MCLC: Interview with Chris Rea

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Interview with Chris Rea
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (11/16/16)
Finding a Rich Vein of Humor in China’s Past
By IAN JOHNSON
Christopher Rea is a literary and cultural historian at the University of British Columbia. A 39-year-old native of Berkeley, Calif., he has written on major figures in modern Chinese literature, including Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. His new work, “The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China,” shows how the early 20th century inspired a flowering of comedy, farce, cursing and satire. In it, one finds interesting parallels to today, especially in how people stick it to authority.
Academic books do not always reflect their subject matter. Studies of sex, for example, are notoriously unsexy. But Mr. Rea’s book is funny, beginning with its hilarious “executive preface.” It even carries a blurb by Eric Idle of the British comedy troupe Monty Python.
In an interview, Mr. Rea discussed cursing as a spectator sport, the invention of humor and his debt to Monty Python.
What led you to write about Chinese humor?
I grew up watching Monty Python and the Marx Brothers. I loved the zaniness, the silly gags, the outrageous conceits and, later, Groucho’s double entendres. In college I discovered that Chinese is a fantastic language for wordplay. So when I started delving into literary and cultural history, the question in the back of my mind was: Did China have anything similar to the Pythons or to vaudeville.
China isn’t usually thought of as a funny place.
State repression is one reason for that. China’s leaders are deathly afraid of ridicule. And the China story has, for various reasons, tended to emphasize suffering, struggle and grievance. This is what’s so refreshing about writers like Qian Zhongshu, who had an ear for wordplay, a nose for “ingenious disingenuousness” and the guts for scorched-earth satire. China in the early 20th century — my book’s focus — was, to put it mildly, a rough and tumble place. But it fostered a whole industry of mirth populated with cultural figures from hack jokesters to respectable writers slumming it as humorists.
It seems that many Chinese humorists back then turned to cursing. Why?
For a couple reasons. First, a print culture boom made disputes public as never before. Now you’re taking down your adversary not in a teahouse, but in the newspaper. Slights and sarcasm quickly escalate to name-calling and character assassination. Writers with a penchant for funny insults became famous as “renowned revilers” — ming ma — cursing celebrities, if you will. Second, early 20th-century China was a violent place of rampaging militarists, political assassinations, foreign invasion and crushing poverty. Many critics felt that extreme conditions called for extreme rhetoric. Hypocrites, traitors and wimps became objects of contempt.
Can you share an example that could be printed in a family newspaper?
In 1923, when the northern warlord Cao Kun bribed his way into the third presidency of the Republic of China, Wu Zhihui, one of the founders of the Chinese Nationalist Party, called him the “sperm president.” Wu reportedly explained this epithet as follows: If a man could turn each of his sperm into a human in one go, Cao could have just had his millions of descendants elect him and saved all the money he spent on bribes.
What was the role of the writer Lin Yutang, who coined a term for humor: youmo?
Lin Yutang was out to break a language barrier. Chinese had words for “serious talk” and “funny talk,” he claimed, but nothing in between. Existing Chinese terms for humor were tainted with associations like abusiveness, triviality or cynicism. Youmo would symbolize a new type of talk that was at once engaged and amusing. More than that, youmo was a new outlook: China was in crisis, but Lin wanted his countrymen to be self-confident enough to face it with a smile. And humor would enable him to be a critic of the government without getting shot.
Your book mentions “the invention of humor,” but it wasn’t that humor didn’t exist in China previously, right?
Right. Most of my book is about cultures of humor in the decades before the 1930s, when proponents of youmo essentially reinvented humor as an idealized moral concept. Looking further back, you have collections of jokes, amusing stories and anecdotes, comedic verse and essays. Performing arts featured slapstick interludes, banter and stock clown roles. And there’s no shortage of bawdy sexual humor, like Li Yu’s “The Carnal Prayer Mat.’’
Lin Yutang’s view was that people had either forgotten about this side of China’s past or had repressed it. Song dynasty thinkers had suckered everyone into thinking that Confucius was uptight, when in the Analects he’s actually making self-deprecatory jokes and kidding his disciples. The 1930s humor crowd dug up a lot of oldies but goodies while introducing a slew of foreign humor and their own creations.
How did people respond to the promotion of humor?
It was a hit. The press dubbed 1933 “The Year of Humor,” and the term youmo has stayed with us since. But Chinese humor writers had traditionally been on the defensive. When they cracked jokes, they’d say it was just a way to pass the time over a cup of tea. The reflex was to belittle humor. The moderns, too, felt they had to justify what they were doing. Lin Yutang wanted it to be O.K. to be funny without losing face. But he acknowledged that the general prejudice was that “no one except a clown would condescend to crack a joke in public.”
What are some of your favorites from this period?
The Shanghai writer Xu Zhuodai, who went by the pen name Master of the Broken Chamber Pot Studio, was a master of farce and a trickster extraordinaire. He’s a good one for hoaxes. Ye Qianyu’s pioneering comic strip “Mr. Wang” is inspired. Works by Lao She, Lin Yutang andLu Xun are justifiably famous. And one major discovery was a series of essays curated by Qian Zhongshu’s teacher Wen Yuanning in 1934, short profiles of public figures, like one whose “real profession is to be a celebrity.”
What does this history tell us about Xi Jinping’s China, which doesn’t seem very funny?
Xi’s regime is pretty grim, so it makes headlines when he cracks a joke. The Chinese state has attempted to employ humor for a charm offensive, but its behavior is mostly repressive.
Still, there are plenty of parallels to the period I discuss. One concerns how humor makes use of, and is shaped by, available media. Publishing a newspaper became cheaper in the late Qing, and you got lots of ads, essays and poetry followed quickly by parodies of the same. Likewise, Photoshop and digital platforms have made it cheap and popular to create and circulate all sorts of spoofs, or e’gao.
You see similar types of wordplay. When the Qing collapsed in 1911, Yuan Shikai seized power. His family name is a homonym for “ape” — yuan — so ape became President Yuan’s meme. You find the same type of wit in the code words and puns used today to evade censorship bots, or just for fun. Like the Chinese title of the 2016 German horror film “Friend Request’’ — “Fei Si Bu Ke” — which means “certain death” and sounds like Facebook.
You also get joking communities. The website Let’s Have Fun, for example, allows you to cut and paste preset icons and add your own text to create a comic strip. Back in the day, depressed Qing writers would share self-mocking doggerel verse in the newspaper. Now, people share their frustrations and embarrassments online.
The internet is rife with mockery too.
Anonymous netizen pile-ons are familiar, but mockery can also be a media strategy for enhancing celebrity. Chinese cultural icons and writers as diverse as Li Ao [in Taiwan], Wang Shuo and Han Han have made outbursts of vituperation part of their shtick. Predictably, unpredictability tells the public: “Watch this space!”
Eighty years ago, Wu Zhihui’s salty tongue had journalists trailing after him for his latest quip or gaffe. He’d be at a university to give a speech and when he pulled it out of his pocket all his change would come out. Then Wu and the principal would spend five minutes picking his pennies off the floor. So Wu was catnip to the press. In the 1930s, one writer said that Wu was remarkable “in the sense of being uncouth and yet that very uncouthness has become an attraction in itself.”
Sounds oddly familiar.
Next year, my colleague Bruce Rusk and I will be coming out with another work that speaks to concerns of today. It’s a translation of a Ming dynasty story collection called “The Book of Swindles.’’
by denton.2 at osu.edu on November 16, 2016
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