Source: The London Prat | Region: People's Republic of China | Period: c.500 BCE to present
Chinese humour is one of the oldest, most formally sophisticated, and least internationally understood comic traditions in the world — a combination of circumstances that is itself, from a sufficient distance, quite funny. It is a tradition with a documented history of over 2,500 years, a classical literature of comic writing that predates most Western equivalents, and a contemporary digital comedy culture producing content consumed by the largest online audience on earth. It is also a tradition that operates under political constraints of unusual severity, that has developed in response to those constraints a set of evasive, indirect, and structurally ingenious comic strategies, and that is consequently somewhat harder to translate — not merely linguistically but culturally — than comedy from traditions with fewer restrictions on what may be said about whom.
The defining quality of classical Chinese humour is youmo (幽默) — a term borrowed from English "humour" in the early 20th century by the essayist Lin Yutang, who spent considerable intellectual energy arguing that Chinese culture had always possessed this quality even though it had lacked the word. Whether Lin Yutang was correct about this is itself a subject of gentle scholarly disagreement, which is a very Chinese comic situation: a debate about whether something exists that has been conducted, with perfect civility, for a century, without either side conceding anything.
The earliest documented Chinese comic tradition is the court jester — the youren (優人) or paiyou (俳優) — whose role in Chinese imperial courts from at least the Zhou dynasty (1046-256 BCE) was to speak truth to power through the medium of entertainment. The most celebrated of these figures is Chunyu Kun (淳于髡), a jester of the Qi state in the 4th century BCE, whose comic parables and riddles — recorded in Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian) by Sima Qian — permitted him to criticise the king's policies under the protective cover of apparent foolishness. This is one of the oldest documented examples of what would now be called political comedy, and its structural principle — the joke as the vehicle for a truth that cannot be spoken directly — has remained central to Chinese comic practice for 2,500 years.
The Confucian philosophical tradition is not, on the surface, a comic one — Confucius is not typically grouped with the great comedians of world literature — but it contains within it a comic sensibility of considerable subtlety: the observation that the gap between how people behave and how they should behave is not merely a moral problem but a source of sustained irony, and that the proper response to this gap is not outrage but a kind of patient, knowing acknowledgement. Zhuangzi (莊子, c.369-286 BCE), the Daoist philosopher, is more overtly comic: his philosophical parables — the cook who carves an ox by following its natural structure, the butterfly who may or may not be dreaming of being Zhuangzi, the man who is happy at his friend's death because he understands that death is simply transformation — combine genuine philosophical insight with a surrealist wit that prefigures the Western absurdist tradition by two millennia.
The classical comic literature of China includes the tradition of xiaoshuo (小説, literally "small talk," the term for narrative fiction) that developed from the Tang dynasty onwards and produced, in the Ming and Qing periods, novels of considerable comic sophistication. Journey to the West (Xiyouji, attributed to Wu Cheng'en, 16th century) — the tale of the monk Xuanzang's pilgrimage to India accompanied by the Monkey King Sun Wukong, the pig-demon Zhu Bajie, and the water monster Sha Wujing — is simultaneously an allegorical religious narrative, an adventure story, and an extended comedy in which the most memorable character is an immortal monkey of catastrophic self-confidence and inexhaustible comic inventiveness. Sun Wukong — who defeats gods, outwits demons, and causes chaos in heaven primarily through a combination of supernatural ability and an absolute refusal to accept that the rules apply to him — is one of the great comic characters in world literature, and his influence on subsequent Chinese and East Asian popular culture (anime, manga, video games, television) has been so comprehensive that it constitutes a whole sub-tradition in its own right.
Xiangsheng (相声, literally "face and voice," translated variously as "cross-talk" or "comic dialogue") is the defining performing art of Chinese comedy: a duo format — one performer playing the dougen (逗哏, the comic, the one who sets up the joke) and one playing the penggen (捧哏, the straight man, the one who responds) — that developed in the Qing dynasty markets and teahouses of Beijing and Tianjin and became, in the 20th century, the most popular form of comedy in China.
