The few Chinese in the audience at Des Bishop's stand-up comedy show in a Melbourne bar are laughing - but whether with amusement or embarrassment as he mimics a Chinese accent isn't clear.
Bishop is convinced they enjoy it. "The Chinese like it because it means something to them and the Australian-born Chinese like it," he says. In fact, while the Melbourne crowd can be "overly concerned about political correctness", the Chinese aren't offended, he adds.
"There have been a couple of nights when the Australian people have said, 'Can you say that?'," Bishop admits of his recent profanity-laden Melbourne Comedy Festival show Made in China. Certainly this non-Chinese audience member is squirming as he tells anyone uncomfortable with his performance that "they love that sh** in China, they love us doing sh** versions of them".
The accent is "representative of the person I am talking to", he says, in the same way as he would use an Irish or Australian accent. "I'm not trying to do a fake Chinese accent."
Bishop, 38, who off stage is well-dressed and quietly spoken, grew up in New York until age 14 when his Irish-American parents sent him to school in Ireland. He stayed and, 24 years on, is a full-time comedian with his own small comedy venue in Dublin, The International Comedy Club.
But after spending the past year in China living with a family and learning Putonghua, he is now planning to spend another year in Beijing, where he has his own apartment, excited by the emerging stand-up comedy scene there.
His career has included documentary and television, incorporating stand-up. When making a documentary about minimum-wage workers in Ireland, he met many Chinese and when, in 2004, they went home for a visit, he went too. "Like most people, it was nothing like I had thought."