LUO Ye still remembers the first joke she performed on stage. "I love staring at my own reflection in car windows," she says flatly. "But I cannot afford a car, so I'm looking for a boyfriend who's shorter than me and wears sunglasses all the time."

Inspired by the deadpan absurdities of Steven Wright and Maria Bamford, Shanghai-native Luo, who works at an architecture firm, is one of the many flavors of comedy offered by the Shanghai-based stand-up comedy group, Kung Fu Komedy.

From Tammy Imig's "utterly honest" style to Damon Sumner's observational humor (sample - "I love being black in China because wherever I go, I always get a lot of attention."), the two-year-old group has developed a stable of comedians cutting its teeth on Shanghai's international audience.

Imig and Sumner are both English teachers from Atlanta, but they did not come to Shanghai together.

"It forces you to do smarter comedy," says the group's co-founder Turner Sparks, a northern Californian who is CEO of Mister Softee, the first American ice cream truck to operate in China. "You have to do stuff that can relate to everyone but isn't bland or dull."

While the crowds are predominantly expats, Sparks sees the power of word-of-mouth among its Chinese fans.

"At first, Chinese audiences were a little worried that they wouldn't understand but we've seen that they will come and they will always tell you the percentage of what they understood after the show," Sparks says with a laugh. "You see them come back a couple weeks later with five friends, though, which is great because we want to be as multicultural as we can be."

While the group currently has one Chinese comic, Luo, she does comedy solely in English.

"It's different," she says. "I've tried telling some of my English jokes to my friends in Chinese but they don't find it funny."

Group co-founder Andy Curtain confirms that some things are lost in translation.

"I've done comedy in Chinese but I feel like they like the more theatrical side to it," says the Australian from Melbourne who works for KFC. "We grew up watching stand-up, whereas they would like to compare it with something that they're used to seeing. The difference is less cultural and more what you've been exposed to as part of your culture."

Curtain also observes: "One of the biggest points (of difference) is that Chinese audiences don't really like dirty comedy, but a lot of people don't. That won't fly with a Scandinavian audience as well."

Regardless, stand-up comedy is becoming an increasingly popular art form across Asia. Comedy clubs are packed across India, Singapore and Hong Kong. With the opening of their club in Massé off Shaanxi Road S. Kung Fu Komedy has added Shanghai to that list.

The main Kung Fu Komedy troupe has eight members, and the new Faces of Komedy group has seven comedians who joined after open mic nights.

Kung Fu Komedy runs weekly Saturday shows and just brought in American comic Butch Bradley on the weekend for a sold-out appearance.

"We're building ourselves on the model of the Comedy Store in Los Angeles," explains Curtain. "We have headliner shows every Saturday and we eventually want to have those on Thursday and Friday as well. Our goal is to be in 20 cities in China and develop all the headliners that we have."

It's a remarkably ambitious goal to try to follow the famed comedy club that gave early opportunities to future legends like Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Russell Peters and Dave Chappelle.

However, in two years Kung Fu Komedy has gone from a group of people wanting to try stand-up to having member Drew Fralick perform on TV with popular Chinese-American comic Joe Wong and receiving requests from internationally renowned comics looking to perform in China.

Kung Fu Komedy was started by Curtain and Sparks as two separate groups based in Shanghai and Suzhou. Neither had ever tried stand-up before, but they were able to eventually convince friends who ran bars to give them a chance to host a stand-up night.

The first Kung Fu Komedy show in Shanghai was at Beedees in 2011, when the group did stand-up in an empty room. The next show was different. "We tried it with a crowd and since we were the only people doing stand-up, the room was so packed that people couldn't get into the door," Curtain says.

Meanwhile in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, Sparks had started Stand Up China a year earlier. The two groups eventually found each other and after a couple of collaborations decided to merge under the Kung Fu Komedy banner.

Monthly shows turned into weekly shows as the group built up stronger fan bases in both cities. Last year, they performed in Ningbo, Wuxi, Nanjing and Beijing. The group has also swelled in size due to their weekly Wednesday open mic nights that provide opportunities for people to try stand-up and serves as an incubator for the group's New Face of Komedy sub-group.

This was how Shanghai-native Luo joined the group. Exposed to stand-up comedy through the Craig Ferguson late-night show, she first performed at an open mic and encourages others to do so too.

"They're no big deal. You just have to try it once so you know how much you hate or like the feeling of being on stage. If you don't try, you just end up feeling scared," she says. "After a few times, it felt like it was routine. I had these new ideas so it's not like I could not go."

The dedication to the craft that Luo has runs throughout Kung Fu Komedy. Having just the one venue also ensures that the group's comedy is always fresh.

"Shanghai has kicked me in the face," Sumner says. "In Atlanta, there are so many rooms that I could take the same set and keep working around. Here after one or two times, they're like 'yeah, we know that joke, Brother. Give us something else.' But it's good because it challenges me to keep writing and keep thinking."

The group's hard work has paid off in the late January opening of Kung Fu Komedy Club.

The intimate space can hold up to 80 people and without a stage, the comics are sometimes within centimeters of their audience. Still it generates raves from Imig.

"This is the perfect room for comedy," she says. "There's no bar in here, so there's no noise. There's no TVs, no distractions. It looks kind of like a prison cell but it's nice in that it keeps the attention focused."

The group is also plotting more shows across the country, and Sparks says this is just the beginning of something bigger.

"It's just like the late 1970s in New York and Los Angeles," he says. "In five years, stand-up comedy just exploded all over the US and I think that's going to happen here. I think you'll see this art form moving into the Chinese language and I wouldn't mind seeing this not be the only comedy club in China."

Kung Fu Komedy performs every Saturday and holds a weekly Wednesday open mic at Kung Fu Komedy Club (5/F, 219 Jinxian Rd). Open mics are free and Saturday shows range from 30 yuan to 180 yuan at the door depending on the headliner. For more information, visit www.kungfukomedy.com.