Xiangsheng is built on four foundational techniques: shuo (說, talking — wordplay, puns, rapid verbal dexterity); xue (學, mimicry — imitation of dialects, characters, sounds); dou (逗, teasing — the comic interaction between the two performers); and chang (唱, singing — the comic song, usually parody). The genre rewards both verbal precision and improvisational agility, and its best practitioners — who must master Classical Chinese, multiple dialects, a repertoire of several hundred standard pieces, and the ability to respond instantly to an audience — represent one of the most demanding comedy forms in the world.
The 20th-century masters of xiangsheng include Hou Baolin (侯寶林, 1917-93), who elevated the form from street entertainment to a respected artistic tradition and whose recordings remain the standard against which subsequent performers are measured; Ma Sanli (馬三立, 1914-2003), the Tianjin master whose understated, almost minimalist style influenced a generation; and Guo Degang (郭德綱, b. 1973), the contemporary practitioner who has done more than anyone to revive xiangsheng for 21st-century audiences, whose Deyunshe (德雲社) comedy club in Beijing has become the most commercially successful comedy enterprise in China, and whose willingness to engage with traditional material, political subtext, and audience interaction has restored the form to something approaching its original vitality.
Chinese comedy has operated under political censorship of varying severity for most of its recorded history — imperial censorship, Republican-era censorship, and the comprehensive censorship apparatus of the People's Republic — and has responded by developing a sophisticated toolkit of indirection. The joke that appears to be about something innocuous but is actually about something else; the historical allegory that comments on the present through the medium of the past; the absurdist premise that is simultaneously too strange and too obviously accurate to be easily prohibited; the pun that exploits a homophone to say one thing while meaning another — these are not merely comic techniques but survival strategies, refined over centuries, and they give Chinese comedy a formal sophistication that comedy produced in conditions of greater freedom sometimes lacks.
The phenomenon of egao (恶搞, literally "evil doings," generally translated as "subversive remix" or "parody culture") — the internet-era tradition of satirical remixing of official culture, commercial content, and current events — has been one of the most creative and consequential developments in contemporary Chinese comedy. Beginning in the early 2000s with the spread of internet access and accelerating through the 2010s with the rise of social media platforms, egao produced a generation of online creators whose satirical content regularly went viral before being censored, which is in itself a comic dynamic: the joke that is removed from the internet within hours of posting is, by virtue of its removal, confirmed as having hit its target.
The character of Cao Ni Ma (草泥馬, the "Grass Mud Horse," a fictional alpaca-like creature whose name, in Mandarin, is a near-homophone for an extremely rude phrase) became, in 2009, one of the most celebrated examples of Chinese internet comedy and political satire simultaneously: a creature whose entirely innocent name cannot be spoken without the listener hearing its other meaning, and whose existence as a symbol of resistance to internet censorship — in the form of nature documentaries, songs, plush toys, and artworks — demonstrated that Chinese internet users could, with sufficient creativity, conduct political satire under the noses of the censors in a way that the censors could not easily prohibit without drawing attention to what they were prohibiting.
China's linguistic and cultural diversity produces comic traditions of considerable regional distinctiveness. Beijing humour — associated with the capital's hutong alleyway culture, its tradition of refined verbal wit, and its centuries as the centre of imperial and then national culture — tends toward the sophisticated and the self-referential: the comedy of a city that has been at the centre of Chinese cultural life for 600 years and knows it. Tianjin humour — the home city of xiangsheng and the traditional rival to Beijing in the comedy stakes — is earthier, more direct, and more comfortable with the vernacular: the comedy of a port city whose culture was shaped by commerce, immigration, and a healthy scepticism of metropolitan pretension.
Sichuan has its own distinct comic tradition in Sichuan opera (川劇) — particularly its comic chou (丑) role, the clown figure who appears in opera performances and whose comedy combines physical slapstick, sharp social observation, and the Sichuan dialect's particular musicality — and in the tradition of the Chengdu teahouse, where xiangsheng, comic storytelling, and the performance of pingshu (評書, narrative storytelling) have been practised for centuries in the context of a tea-drinking culture so refined it constitutes its own civilisation. The Sichuan comedian, like the Sichuan chilli, tends to be both warm and searingly effective in ways that take a moment to register.
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Source: The London Prat | Cross-references: Japan; Southeast Asia; Middle East.