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韩寒：历史上最爱放烟花的办公室主任　　

很欣慰，北京的公安机关经过调查，央视大楼着火原因并不是神秘自燃，也不是附近居民烟花误伤或者临时工在楼里吸烟，是中央电视台自己礼花玩，把自己给点了。令人难过的是，消防员张建勇为此付出了年轻的生命，要不然这事就成了喜剧了。

后来央视出面道歉，说是因为某办公室的主任未经上级批准，违规燃放烟花所致。

于是，历史上最爱放烟花的办公室主任出现了。这将近百万元的由电脑控制的礼花，同时有数台摄像机在拍摄的一个行为，居然是一个办公室主任自己干的。未经上级批准那肯定就是他自费放的了，或者说，在央视，某办公室燃放百万元的烟花是不需要经过批准的，这CASE太小了。

很明显不是这样的，当然是更大的领导希望，责任到这个办公室主任就打住了，你就安心的坐牢去吧，兄弟，放心，你的父母我们会赡养的，你的儿女我们会抚养的，你的老婆我们会包养的。

这个礼花的燃放，很显然是央视准备用在以后的电视节目里的，作为央视新大楼形象片的片花播出，当然，也有可能是当天录播的元宵晚会之后直接就可以插入刚才的礼花映裤衩的壮观景象。但是，很不幸这些画面只能成内参了。我都能想象当时的几个拍摄烟花的外景摄影师看见大楼着了以后的情形，他们拿着对讲机问，导演导演，这是安排的麽？

此番央视自焚，我惊奇的发现，除了对消防烈士表示惋惜意外，我身边的人都是喜闻乐见的，我强压自己阴暗的心理，企图以人文关怀面对这个灾难，但我不得不承认，我是幸灾乐祸的。当然，可能别人都是沉痛悲哀的，那就当我身边的是一个阴暗小团体吧。我就向大家暴露我的低级阴暗。

首先，多行不义必自焚。玩火自焚是一个历史定律，当然，人家说的是一个漫长的过程，没见过央视那么立竿见影的玩火自焚。央视作为一个新闻媒体，基本没有新闻道德。可以说，除了中国，中国中央电视台这样做事的电视台在其他大部分国家，都是一个违法的存在。在我们这里，它不但合法，而且甚至象征着法。多少年来，央视做过多少颠倒黑白，混淆视听，迫害文化，篡改事实，瞒天过海，助纣为虐，粉饰太平的事情？当然，这是一个疑问句，没别的意思，你说没有就是没有咯，反正你掌握了媒体资源嘛。

按理来说，国家财产有这么大的损失，老百姓应该很难过才是，因为这些都是用纳税人的钱造的。但现在大家都是开明的，反正吃喝玩乐都是浪费，一个楼造两遍算什么。央视给大家的感觉就是牛逼，而且央视自己也很满意于这种牛逼，直到火烧牛的逼，才牛逼不起来。央视是一个半垄断的机构，一个半垄断机构都能这样牛逼，所以可以见得，如果一个垄断机构要牛逼起来，那是什么样，反正他们就是牛，屁民们都是牛虱，在来烦我，那一小撮牛屎就是你们的下场。

所以，央视自己要反思，当然，央视是永远不需要反思的。随着舆论的发达，社会的发展，央视的公信力现在已经不能用没有来形容了，而是一个负数。也就是说，央视的新闻我们可以反过来看。我们当然理解央视作为一个国家电视台，党的喉舌，自然不能那么随心所欲，但是，事情永远是可以做好的，命题作文也是可以不至于差成这样的。这是事情最坏的结果。一个媒体，完全没有公信力可言，非但没有倒闭，还是一个国家的第一号，那只能说明连同这个国家都失去了公信力。

不幸的是，在这次火灾倳件中，央视又一次重演了一遍。这应该是建国以来除去森林大火以外，造成经济损失最大的一场火灾了，这无论如何都是一个特大新闻，但在央视的轻描淡写下，这场火灾就像烧了你我家的房子一样平常。假设是BBC的大楼放烟花烧了，甚至是湖南卫视的楼烧了，央视一定是报道的最积极的，不仅要滚动播出，而且估计导播都得乐得在地上打滚，做到真正的滚动播出。但这么大的一件事情，曾经一度是全世界的头条以及直播的新闻，在一个国家电视台里并无体现，达到了完美的和谐。这也是我们中国的新闻现状，我们看到的所有新闻都是经过了别有用心的删选和选择的，一切都看剧本需要和导演要求。

