, “Can you do it? If not, forget it,” he promised he would get on the show, even though he was not sure himself.

3. One decision to stop taking orders turned a run of failures into a single viable track

• Before stand-up, 南瓜 washed cars and sold liangpi; loans from friends and credit-card debt eventually cost him RMB20K-30K. He put a few thousand RMB into a snack cart, but even at a high-traffic location nobody bought anything. To this day, he can only call it “metaphysics”—the more damaging problem was that he never got any positive feedback.
• While delivering a cake to a bar, he saw live stand-up for the first time. He hit pause on the delivery app and watched the whole set: “I saw a ray of light—the light on that stage, maybe it was shining on me too.” A life that had already burned down to dead embers suddenly offered the possibility that he, too, could take the stage.
• His first open mic was welcomed despite his clumsy delivery, but the second one “went completely cold.” He realized that an audience liking his energy did not mean the material worked. He also believed he had caught the best window: back then, “if you had persistence, talent, and method,” you could get into the business; now there are too many strong performers and finished bits, and newcomers are more likely to be discouraged early.

4. The training camp felt like a university acceptance; methodology gave his experiences a point of view for the first time

• In 2021, after several failed applications, 南瓜 entered a training camp that selected only 50 people nationwide and went wild with excitement. It felt like receiving a university acceptance letter he had never gotten; even meeting 周星驰 later could not match the emotion.
• While others were seriously asking creative questions, he asked, “How can I join 笑果?” His reasoning was that he might never again have the chance to make that pitch in person. 李诞 told the staff on the spot, “Sign him,” and said he had some comedic sensibility.
• He also asked how to make 100 audience members with entirely different family backgrounds, education, and cognitive frames all like him. 李诞’s answer was “Impossible.” 南瓜 came to see every performance as a game of odds: “I bet on whether this joke can make you happy.”
• The camp covered writing, written tests, Sketch, and improv, but the key lesson came from 王子涵, who taught him to write the “premise”—his view of what happened. Before that, he could only tell stories; afterward, his stories began to carry a judgment.

5. Distinctive material is only supply; resonance requires rebuilding the entry point

• Audiences in Xi’an responded more strongly to 南瓜’s raw life material. In Shanghai, he realized that “just talking about myself” was not enough. The answer was not to replace the material, but to add enough craft for strangers to first understand what this life had to do with theirs.
• The cake bit originally amounted to 南瓜 being forced to eat a damaged cake, so he ended up “celebrating 3 or 4 birthdays a year,” with birthday wishes ranging from “Happy 60th” to “May I marry 易烊千玺 soon.” He later first established the shared anxiety of riders who appear to have freedom but constantly worry about damaged orders, making the original story easier to hear.
• In the semifinal, he sat in a car watching riders outside and wanted to write about how improving his own circumstances had made him “forget his roots”—“a boy turning into a dragon”（少年变成恶龙）. The judges wanted him to develop the scene further, but he admits he could only leave it open: “I still can’t handle it properly.”
• “Security guards call riders electric scooters, and riders call security guards walkie-talkies” was originally just mutual mockery. 黑灯 identified it as “mutual harm among people at the bottom,” and 南瓜 explained that he had redirected onto security guards the anger he did not dare vent at customers.

6. Shanghai’s professionalization came from repetition density, not an identity switch

• Before moving to Shanghai, 南瓜 had no inner struggle and kept no fallback option. He returned the electric bike he had rented in Xi’an and rented another in Shanghai. Unlike his confusion when he first arrived in Xi’an, he had only 2 goals this time: deliver food to cover his living costs and break into the stand-up circuit.
• He chose his home by map, requiring it to be roughly 11 km from the performance venues on Nanjing East Road and within a 40-minute ride. That let him pick up delivery orders without allowing the commute to consume his stage time. By the second or third day after settling in, he had begun signing up for open mics.
• During that stretch he had no events, friends, or girlfriend. He wrote bits while making deliveries and ran as many as 3 open mics a night, calling himself the most frequently performing comedian in Xi’an at the time. Cheap KTV rehearsals did not eliminate his nerves; repeated stage time did. His Mandarin, memorization, and stage presence were all sharpened the same way.

