In 2010, the Chinese government launched a crackdown on “three vulgarities” (san su) in entertainment. At a meeting of the Politburo, then-President Hu Jintao prescribed that cheap (disu), vulgar (yongsu) and tasteless (meisu) cultural products must be done away with as one component of deepening reforms in the cultural system (tizhi). This in turn, he said, would bring about the prosperity and development of the cultural sector; contribute to realising a “relatively well-off” (xiaokang) society; have a bearing on the overall picture of socialism with Chinese characteristics; and ultimately, influence the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation” (Zhonghua minzu de weida fuxing) (Xinhua wang 2010).

One of the campaign’s targets was Guo Degang: a xiangsheng performer with 68 million followers on Weibo (China’s answer to Twitter) who is widely credited with reviving the art in recent decades (Cai 2016). Xiangsheng—sometimes rendered in English as “cross-talk”—is a Chinese comedic form which evolved from previous folk arts (quyi) to become a stand-alone, identifiable genre by the latter part of the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912) (more precisely, in the mid-nineteenth century). Traditionally, it makes use of four main skills: shuo (speaking), xue (imitating voice and facial expression), dou (teasing; skilful banter) and chang (vocal ability) (Xue 1985: 6). “Speaking” refers to poetry, couplets, games, riddles, tongue-twisters, idioms and witty remarks. “Imitating” refers to mimicking dialects, local operas and other folk art performances (for example, singing Peking Opera and other local operas such as Hebei bangzi and pingju, performing dagu, all of which require years of training). “Teasing” offers a critique of social problems and “singing” refers mainly to performing the taiping geci (songs recited to a rapid beat). Guo Degang is one of the few contemporary artists who have mastered both these heritage-laden skills—claiming to have mastered six hundred xiangsheng—and modern technologies and popular tastes.

This book concerns xiangsheng in general, and Guo Degang in particular. Xiangsheng matters as a major form of oral performance and embodiment of popular culture; Perry Link assesses it as “probably the Chinese art most deeply soaked in the daily life of ordinary people” (2016: 218). Guo Degang matters as the art’s most famed contemporary performer, with enormous popular following in China and the Chinese diaspora. Some of the questions that drive our discussion include: What is xiangsheng, and what is its place in Chinese history? What are the characteristics of Guo Degang’s xiangsheng, and why did it offend the Chinese authorities? How have others received Guo’s creations?

For much of its life xiangsheng was confined to the realm of oral culture enjoyed by the lower classes. As such, few of the pre-PRC (i.e. pre-1949) scripts (duanzi) were recorded for posterity, instead being passed down orally from master to disciple. Nor have many of the more recent scripts been translated into English. The present study is therefore vital to illuminate scripts which have not previously been made available in English, and to redress the balance of scholarly histories, which have tended to focus on the types of humour favoured by the literati and the elites (Chey 2011: 6).

Though xiangsheng was chiefly enlisted by the CCP government to mobilise the population and disseminate political propaganda during the early decades of socialist China, xiangsheng was also recruited to ridicule those unscrupulous and inhuman sociopolitical phenomena by the end of the Cultural Revolution, thus venting the frustrations of the common folk (Link 1984). A relatively large number of Chinese works on xiangsheng were published in the early 1980s, when it became possible to write on the arts more freely after the repressive years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) (see, e.g., Tian 1981; Wang 1981). These works often provide scripts for popular skits of the late 1970s, and insights into the history and skills involved in xiangsheng, but their analysis follows the official line of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at their time of publication. That is to say, they blame the Gang of Four for the excesses of the “ten years of turmoil”, thank the CCP for restoring artistic freedoms, and marvel at the pace of reforms instituted by the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party Congress.

Curiously, though it is a major folk art form, very little about xiangsheng has been written in English. One of the authors of this book, Shenshen Cai, has previously published on Guo Degang’s xiangsheng (Cai 2016, 2017), and her research forms the basis for Chapter 3 of the present work. David Moser, Perry Link and Marja Kaikkonen have also made major contributions to the study of modern xiangsheng, and their work informs this chapter especially. Link (1984: 111) wrote of what he saw as irrevocable changes to xiangsheng’s “mode of performance” in the early Maoist period, when it was used for propagandistic purposes—a development that Kaikkonen (1990) also focuses on. Subsequently, Link has drawn attention to the mood of optimism in xiangsheng circles in the early 1950s and argued that “party ideologues … were too suspicious and insecure” in seeking to control and crack down on the art (Link 2007: 229). More recently, Moser has noted the “meteoric rise” of Guo Degang (2018: 89ff) and concluded that xiangsheng is currently impacted by both globalisation and new forms of comedy and media (2018: 93). Our study explores all of these developments in due course.

Other Anglophone studies of humour are helpful in providing an intellectual context for xiangsheng. In particular, Christopher Rea has drawn attention to the place of humour in recent Chinese history. As he points out, scholarship tends to focus on the tragedy and trauma of the Mao years: the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution the most notorious mass campaigns, resulting in tens of millions of deaths. Without downplaying the scale of human loss and devastation during the reign of Mao Zedong, Rea reminds us that it is instructive, too, to remember the comical; “Another way of regarding history … is as an accumulation of jokes” (2015: 3). In this vein, a recent volume edited by Ping Zhu, Zhuoyi Wang and Jason McGrath focuses on “Maoist Laughter” and points out that “the new socialist China … regarded laughter as one of its salient trademarks” (2019: 1). Laughter during the Maoist period “was not only ubiquitous but also bonded with political culture to an unprecedented degree” (Zhu et al. 2019: 3). In her contribution to that volume, Xiaoning Lu finds that xiangsheng movies in the mid-1950s, far from being “monotonous” propaganda, were “a site of negotiation and contestation” and that “laughter under Mao was innovative and experimental” (Lu 2019: 73–74). Such an understanding encourages us to explore afresh the relationship between artists and the state in both times gone by and the present day.

Volumes edited by Jocelyn Chey and Jessica Milner Davis (2011, 2013, respectively) have also provided histories of humour in China stretching back to ancient times. Joseph C. Sa...