这把大火需要反思的不是烟花需要不需要禁放，这是一个小问题，这只是央视在漫漫自焚路上的一个小高潮而已，我们需要反思的是，央视需要不需要禁放。而炡椨也需要反思一个问题，那就是央视，人民日报，光明日报，新华社等喉舌，在现在的操作模式下，其实还拖累了主子的形象，本来是真事，被这些媒体一说，新华社通稿一发，反而像个假事了，本来是个加分的事，被他们一宣扬，居然正正得副变成了一个减分的事情。而且随着年轻人的成长，这些媒体上报道的内容正逐渐的成为笑柄。虽然他们都是由宣传部门直接管理，但是，在这五十年中，社会和炡椨都发生了诸多的变化，不过对于这些宣传机构的控制管理以及他们的宣传方式都和五十年前几乎一模一样，只是增添了五毛党等一些颇为不得力的辅助，自然会被时代淘汰。

五十年前人好骗，你今天人民日报说毛主席语录发行到美国导致了美国的灭亡，晚上九成八的群众都会像央视那样放烟花庆祝.但现在是一个讲究以德服人和以德蒙人的年代，所以，希望这场大火能让相关部门考虑考虑，新闻到底需要不需要联播。

by David Moser

Americans seeing it on Chinese TV for the first time usually have the same reaction: “Chinese stand-up comedy!” And indeed, the surface similarity is striking: two performers stand up on a stage in front of a live audience and engage in rapid-fire humorous repartee, with their interaction following the tried-and-true formula of a “straight-man” acting as an exasperated foil to the muddle-headedness of an illogical clowner. One is reminded of the classic American comedy duos like Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, George Burns and Gracie Allen, or 60s TV acts like Rowan and Martin and the Smothers Brothers. The Chinese art is called xiangsheng (literally, “face and voice”), which is usually translated into English as “crosstalk”, and for most of the twentieth century this performance form was virtually synonymous with humor in China.

Beyond the surface resemblance there are differences. While American stand-up comedians tend to work solo, in China the two-person format is the dominant one (perhaps reflecting the cultural tendency toward collectivism vs. the American cult of the individual). Crosstalk performers tend to be somewhat more formal and “stagey” in their delivery than their American counterparts. But the major difference lies in the overall structure of the performance. An American stand-up comedy routine tends to consist of a string of jokes loosely strung together, with the performer flitting from topic to topic with throwaway lines as perfunctory segues from one subject to the next. In contrast, a crosstalk piece is always a coherent, self-contained routine with a fixed narrative or unifying main premise. In this sense, a typical crosstalk piece more resembles a scripted dialogue such as Abbot and Costello’s “Who’s on First?” routine, or the Marx Brothers’ “Why a Duck?” scene. There is a repertoire of hundreds of traditional crosstalk pieces, as well as new pieces being written all the time, and each time a piece is performed the original premise and overall structure is preserved, with the performers free to add material or edit sections according to the needs of a specific performance. The subject matter of crosstalk draws upon every aspect of Chinese culture, from history, regional dialects and folk tales to contemporary issues like the one-child policy or economic modernization.

Crosstalk used to be phenomenally popular in China. Teahouses and auditoriums were packed each night with enthusiastic audiences, every theatrical troupe had a stable of crosstalk performers, and crosstalk was an essential part of every Chinese New Year variety show. In a culture not yet glutted with mindless entertainment, crosstalk was the major populist form of humor, and it was genuinely loved by audiences from every walk of life.

However, there is now widespread consensus that the art form has drastically declined in quality over the last few decades. Performances on radio and TV have dwindled considerably, and crosstalk is barely given a perfunctory place in the major variety shows. Audiences and performers alike perceive a crisis; is the form in danger of dying out completely?

There are various explanations for this decline. Some lament that, with the advent of tape recorders, the master-apprentice system of transmission has fallen by the wayside, resulting in a lowering of performer standards. Others maintain that the severe time constraints of TV deny performers the breathing space they need to deliver an adequate performance. Media analysts put the blame on competition from the influx of foreign DVDs and more free-wheeling Hong Kong entertainment products. Everyone seems to have an excuse for crosstalk’s increasing inability to hold an audience.