7. Rock & Roast’s first-round exit damaged his confidence; the split tour response actually corrected his model

• Before appearing on Rock & Roast, 南瓜’s 5-minute sets were killing at every offline show. He made the top 10 in the nationwide audition, with only him and 黑灯 among the 10 finalists being newcomers, and assumed he would be one of the year’s best new comedians. He was eliminated in the first round.
• After 周迅 and 那英 did not hit their buzzers, some people explained the result by saying celebrities could not empathize with lower-income lives. 南瓜 himself found that explanation “very hard to accept.” When 卫诗婕 asked whether it meant elite audiences could not understand his writing, he pushed back: he was “not taken out by the audience,” but had “lost to the format.”
• On the night filming ended, he and 黑灯, who had advanced, went to the beach after dawn. The reported “5 a.m. walk to clear his head” was simply a polished description of a night when neither of them had slept.
• The later nationwide tour changed his mind. Some audiences found ordinary people’s lives extremely interesting; others said, “That is exactly where the limits of the ordinary person lie.” Only then did he realize that urban young people cared more about education, work, relationships, family of origin, and their bosses—all gaps in his own material.

8. Immediate cash flow for riders leaves risk and depreciation with the body

• During the pandemic, some riders slept under bridges to make more money. 南瓜 said that without stand-up, he “might have gone out and slept under a bridge for money.” Years of delivering into the wind inflamed his eyes, leaving him with photophobia, tearing, and difficulty keeping them open—a lasting occupational condition.
• He no longer likes repeating stories about hardship because once you have lived through it, you only want to leave it behind. Watching 逆行人生 still pulls him into the experience and brings him to tears. 卫诗婕 said this showed how many people trade away health, and even life safety, to cover basic needs.
• How much a rider works depends on personal goals and cash pressure. When 南瓜 owed RMB20K-30K, he said he could protect his health and plan to repay it over roughly 6 or 8 months; he did not choose to pay it down by running RMB500-600 a day. Someone who urgently needed RMB100K for medical treatment or a family problem might have no choice but to “run themselves to death.”
• The payback was immediate: RMB5, RMB8, or RMB12 per order. “You make RMB5 and it goes straight into your pocket,” which made watching the daily inflow reassuring. The costs included wind and sun, as well as worrying about what classmates would say; once he actually started, he stopped caring about their opinions.

9. With choice, he wants to leave the label—and relearn where to place his self-respect

• When 马伊琍 asked whether he would return to delivery work if stand-up stopped working, 南瓜 deliberately did not answer directly. He only said he had to “hold on tightly to stand-up comedy.” He is grateful that the rider label gave him recognizability, but does not think he—or most people—will do it for life. He delivers now because “I had no choice before, but now I do.”
• He wants to be remembered for the “韧” in 坚韧—resilience—along with optimism and confidence. He also admits that before Rock & Roast he had become so inflated he was “more arrogant than 黑灯”; the first-round exit brought him back to reality. He agrees that “30% is fate and 70% is hard work,” but also believes entering 3 years earlier or later could have meant missing the critical node.
• His results did not repair the insecurity in his private life: he has confidence in his career, but not in love. Because his open-mic sets about romance went cold and he worried his appearance would make those jokes seem overly slick, he ultimately chose not to perform his romance material on the show. 卫诗婕 directly pushed back, saying he did not look old. Around people he knows, he describes himself as a “happy puppy”（快乐小狗）who is afraid of saying the wrong thing and then ruminates about it afterward.
• His answer on dignity always leaves room for circumstances. After scratching an Audi, he instinctively cried and apologized; the other party ultimately waived the claim, reinforcing his belief that “you still have to bow your head when you should.” Doing an imitation for RMB200 or going into the water in March or April to make RMB80 was condemned by a teacher as undignified. 卫诗婕 said it depended on the circumstances, and that going into the water was not the same in kind as admitting you were an idiot. 南瓜 said going into the water was “purely for the money,” and agreed that the 2 situations were fundamentally different.