The Chinese Sense of Humor
By C. T. Hsia

At this juncture of history, Chinese-speaking populations are fractured in different localities of the world and living under diverse sodal and political systems. However, observers still see a common cultural heritage among them—an essential “Chinese-ness” of which, they say, the sense of humor is an important element. This has been evident whether you find yourself in Peking, Taipei or Hong Kong, or on the road to Singapore.

For a discussion of Chinese humor, we present here, in somewhat abridged form, an essay written by Prof. Hsia for a manualon China compiled in 1953 but hitherto unpublished. We are delighted with this “find”, not only because the piece was not widely read in its original form but also in the belief that what Prof. Hsia had to say about this facet of the Chinese character a quarter of iz century ago remains abundantly true today.

HUMOR IS ONE of the commodities which have been bandied around by writers on the Chinese character. Some of them have endeavored, quite in vain it seems, to produce specious evidence of a particular brand of Chinese humor. Insofar as humor denotes a particular way of sizing up and relishing a character, situation or event, Chinese humor is different from American or British humor only to the extent that certain characters and situations, which are subjected to a humorous interpretation in China, are not so subjected in Britain or the United States. Either the British and Americans seldom meet with these characters and situations or they regard these characters and situations in a different light. And with due allowance for different social usages and customs, the characters and situations which humor feeds upon are more universal than some sociologists seem to believe.

To begin with, we need to be reminded that laughter is often a form of malicious self-assertion. In pre-historic times 1aughter was a sign of victory; physiologically it accompanied and aided in the relaxation of the nerves and muscles after a tense struggle or fight. In time laughter became associated with the external signs of injury in others—a broken nose, a black eye, or a maimed leg. The injured party with his telltale signs of humiliation was a potential enemy of no particular danger. This is ridicule; and it is still the typical form of laughter indulged in by children of all nations. With the transference of the field of combat from the physical to the intellectual, wit emerged. It is characteristic of any fonn of wit that it presupposes an opponent and an audience. The riddle, historically the oldest fonn of wit, is primarily a contest of cognitive skills.

Another fonn of laughter has as its imaginary enemy not the inferior object of ridicule but the powerful repressive forces of society. By ridiculing these forces of order and decency, one can let off steam and help preserve his mental health. Thus, while half of the American jokes consist in ridicule at the expense of the inferior , the other half are directed against the clergy , the bureaucracy, and the taboos regulating the behavior of the sexes. It is a tribute to puritanism that jokes about sex and human anatomy are so hugely enjoyed in this country.

Humor is the most civilized fonn of laughter because it treats its object of ridicule with affection. When a child tries to walk and stum bles, the smiling response from its mother is a sign of humor—ridicule tempered with love. The humorist, therefore, fmds constant amusement in the weaknesses and peccadilloes of his friends and himself. Insofar as this is ridicule, the humorist holds himself superior, though he entertains other aims than demolishing the enemy. The professional humorist engages the audience’s interest by chatting about himself, often in de- liberately fictional tenns, and about his equally fictitious friends whom the public has learned to love.

THIS CLASSIFICATION of laughter can be used to gauge the degree of humane re- fmement in Chinese laughter. The Chinese are a noisy people supremely gifted with the sense of the ridiculous; from this, many writers have drawn the conclusion that the Chinese are an eminently humorous nation. This statement, however, can only be accepted if one adulterates the content of humor to include any fonn of childish laughter. Clearly it takes education to adopt the humorous attitude—to be generous and to free oneself, for however short a duration, from the combative instincts which impose seriousness and inhibit laughter. At the same time, to be humorous is to be condescending. The number of Chinese who can adopt the attitude of generous condescension cannot be large. Thus while the educated Chinese in their intercourse with Westerners often strike the latter with their abundance of humor, the Chinese masses, with little humane education, are at best merely potential humorists because their laughter has not advanced into the stage of humor. Their laughter often echoes that of the caveman who has just finished thrashing his opponent. This can be observed in the daily social life of the Chinese and in the type of jokes and stories which they enjoy.

