The Seditious Nature of Humour

The Power of Irony: You Cannot be Persecuted for What Was Unsaid

Years ago we watched a programme on the gradual emergence of political opposition in Czechoslovakia whilst it was still under the boot of Soviet Russia. The protagonist was arguing that opposition was nurtured in the night clubs of Prague by comedians--stand up comedians.  It was the kind of activity which escaped the attention of the censors and remained underground.  Holding the Soviet Union up to ridicule encouraged a far more critical attitude towards one's own repressive government.

One of the comedians involved recounted the following joke he had told in the night clubs: 

A Soviet commissar was racing home late one afternoon only to realise that he had forgotten to pick up some meat and bread from the elite commissar's GUM that lunchtime, as he had promised his wife he would do.  He decided to stop off at the neighbourhood food shop.  Alighting with his aides and bodyguards, he was confronted by a long queue stretching down the pavement, fifty metres from the shop entrance.  After waiting patiently in the line for thirty seconds, he murmured some instructions to his chief bodyguard.  The guard stood out from the line a bellowed, "Hands up all those that are Jews."  About a quarter of the queue put up their hands.  "Jews, go home," he shouted.  The Jews trudged off. 
But the line was still slow moving, and the Commissar was getting cold.  He spoke with his bodyguard again, and the chief once again stood out from the line and bellowed, "Hands up all those who are not Party members."  About ninety-five percent of the people in the queue put up their hands.  "Non-Party members, go home," shouted the guard.  This put the Commissar right up near the store entrance.  Ten minutes later he got in.  There was nothing on the shelves.  "We sold out hours ago," said the frightened storekeeper.
The angry Commissar stalked back to his limo.  "See," he said to his secretary, "it's what I have always told you.  The Jews always get the best deal." 

This is a profoundly subversive joke which operates at a number of different levels.  At all levels of the joke, the regime is exposed,  mocked and pilloried.  And it worked because it was so close to actual reality.

A recent article in Foreign Policy argues that subversive humour is emerging, particularly via the Internet.  We suspect that, as in Eastern Europe, such humour will prove a powerful force in eventually breaking down the authoritarianism of the Chinese Government.  It is probably even more devastating in China because the loss of face is a matter of shame--which brings an extra bite to seditious jokes.  And China provides no lack of opportunities for mockery.  The Middle Kingdom is a satirist's dream.

Irony Is Good!

How Mao killed Chinese humor ... and how the Internet is slowly bringing it back again.

BY ERIC ABRAHAMSEN | JANUARY 12, 2011

"Socialism is great!" Was there ever a statement riper for ironic mockery than this erstwhile catchphrase of the infant Chinese republic? How could a thinking people accept this and a host of other bald statements at face value, without so much as a raised eyebrow or a silently murmured really? And why, 60 years later, when the Chinese government calls the Dalai Lama a "devil with a human face," do none of its citizens seem to feel the urge to giggle?

Irony, put simply, is a gap between words and their meaning, a space across which speaker and listener exchange a knowing wink. For this knowingness to be mutual, a web of common experiences and beliefs must exist, within which language adopts deeper echoes and associations. In China, however, the Communist Party has made quite clear that there is no commonality but that of the party and its people, and certainly no shared language beyond that handed down by national leaders. The Chinese government has spent decades ensuring that public discourse has remained "public" only in the sense of "government owned." . . .

But it was really the Internet that salvaged Chinese humor, . . .  In the late 1990s, the Internet was still entirely uncensored (it would remain that way as late as 2004 or 2005), and it became, at last, a public space for writers and thinkers, who had been stifled by the government-controlled mainstream media, to explore new kinds of voices. . . .

These days, more sophisticated and ubiquitous Internet controls have meant less humor and criticism aimed at central government and top leaders, but a proliferation of mockery of lower-profile targets: the figures of authority and power that exist at all levels of society, from the classroom to the office. Reports of official corruption or abuses of power are regularly seized upon, creating memes that echo around the web. When a drunk driver killed a student in Baoding city last October, the driver's only defense was to proclaim, "My father is Li Gang" -- the deputy director of the local Public Security Bureau. The web erupted in rage and derision, creating poems, music videos, and innumerable mocking variations on the phrase, which now, in its Chinese form, gets 32,400,000 hits on Google. . . .


Han Han, a writer who may be one of the widest-read Internet personalities in the world, is one proof. . . . In 2009, a group of river boatmen, with the backing of local cadres, retrieved the bodies of students who had accidentally drowned in the river and then refused to hand the bodies over to the students' parents without an exorbitant fee. Han Han's recommendation was that all Chinese citizens carry the body-recovery fee on their persons at all times: "If you or a friend should fall in the water, you can hold the cash up above your head -- that's the only way these half-official body-recovery teams will bother fishing you out.". . . 

But most traditional media continue to move in earnest lockstep with the government line. Irony still seems to fall flat in a culture where one-dimensional discourse is promoted from the earliest days of school on up into the professional world. Starting in middle school, all Chinese students are still required to take "political thought" classes, later developing into versions of Marxist-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, and Deng Xiaoping Theory that are re-taught every year until the end of higher education.

The same formulations are repeated year in and year out, unleavened by reflection or analysis, and the result is a kind of mental numbness: the ability to set two potentially related thoughts side by side, without ever connecting the two. Japan's World War II invasion and occupation of northern China is continually rehashed in the media, yet the blindingly obvious correlations to the Chinese presence in Xinjiang and Tibet are never drawn.


Truly nuanced, self-aware social discussion may still be in the future -- "It could take two or three generations," Wang Xiaofeng told me -- but among educated Chinese the government's baldest self-contradictions no longer pass unremarked. When Wen Jiabao spoke about free speech and constitutionality in a September interview with CNN, his comments were subsequently censored in the Chinese media. China's online cognoscenti crowed over the absurdity.


The government is lumbering around to face this new challenge. The first rule of censorship is still "Don't talk about censorship"; and it would be fatal for the government to address popular sarcasm and irony directly, because so much of its own identity is written in language that would not sustain scrutiny. But its awareness is apparent through what is forbidden: "My father is Li Gang" has made the list of "sensitive" phrases.


No matter how swiftly authorities stamp out new criticism, however, it's too late. The brute removal of undesirable language from public discourse only works when ideas do not exist independent of language, but it is precisely irony that allows silence to speak as loudly as words. Wang Xiaofeng may be right in saying it will take another generation before any voices will be raised in direct challenge, but the government should be worried. Even now, each online report of disaster, failure, corruption, or injustice is met with a newly repurposed old Maoist catchphrase, perhaps angry or resigned, but above all, ironically knowing: "Our thanks to the nation."

Subversive humour was making the rounds in Czech night clubs in the sixties.  It took a generation before the Wall came down.  We suspect that subversive humour and irony in China will make a similar contribution--and in thirty years time we will all be repeating the new conventional wisdom, "Of course China had to dismember its authoritarian government.  The internal contradictions were tearing it apart."