The excuses all ring hollow. Similar humor forms remain wildly popular in the States and in other countries. Stand-up humor is easily staged, quickly produced, and has an immediacy and topicality that no other form of humor can have. All people, including Chinese people, crave the cathartic release that laughter provides. If done right, there is no reason to think crosstalk would not enjoy the same popularity as its foreign counterparts. The real cause of crosstalk’s decline is painfully obvious, though no one dares to publicly acknowledge the truth: the Communist Party killed it.

The Chinese government has systematically stifled crosstalk by bowdlerizing its tradition, restricting its natural growth and evolution, and reducing the form to a sycophantic, unsatisfying — and unfunny — shadow of its former self.

Younger audiences exposed to only the lukewarm pap that now passes for crosstalk on Chinese TV have no way of knowing that it was at one time a freewheeling, vibrant, and even rambunctious art form. Developing from humble origins as a type of street theater in the Qing Dynasty, by the 1940’s it had become a complex oral performance form that maintained an anti-authoritarian and even slightly subversive quality. It was wildly politically incorrect, lampooning everyone — pompous social elites, corrupt officials, country bumpkins, the handicapped, prostitutes, the effete intelligentsia, and even the KMT leaders in power at the time. It is difficult to convey the culturally-embedded style and content of crosstalk humor in a brief article such as this, but suffice to say, the form was every bit as rich and varied as the traditions of American Vaudeville and stand-up comedy.

Then came 1949. After the communist takeover, Party officials in charge of entertainment for the new China agreed that the crosstalk genre was too rowdy and impertinent to be allowed in its present form. It went without saying that the sexual humor had to be cleaned up, but authority figures were also now off-limits, and performers could no longer ridicule the peasantry, who were now the class heroes of the revolution. Crosstalk and other entertainment forms were now called upon to “praise” (gesong) rather than to “satirize” (fengci). Few dissenting voices dared point out the obvious problem, namely that “praise” is not very funny. But no matter. In typical Chinese fashion, a special task force was formed, the “Committee for Crosstalk Reform”, under whose guidance hundreds of traditional pieces were revised and cleaned up for public consumption. Many pieces could be salvaged with minor cosmetic surgery, while others could only be discarded completely.

Typical of pieces that were deemed unacceptable was “Drinking Milk”, a one-person piece which goes as follows (drastically truncated here for space reasons):

An old man takes sick with a rare disease. The doctor tells him “This is a serious illness, my friend, but we can cure it for you. There’s a special Chinese herbal medicine that will fix you right up. But there is one problem: the prescription requires that you drink milk with it.”

“Why, that’s no problem.” the old man says.

“HUMAN milk,” clarifies the doctor.

“Well, that’s no problem either. It just so happens my daughter-in-law just gave birth to a baby. I can just get some milk from her.”

“Sorry, but there’s one more requirement,” says the doctor. “The milk has to be drunk directly from the breast, otherwise it loses its effectiveness.” Whew. This might be a little tricky. What can he do? The old man has no choice but to directly approach the daughter-in-law with his problem. He explains his predicament to her, and she is quite understanding.

“It’s a matter of life-and-death,” she says. “Of course I’ll help you.” So she timidly opens up her blouse and lets the old man suck the milk. But he has barely had one mouthful than the son — who had heard that his father was ill — returns home from work early. Opening the door and seeing his young wife there with his very own father in this rather compromising situation, he is understandably pretty pissed off.

“Dad!” the son cries in shock. “What the hell are you doing?” The father, seeing his son’s displeasure, stands up indignantly and says, “So! I drink one mouthful of your wife’s milk and you get this upset? Have you forgotten how much of MY wife’s milk YOU drank when you were a baby?”

This piece is no longer printed or performed in the media. It has for all intents and purposes disappeared from the crosstalk repertoire, though older performers remember it and can perform it in informal settings. The average Chinese audience member would be amazed that crosstalk in its current innocuous form had anything even this mildly risqué in its past.

