Humor in Chinese History | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Humor has a rich history in China. As in other cultures, comedy and humorous literature have often been criticized as immoral by somber ideologues. Nevertheless, playful writing and humorous anecdotes survive from China's earliest times and were produced throughout the imperial era (221 BCE–1912 CE). In Chinese history, humor has been used for a variety of purposes, including entertainment, cultural criticism, personal attacks, and bolstering group solidarity against outsiders. Humor is thus important to study for a full appreciation of the complexity, tensions, and joys of Chinese life over the ages.

The most famous and influential humorist of ancient China was the philosopher Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu, 369–286 BCE), whose writings make up one of the two primary texts of Taoism, the other being the mystical Daodejing. Zhuangzi used playful parables, parody, and clever wordplay to ridicule other philosophers' belief in the power of human reason. According to Zhuangzi, people's understanding of the world is always limited by their limited perspective, just as a frog in a well cannot see more than a small patch of the sky or a sleeping man has no way of knowing that he is not the butterfly he dreams himself to be. Zhuangzi's stories have delighted generations of Chinese readers and served as models of humorous writing.

A chief target of Zhuangzi's joking was another prominent philosopher, Confucius (551–479 BCE). In contrast to Taoists like Zhuangzi, who believed in living in intuitive harmony with the natural order, Confucius promoted a strict ethical code and a hierarchical social order. Confucius is often depicted as a rather stern teacher, but there is some evidence in the conversations with his disciples recorded in the Analects that he too had a sense of humor. One of the most amusing images from ancient China was actually produced to illustrate the Confucian ethical principle that one should be filial to one's parents. A stone carving in the Wu Liang shrine, constructed during the second century CE, depicts the well-known story of a seventy-year-old filial son persuading his even more elderly parents that they are still young by acting like an infant.

Since the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), Confucianism has tended to reject humor, seeing it as incompatible with sincere devotion to ethical principles. The famous female writer Ban Zhao (c. 45–116 CE) stated that a good woman should shun jests and laughter and solemnly devote herself to serving her husband and his parents. Some Confucian scholars criticized as frivolous all humorous popular novels and plays, which were often banned by the government. Even poetry did not escape the attacks of sterner Confucian critics in the late imperial era (Ming and Qing dynasties, 1368–1912), who saw it as a waste of time that might have been better spent studying history and promoting morality.

The question of the value of humor was never definitively settled within the Confucian tradition, however, and Confucian thought continuously coexisted and interacted with other schools of thought, such as Taoism, that did encourage a humorous sensibility. Buddhism entered China during the Han dynasty, and the Chan school of Buddhism (Zen, in Japanese) made use of the "shock effect" of humorous and incongruous images to bring about enlightenment, much as Zhuangzi used humor to question rationality. The use of humorous and incongruous images for their shock value was borrowed by poets in the Song dynasty (960–1279) and later periods.

Advances in printing and publishing contributed to the spread of humorous literature. Two periods of political unrest and technological change in later Chinese history produced a flood of humorous writing spanning the spectrum from escapist entertainment to harsh satire: the early seventeenth century, when the Ming dynasty was in decline, and the Republican period between the fall of the Qing dynasty (1912) and the founding of the People's Republic (1949). In the earlier period, humorous and erotic novels, such as Jinpingmei (Golden Lotus), and comic short stories, such as those collected by Feng Menglong (1574–1646), were immensely popular. During the 1920s and 1930s, China's greatest satirist, Lu Xun (1881–1936), criticized Chinese society and politics in essays and short stories published in some of the hundreds of newspapers and literary journals that appeared in those years. Lu Xun also promoted woodblock printing and satirical cartoons that the illiterate masses could understand. In this era, the writer Lin Yutang (1895–1976) introduced the English word "humor" into the Chinese language and argued that China needed more of it.

During the era of Mao Zedong (1949–1976), and particularly during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), sincere revolutionary fervor was held up by the Communist Party as the only proper attitude toward life. Humor did not entirely die out, but it was dangerous politically. In Taiwan, the Nationalist Party also clamped down on political expression, but apolitical humor was not discouraged.

The themes of Chinese humor often resemble those in other parts of the world: stock characters such as the henpecked husband and the lusty widow abound in published joke books. Confucian and Buddhist institutions and thought are also popular objects of humor, especially in plays and opera plots from before the twentieth century. Residents of one part of China often make fun of those of another. However, this sort of regional humor and jokes about foreigners are not as prominent in China as humor involving ethnicity and nationality is in Europe and North America. The nature of the Chinese language, which has a relatively small number of different sounds, encourages puns and wordplay. These are particularly common in the performance humor called xiangsheng, which resembles vaudeville dialogue.

The decades of the 1980s and 1990s, during which ideological orthodoxy disintegrated in both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan and the use of the Internet mushroomed, may be the beginning of another great age of humor in Chinese history. A growing appetite for humor in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has led publishers to comb traditional literature and pull out the funny bits for hot-selling anthologies. Lin Yutang's writings from the 1920s and 1930s are enjoying new popularity, and, in both Taiwan and the PRC, the television sitcom has become a well-established form.

Kristin Stapleton

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