The deeper I get into Chinese comedy, the stranger the questions I seek to answer become.
Recently, I had a doozy: How do you introduce your comedic bilingual rap song to a perfectionist TV performer with 60 years of traditional Chinese comedy experience?
The answer – just do it, and wait for the reaction.
Last week I had a chance to sing my “Mo Money Mo Fazhan (Develoment)” to my traditional Chinese Xiangsheng comedy master, Master Ding. (P.S. The music video will be out real soon!)
Master Ding’s response was actually quite positive—he loved the energy and the newness of the piece. His face kept jumping from excited to confused to happy to worried—but overall, he gave the piece a thumbs up.
He did, however, have reservation, one that hit a refrain that oftentimes comes up with his opinions on my work.
“Everything in this is really great,” he will say, “except you keep bringing it back around to government. This isn’t your American stand-up.”
By stand-up, Master Ding means more the Western comedic sensibilities than specifically stand-up comedy. But this does indeed touch upon a nerve. Government and comedy are so closely connected in Western culture it is hard to imagine them separate. I have had American friends of mine ask me if Chinese people even have comedy, because they can’t directly use it to attack the government. Chinese people laugh when they hear that anecdote—disproving it already.
Of course Chinese people have comedy, and they also use comedy to address government. But it does need to be more subtle when it comes to addressing sensitive issues. This is not just because of direct government censorship, but also broad social concepts about what is acceptable to talk about onstage, and what crosses the line. Comics toe the line here as close as in America, but because “the line” is so far back from where it is in the West, jokes that are bold in Chinese culture come across as flat in English.
An example is one of my favorite jokes I heard recently on the Chinese standup circuit comes from the comedian Tony Chou (who was featured along with me in a piece earlier this year about the nascent scene here). Calmly, almost as a segue, he says, “I don’t know what everyone else has been up to recently, but me, I’ve been fulfilling the Chinese Dream.”
The joke is a jab at the “Chinese Dream”, an ethereal, indefinable and yet omnipresent government catchphrase that is used to encourage everyone from regular citizens to high officials to create a better tomorrow.
A Western comedian, confronted with a transparent and hollow government propaganda campaign would likely call it out for what it is—using descriptive words to explain the situation and mocking the logic behind such thinking.
But a Chinese comedian’s tack is different. Such a direct approach is simply not as effective here. Government censorship aside—no censors are in tiny bars on Saturday nights—calling things out directly is just not as effective as a comedic tool here. The Chinese audience gets uncomfortable; the comic appears to have the social skills of a sledgehammer, or, even worse, a foreigner.
In Tony’s joke, the emptiness of the catchphrase is highlighted by the emptiness of the joke. It’s a brilliant solution to the problem—if any “inappropriate” meaning is taken from the joke, it’s all filled in in the head of the audience, and so it never “existed” out loud at all.
During my experiences here, I’ve learned to adjust to this style and include it in my own comedy. But my comedy, while more subtle perhaps than some, is still fairly direct in comparison. In seeking to highlight the strange intermarriage of the socialist period with modern reforms, one of my lines from the upcoming rap video is:
We’ve got 十三亿 (Shi San Yi, 1.3 Billion) all eating KFC
And Mao Zedong’s face still on the Renminbi (Chinese currency)
Rather than making a value statement, I try to simply highlight the strangeness of the socialist leader’s face being on the Renminbi, directly translated as “The People’s Money”, as it is spent on foreign brands and foreign food. I aimed to leave viewers, Chinese or otherwise, to parse the complicated truth behind what that means—a nod to the “filling in the answer in your own head” mode of comedy that is effective here.
For the average Chinese person, this works. People my age respond generally favorably to the line, and the fact that most are OK but some are uncomfortable means that I am getting a pretty good gauge on where the line is.
But for Master Ding, it’s still far too much. After sixty years of performing, he has been through many stages of art. He’s seen performance nearly die in civil war and WWII, revived in the post-war period, destroyed once again in the Cultural Revolution outside of pieces that praise the party and the socialist state, and even loosening of restrictions in the years between the Cultural Revolution and the incident in a certain square in 1989.
I knew that for a performer like Master Ding, who maintained his art through such great turmoil, any government topic was like poking a bear. His point of view seemed clear to me: especially in this day and age with so much freedom from the restrictions and concerns that plagued artists in his day, why even bother? Smile, act well, train, create new pieces, and move forward without rocking the boat, lest you fall overboard.
Today Master Ding and I had a performance at a retirement home for government officials in the outskirts of Beijing. The air was clear and the retirement home was nestled in the hills that ring Beijing. Master Ding knew many of the officials there from his time performing in a government theatre troupe during the socialist and early reform periods. As he chatted with one official, the topic of old Xiangsheng masters arose, including the famous single-person Xiangsheng performer Liu Baorui.
Master Ding’s voice darkened. “He always was worried when performing for officials,” he said. “His voice sounded fine, but if you watched his legs, they were shaking. He had bad history—he took money from the nationals in the civil war, and it was documented. He was always worried that would come back to get him.
Do you know where he is buried? Nobody does. A famous performer, and nobody can tell you where he is buried.”
Nobody knows what mixing government and comedy will look like in China in the future, but there are still people alive who remember what it was like in the past.
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