But if they found this piece surprising, they would be absolutely flabbergasted by the X-rated premise of piece called “The Birdie that Doesn’t Chirp”. The piece is a double entendre-filled conversation between a man and a lady friend. (Female performers were rare; crosstalk, like early American stand-up comedy, was almost exclusively a male domain). The man mentions to the woman that he owns a special kind of bird that doesn’t chirp. Under puzzled questioning from the woman, it turns out the curious bird in question has no feathers, has only one eye on the top of its head, stays inside its “cage” most of the time, can grow or shrink in size at certain times, and so on. As the dialogue proceeds it becomes increasingly obvious to everyone but the innocent woman that the “bird” in question is actually the man’s penis. At one point the woman suggests that he take his bird out to a teahouse, as is the custom of Beijingers who raise birds as a hobby:

Man: A teahouse? Forget it! Last time I went to a teahouse at Wangfujing, as soon as I took off his cover, the waiter came running over. “Cover it up! Cover it up!” he said. “If you don’t cover that up, I’m gonna scald it to death with boiling water!”

Woman: Oh.

Man: Better cover him up, right? So I covered him up.

Woman: It seems to me you don’t know the first thing about birds. You can’t put his cage on the table if you go to a teahouse. All that dirty bird poop. While you’re drinking your tea, you hang your birdie up.

Man: Hang it up? No way!

Woman: Why?

Man: Dizzy from the height.

Woman: Nonsense. Birds don’t get dizzy.

Man: No, I mean I would get dizzy.

Woman: What’s it got to do with you?

Man: It’s my bird, after all.

Very sophomoric humor, of course — sort of the Chinese equivalent of a Playboy party joke. But it is revealing to see how far this kind of frankly sexual content could be taken in pre-1949 China. Crosstalk performers referred to this sort of piece as hunkou, which could be loosely translated as a “meat [as opposed to vegetarian] dish”. There is absolutely nothing remotely approaching it in the broadcast media today. (It is difficult for scholars to reconstruct pre-Liberation crosstalk because in the political extremism of 50s and 60s most of the historical record of the art form, including films, scripts, and recordings, were destroyed or irrevocably lost. A wire recording of this piece was made in 1953, and somehow resurfaced in 1990, whereupon the fragile steel wire technology was transferred to audiocassette tape by a member of the Academy of Social Sciences and passed on to a Princeton professor.)

Crosstalk also had an abundance of black humor. The premise of the piece “Selling Coffins” is almost Monty Python-esque: A coffin seller burdened with a surplus of merchandise desperately tries to unload more coffins on his customers using hard-sell techniques:

A: [to the customer]…The smaller coffins also can be put to other uses besides burying people, you know.

B: Like what?

A: Do you have a child in your family?

B: Yes.

A: Swell! You can buy one of these small coffins and use it as a baby stroller. It’ll be perfect: the handles on all four sides will keep the baby from falling out.

B: No good. A stroller has wheels, a coffin doesn’t. Without wheels, how can you rock it back and forth?

A: Just put four wheels on it and there you go! It shouldn’t cost much money.

B: But… the baby will be terrified jostling about inside!

A: Oh, don’t be such a fuddy-duddy! Stick a little mattress in there and it’ll be just fine.

B: Boy, you’ve got a solution for everything.

A: So you’ll buy one, eh?

B: Well, I… no, it won’t work. There’s no place to hang mosquito netting in the summer.

A: What do you need mosquito netting for?

B: Without it, the baby will get bitten by mosquitoes!

A: So just shut the lid. The mosquitoes won’t be able to get in.

B: But with the lid shut, the baby will suffocate!

A: So much the better.

B: What?!?

A: You can just wheel the coffin to the cemetery to bury the kid — no need to hire pallbearers.

These examples at least illustrate the range of freedom that this performance domain once had, and the kinds of salty content that pre-Liberation audiences were routinely exposed to. The point is that early crosstalk, like any indigenous folk art form, was able to reflect daily life in a rich, genuine way. Performers were free to explore both the virtues and the foibles of the Chinese people, both the glories and the excesses of Chinese culture, and the pleasures along with the annoying absurdities of everyday life. In short, crosstalk was able to laugh at the full range of things Chinese, including the darker side. When the Party got their puritanical hands on the form after 1949, they immediately began to it pull out its satirical teeth, turning it into an bland mouthpiece for political policy.