Despite the fact that the Chinese have been very scrupulous in the exercise of li or propriety, they have lacked instruction in the essence of courtesy, that is, a respect for privacy and idiosyncrasy. The Chinese still retain a childish delight in taking notice of any physical and moral deviation from the norm; their fellow creatures, so unfortunate as to be physically defonned and disabled, are usually objects of ridicule. Thus the blind, the deaf, the hunchback, the bald, and the pock- faced are laughed at openly. This sense of ridicule is also directed against persons who claim to possess special knowledge or power or who live an abnonnal existence: the doctor, the teacher, the magistrate, the monk. The Chinese simply cannot believe that a monk can really abstain from sexual love or from eating the flesh of animals. Hence’the numerous jokes about the amorous and meat-Ioving monk. In a sense laughter is a social corrective in that it unconsciously follows the Confucian mean in checking both excessive zeal and lax morals. It also upholds the proper conduct for each person in his station so that the cuckold or henpecked husband is always subjected to ridicule because he forfeits sympathy by his lack of authority over his wife.

But the Chinese often go beyond the limits of corrective laughter to forms of extreme childishness. Thus any person whose dialect and dress deviate from those around him is an object of open curiosity. For many decades, the Westerner with his prominent nose and hairy body was stared at by the Chinese villagers. It is customary for the city dwellers to laugh at new arrivals from the country , simply because the city dwellers, through no merit of their own, have learned to turn on and off the switches, and to get used to modern ways of living. In a city of sufficient self-importance like Shanghai, any deviation from the norm is a call for ridicule. Many comics earn a living there solely by their ability to imitate and burlesque the dialects of Soochow, Wusih, Ningpo, Nanking, and Shantung.

This childish and often malicious inquisitiveness goes at times so far as to predude any possibility of humor and to cause extreme discomfort to the victim. English public schools have been notorious for their bullies. But in Chinese schools, almost every schoolboy is at one time or another the object of unwelcome attention. A student wearing a new gown to school will invariably receive impertinent jeering; thus some girls who have trunkfuls of new dresses at home would resolutely refuse to wear anything but blue cotton garments in order to avoid unwelcome publicity. Rarely does a person having a new haircut escape being reminded of the fact or being patted on the head by his fellow students. A student seen with a date in a theater on Saturday will be an object of animated inter~st: he will often be required to conciliate his tormentors by treating them to candies or ice cream. If his date happens to be his classmate, the furor created will reach even bigger proportions. Many sensitive girls, therefore, refuse to have dates in high school simply because they want to avoid this public exposure and the embarrassing consequences.

This public inhibition of the individual’s right to do what he pleases is really the reverse of humor, which implies a more detached and tolerant view of other people’s activities. Thus one may say of the average Chinese that he retains the unconscious malice of the child. Like the child, when his laughter is not purely negative—the ridicule or disapproval of other people’s physiognomy, intelligence, or behavior—he takes delight in any demonstration of cleverness, in the form of mechanical ingenuity, verbal wit, or in a well-manipulated situation in which one person outsmarts another. Any Western gadget, properly exploited, finds a ready market in large Chinese cities, whatever its utility. Much of the ancient Chinese writing which passes for humor usually consists of records of clever sayings and stratagems, which give the weak an edge over the strong. The earliest “humorists” whose lives are included in the Records of the Historian were court jesters who by farfetched analogies steered their masters out of the path of folly. Because of the Taoist distrust of brute force, the Chinese came to admire cleverness; many of the comic folk heroes are not unlike Eulenspiegel in their resourcefulness in cheating the stupid and putting one over on the smart. In popular fiction the beloved heroes are always infinitely resourceful in military and diplomatic stratagems. The way Chu-ko Liang obtains arrows from his enemies by launching into the river, during a foggy night, boats manned by straw men drawing the fIfe of enemy archers, is not exactly humor, but a kind of cleverness that is exhilarating to the Chinese mind. The reader shares with Chu-ko Liang a sense of triumph which is akin to laughter. Likewise, the Chinese heroes in adventure fiction are not merely men of prowess whom ordinary mortals could hope to imitate. An American boy tries to become a baseball player or cowboy hero; a Chinese boy, or for that matter, a Chinese adult, by reading about beings defying every law of mortal probability, turns away from combativeness to a region of comic fantasy and pastoral justice. The most resourceful of Chinese heroes, the Monkey in The Journey to the West, is in this sense a supreme comic creation.

