Christopher Rea

On his book The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China

Cover Interview of October 25, 2016

The wide angle

E.B. White said that “humorists fatten on trouble,” and in modern China there’s been plenty of that to go around. One of the broad concerns of my book is to identify conditions that nourish certain cultures of mirth or amusement. Incompetent political leaders and social turmoil both help. So does a rambunctious, unevenly-regulated mass media.

A more specific concern has to do with intonation. My book doesn’t get up to the television age, but try comparing prime time pap with the anything-goes humor of cable—the style is partially a function of the venue. Jokes in Chinese tabloids tended to be edgier than in government mouthpieces. Another analogy: the internet and the availability of Photoshop software create ripe conditions for parodists, since it’s easy to share and manipulate texts; the periodical boom in early twentieth-century China created similar conditions, since it was suddenly cheaper to do cut-and-paste comedy.

Think, too, of what happens when mockery becomes a spectator sport—as with YouTube comments, Facebook trolls, or American presidential elections. When Chinese literati started publishing open letters to each other in magazines, a type of one-upmanship set in for who can come up with the most hilarious insult. One writer during the “warlord period” even published a parodic manifesto called The Fine Art of Reviling.

Another basic question that crops up in the book is how useful it is to use humor to take the measure of a people or to draw conclusions about how they think. Witty French. Humorous Brits. Self-deprecating Jews. Outgoing Americans. Early twentieth-century Chinese writers—and I do deal mostly with literate folks, since there’s more material by them—started to theorize humor in relative terms, sometimes resorting to stereotypical characterizations like these. Then, in the 1930s, many of the discussion of humor became self-searching: What is our sense of humor? What should it be?

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you—or your people—have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.

history / literature / 20th century / everyday existence / asia / china / cultural studies / humor /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009