During the dark days of the Cultural Revolution the form virtually ceased to exist. The arts had become merely a tool of indoctrination, and crosstalk proved to be particularly fragile and unsustainable in this new environment. While a revolutionary ballet can still retain some degree of compelling visual power, or a propaganda movie can still hold some purely cinematic value (note Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will), the purely verbal form of crosstalk had no other artistic elements to fall back on, and thus became effectively dead.

Mao Zedong himself was an avid fan of crosstalk, and would hold performances in his residences at Zhongnanhai on Saturday nights. Interestingly, he requested only the traditional repertoire, having no use for the newly produced, revolutionary pieces. Like his wife Jiang Qing, who banned all foreign films but viewed Disney movies in the privacy of her living quarters, Mao continued to foist revolutionary art on the masses, while privately enjoying the unexpurgated classics.

In 1989 I interviewed crosstalk star Hao Aimin, who was one of the younger artists who performed in these weekly performances at Zhongnanhai. In the relaxed setting of my dorm room at Peking University, he related what it was like to perform “stand-up” in front of Chairman Mao:

We would peek out from behind the curtain backstage while we were waiting to go on, and there would be Chairman Mao, all red-faced, dancing waltzes with the young women. Chairman Mao was a large man, very robust, but actually quite graceful on his feet, and a good dancer. Seeing him in this context — as a human being rather than a world leader — enabled us to relax a bit and not be so terrified when it was time to go on. Still, standing up in front of Chairman Mao telling jokes could be intimidating. You had the feeling the people in the audience were afraid to laugh unless he did. Zhou Enlai was a better audience in this respect. He himself was more easy-going and laughed readily at all the jokes. He also had a tendency to anticipate the punchlines, and would say them along with you. This would spoil the joke somewhat, but it made for a more relaxed atmosphere.

In the late 1970’s, following the end of the Cultural Revolution, crosstalk experienced a rebirth as performers were again given more or less free rein to exercise their creative powers. This time the satirists had a safe and officially-sanctioned target: the Gang of Four and the excessive zealotry of the decade that had just ended. Performers took gleeful pleasure in getting comedic revenge on Jiang Qing and her cohorts, and dozens of pieces appeared with titles like “The White-Boned Demon” (the name of an evil spirit in the novel Journey to the West, which became a nickname for Jiang Qing). Jokes about the Gang of Four that had been circulating underground for years could now be put to use in these routines, and crosstalk performers were even free to show off their much-vaunted imitation skills to viciously parody Jiang Qing’s sing-song Shandong accent:

A: [imitating Jiang Qing] I’ve always studied diligently since I was young. I persisted in reading Marxist-Leninist literature five hours every day, and Chairman Mao’s works for seven hours every day. Comrades, I read four works from cover to cover: I can recite from memory Lenin’s Das Kapital, and Marx’s The Collected Works of Lenin…

B: Come off it! Give us a break!

A: Comrades, the struggles at the top are complex, and there are those in political circles who oppose me.

B: Yeah, they can see you’re a schemer and an opportunist!

A: They say that I have openly tried to subvert the Party. These accusations are totally groundless! Sure, I tried to subvert the Party, but it was never openly!”

You get the idea. Not exactly side-splitting humor. Most of these pieces don’t hold up well, of course, being perhaps prime examples of the type of humor for which “you had to be there”. But the laughter was truly cathartic, as audiences were now free to laugh at what just a few years earlier had been an oppressive aspect of everyday life.

One of the more successful pieces of the post-Mao period was “How to Take a Photograph”, which did a wonderful job of skewering the absurd politically excesses of the time:

A: On the wall of the shop was a piece of paper, and at the top it said NOTICE TO ALL CUSTOMERS.

B: What did it say?

A: It said: “All revolutionary comrades who come in the revolutionary door of this revolutionary photography shop, before asking any revolutionary question, must first call out a revolutionary slogan. If any of the revolutionary masses do not call out a revolutionary slogan, then the revolutionary shopkeeper will take a revolutionary attitude and refuse to give a revolutionary response. Revolutionarily yours, the revolutionary management.”

B: Really “revolutionary”, all right. It was like that in those days. As soon as you went into the shop it went like this: “Serve the People!” Comrade, I’d like to ask a question.

A: “Struggle Against Selfishness and Criticize Revisionism!” Go ahead.

B: [to the audience] Well, at least he didn’t ignore me. [Back in character] “Destroy Capitalism and Elevate the Proletariat!” I’d like to have my picture taken.