THE LAUGHTER OF the Chinese masses is often childish and primitive; this is one of the reasons for ascribing to the Chinese race its perpetual youth. But more important than the lack of humane education in the inhibition of the Chinese sense of humor is the serious business of living in an overpopulated land. This is especially true since the impact of commercial and industrial civilization has thrown the people off their balance, and the old division of labor no longer obtains. Most people, even after high school, are not specifically qualified for any job; hence their only chance of securing a position is through exploitation of their relatives. Humor no longer rules where there is tension of any kind existing between a group of people. The arid kind of ceremoniousness with which a person in an inferior position defers to his superior, the kind of supercilious arrogance with which the latter treats the former , and the kind of external courtesy and covert distrust and jealousy among persons of similar rank aspiring for promotion are humor-eclipsing phenomena in a country where there is not a rice-bowl for everybody. This observation holds more or less true of every country , but this kind of tension is particularly noticeable in a city like Shanghai where the struggle for survival claims all one’s waking faculties.

All this serious business of living, however, constitutes a source of “unconscious” humor to a good-tempered onlooker, foreign or Chinese. Life in a Chinese city where the new and old ways make for incongruous contests is a source of infinite fun; modern and medieval vehicles crawl at the same pace during the perpetual traffic jam, and people are alternately on guard and out of temper, using both the most polite and the most vile of language. In that sense China is a rich land of humor, not because the people have adopted the humorous attitude but rather because they can be objects of humorous contemplation: During the thirties, when Un Yutang re-emphasized humor in China, the nation suddenly became humor-conscious. Writers found no difficulty in caricaturing and ridiculing the too obvious national weaknesses and vices as embodied in typical characters like the warlord, the government official, the Confucian gentleman, the pot-bellied merchant, the self-important returned student, the petty clerk, the conscientious Leftist writer, and the country bumpkin. Most of the writers, however, stopped at the sketch or essay and did not create a sustained humorous vision of modern Chinese life. The early humorous novels of Lao She and Chang T’ien-yi, read today, often seem merely facetious and the element of contempt is too palpable behind the mechanical manipulation of simple humors. It is a pity that republican China did not produce a Dickens, for surely no comic novelist could have a richer field for observation than in the panorama of modern Chinese life.

Who are China’s humorists, then? Anyone who is sufficiently enlightened to see the hollowness of form and jargon, the absurdity of popular superstition, the incongruity of fact and pretension. By education and temperament, the scholar is equipped to fill that role, provided, of course, he is not too much concerned with personal gain or advancement. Lin Yutang inclines to think that all warlords and important officials in China are humorists: this observation is subject to criticism to the extent that humor must be disinterested. The Chinese warlords and officials are not disinterested: their pious compliance with hollow forms, along with their ready profession of noble sentiments, is not so much a product of humor as a camouflage to hide their more seedy dealings for power and wealth. Their thorough cynical realism is such that their humor is merely incidental.

The traditional Chinese humorists were usually retired officials and scholars unsuccessful in the civil service examinations. Their attitude of detachment and their independent incomes helped them to enjoy the luxury of humor. A person con- cerned with pressing problems such as hunger finds it hard to see the ludicrous in his surroundings. The poet T’ao Yiian-ming, who was one of China’s subtlest humorists, said upon resigning a petty post that he “would not bend his back for five bushels of rice”; in fact he had already a nice little farm and could thus afford to take things philosophically. Evidence of literary humor in China was sporadic until the Ming dynasty when the scholars, disgusted with the type of writing required for the civil service examinations, turned to the familiar essay. The intimate relationship between literary genre and creative expression is such that, until the discovery of the informal style, genial self-expression was difficult to achieve in China. Folk humor, however, was excellently taken care of by the novel and drama, jokes, and anecdotes.

The Chinese scholar-humorist is invariably a Taoist hedonist. He has none of Dickens’s extroverted interest in other people, but takes pains to describe the minor pleasures and disappointments in his own life. He is often a humorist merely in the sense that he takes a philosophical, tolerant attitude toward the world’s follies, superstitions, and ambitions. He conceives happiness in terms of seclusion and is primarily interested in nature and in direct sensuous pleasures such as listening to the wind among the bamboo leaves or sipping a good cup of tea prepared with water from a pellucid spring. He acts on the Taoist conviction that the complex human relationships are a big bother and that enjoyment of life comes only by stripping life to its bare essentials. His exploration of reality does not, however, take him to the realm of moral scruples and decisions, which challenges the greater writers.

