Humour in Chinese Life and Letters: Classical and Traditional Approaches.

• Author: Sanders, Graham
• Position: Book review

Humour in Chinese Life and Letters: Classical and Traditional Approaches. Edited by JOCELYN CHEY and JESSICA MILNER DAVIS. Hong Kong: HONG KONG UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2011. Pp. xx + 291. $25.

Asking an academic to describe a joke is like asking a chemist to provide an analysis of a fine meal--you might receive an accurate description, but it will not be as enjoyable as the experience itself. If you are seeking edification on the topic of humor in China rather than an anthology of humor, however, then this book is a wonderful place to start. It contains contributions by ten scholars, most based in Australia and Hong Kong, who write about a broad but highly selective spectrum of humor in China, from the Confucian Analects of the pre-Qin era to Lin Yutang's Analects Fortnightly journal in the 1930s. The chapters were compiled and edited under the able guidance of the editors, Jocelyn Chey and Jessica Milner Davis, and published by Hong Kong University Press in paperback in 2011. The book itself is of very high production quality, impeccably copyedited, with copious endnotes, a variety of black-and-white plates, and a comprehensive index.

The introductory chapter by Jocelyn Chey, "Youmo and the Chinese Sense of Humour," provides a nuanced and comprehensive overview of the history of humor in China based on the chapters in the book; it begins with the physicality of laughter in Traditional Chinese Medicine, then moves through Confucian and Daoist concepts of humor, the biographies of huaji "court jesters" found in the standard histories, the use of wit in persuasions made by scholar-officials at court, humorous anecdotes culled from Chinese collectanea, and the importance of the Shishuo xinyu (A new account of tales of the world) in showing how humor was used to negotiate relationships between elites. Chey identifies the Yuan as a turning point in the development of humor in China, as increasing numbers of vernacular stories, novels, and dramatic texts disseminated popular, non-elite humor more widely. The Ming dynasty, with its rapid expansion of markets for printed books, is characterized as an age in which "the distinction between high and low comedy became further blurred" (p. 17) across a wide range of published texts in multiple genres. The real strength of this chapter, though, is its brief discussion of what happens to humor with the advent of modernity in China. New forms of publishing such as periodicals and newspapers (with regular humor...