Because humor enjoys a high place in social intercourse, its modern promoters often claim for it an analogous importance in literature. With few exceptions, however, the professional humorist is always a minor writer. He proceeds on the assumption that man is a lovable creature and concocts a literary formula which flatters the reader’s sense of superiority. His world is as mentally snug as the world of women’s magazines with its cute babies, cozy living rooms, and gleaming refrigerators. It is symptomatic of the modern age that, whereas satire has long enjoyed a classical literary status, the cult of humor was a comparatively recent phenomenon. Satire is akin to the tragic view of life in seeing the bestial qualities in man which need chastisement and correction. Jonson, Moliere, Pope, and Swift all took a serious view of mankind and would not tolerate the smugness of the New Yorker, Punch, and their modern Chinese parallels. One explanation for the belated development of literary humor in China was the Confucian emphasis on satire and didacticism. The comic portions in the Chinese novels are always satirical rather than humorous.

To A DETACHED OBSERVER then, China is a land of rich unconscious humor. The average Chinese enjoys various forms of ridicule and laughter which do not have the dignity or charity of humor. Conscious Chinese humor feeds upon idiosyncrasy, pomp, and hypocrisy. In situations where questions of honor and pride are involved, the Chinese often have recourse to partially humorous solutions such as face-saving and Ah Q’ism. Much has been written about different types of national humor; upon a closer examination, however, they can be adequately accounted for by different social conventions and usages. This is readily proved by the fact that slapstick comedies manufactured in Hollywood have a ready market in every nation in the world whereas sophisticated comedies whose appreciation requires a fuller knowledge of American manners are not so welcome. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Laurel and Hardy were once household names in China because their antics speak a universal language and exploit the fundamental risible situation of a small man caught in a situation too big for him. Humor also benefits from cultural contact. The influence of American humor and slapstick comedies is perceptible in Chinese magazines and movie-making today.

Though humor is universal, the observation that certain nations have more sense of humor and others have less is still a true one. This is not so much a matter of inherent racial disposition as of conscious guidance of character development by responsible educators and politicians. Modern physio-psychology classifies man according to three types; viscerotonic, somatotonic and cerebrotonic. In rough translation into lay language, they stand for the “belly” type, the “muscles” type, the “brains” type. The “belly” type, extrovert and convivial, is the promoter of genial laughter; the “brains” type, while less inclined to conviviality, is not incapable of wit or humor. It is the muscular person who is the potential enemy of society because. his chief interest in life consists in the exercise of power over his fellow men. He is physiologically devoid of humor because he is incapable of admitting personal weakness or inferiority. In the traditional Chinese social order the aggressive tendencies of the muscular type were held under check and the types held up for imitation have always been the Confucian scholar, the Confucian gentleman-squire, the Buddhist or Taoist recluse. Pre-war Germany, on the other hand, was relatively humorless. For nearly a hundred years it had been exploiting the aggressive tendencies of the muscular person and promoting a philosophy which sanctioned his behavior in the supposed interests of the nation or race. The German people of the middle ages had a different philosophy and were quite a merry people.

The emergence of the muscular person into a position of dominance, too, has been a distinctive feature of modern China. In the face of increasing national humiliations, the traditional ideal of the Confucian scholar and gentleman has been discredited and in his place the national savior has been substituted as the hero. Now held up for admiration are the characteristics of the muscular person which at first glance appear so un-Chinese: efficiency, militarism, and pliancy to discipline. The half-baked intellectuals, students, and politicians all find as the rust requisite to national reconstruction the transformation of the Chinese character along the lines of “muscular” mentality. They are ashamed of the age-Iong inefficiency, laziness, corruption, and irresponsible humor of the scholar, which withers idealism and kills initiative.

But the habit of humor cannot be easily outgrown. The Chinese on the mainland find momentary relief in exchanging witty remarks and cynical observations at the expense of the dead-serious Communist cadres. The weapon of humor is far from immediately lethal, but at least it provokes a chuckle or smile and for a moment enables the victim of tyranny to view the Communist activities in the nature of a terrible farce.