A: “Do Away with the Private and Establish the Public!” What size?

B: “The Revolution is Without Fault!” A three-inch photo.

A: “Rebellion is Justified!” Okay, please give me the money.

B: “Politics First and Foremost!” How much?

A: “Strive for Immediate Results!” One yuan three mao.

B: “Criticize Reactionary Authorities!” Here’s the money.

A: “Oppose Rule by Money!” Here’s your receipt.

B: “Sweep Away Class Enemies of All Kinds!” Thank you.

The piece catapulted the young performer Jiang Kun into instant success, and more pieces followed. For a brief period of time, crosstalk had an officially sanctioned target and almost total license to attack it.

This period of satiric openness did not last long. Once the brief period of letting off steam had subsided, political topics were once again off-limits. Those in power did not wish for discontent with recently-toppled regime to begin to spill over into the current one. Genuine laughter is liberating, contagious, and ultimately threatening to the established rule.

However, crosstalk was at least able to return to its roots, and no one was more qualified to lead in this renewal than the art’s greatest living practitioner, Hou Baolin. Hou had been rehabilitated at the end of the Cultural Revolution after being branded as a “rightist”, and was now free to continue the work of revising and expanding the crosstalk repertoire. Hou Baolin was a self-taught performer with a prodigious memory and an uncanny ear. With a Buster Keaton deadpan face and a relaxed, understated style, his performances had an urbane sophistication lacking in many other performers. Hou’s strong point was not satire per se, but rather the basic skills of the art, which involved imitating dialects and opera styles, and capturing the rich range of Chinese speech in impressive vocal displays. With these techniques as a basis, he revisited and revamped the older pieces, recycling and playing with the rich set of plots and characters in traditional Chinese literature and mythology. As popular as he was, his performances could only be characterized as masterful museum pieces. They represented the (pasteurized) cream of the old repertoire. With his undisputed comedic mastery, and with the content of his performances safely apolitical, Hou maintained a position as the premier crosstalk performer during the decades after 1949, becoming practically synonymous with the art itself.

As towering a figure as Hou was, he was not the person to take on the task of incorporating subject matter relevant to Deng Xiaoping’s China. Jobs, family relationships, consumer behavior, social attitudes; all were changing at a dizzying pace, and for crosstalk to remain funny, it would have to begin to reflect these new developments. What the increasingly sophisticated audience was crying out for was comedy material that examined the current realities of Chinese life, jokes that dealt head-on with the new and often traumatic changes unfolding under the new market economy. The raw material for such humor was certainly out there in abundance, and by all rights the 1980s should have been a heyday for Chinese crosstalk performers.

It didn’t happen. The task of producing effective crosstalk material was made nearly impossible by the fact that the government was still not allowing any content in the arts that smacked of criticism. Satire needs a target, but what social phenomena could performers possibly use as fodder for humor? The increasing ranks of laid-off workers? The chaotic collapse of the longstanding danwei (“work unit”) system? The gaudy excesses of China’s nouveau rich? The spoiled-brat “little emperors” resulting from the one-child policy? Such juicy topics were off-limits, effectively preventing crosstalk humor from even getting off the ground. Even more frustrating was the fact that all these topics were being lampooned in the rich underground repertoire of jokes, doggerel poems, and song parodies circulating among the public. The jokes being told by cab drivers were funnier than those of the professional comedians on TV. What were crosstalk performers to do? They rehashed old material. They parodied TV ads. They recited tongue-twisters. They resorted to slapstick. And the form continued its downward slide, with audiences becoming bored and disgusted with the increasingly irrelevant blather performers were forced to produce.

For a very brief time in the late 1980s, however, it seemed as if one performer, Jiang Kun, teamed up with a talented young writer named Liang Zuo, might be able to put some teeth back into crosstalk by adopting a tactic that creative artists under other repressive regimes have employed, namely incorporating subversive messages into their work while on the surface adhering to guidelines of political correctness.

The first success of this duo was a piece called “Reflections in the Tiger’s Mouth”, the basic premise of which is as follows. A young man accidentally falls into a tiger pit at the zoo and finds himself face to face with a hungry tiger. Attempts to rescue him fail, and, suddenly forced to confront his own mortality, he frantically searches for some metaphysical consolation in his last remaining moments of life. But where to turn at this existential crisis point? His thoughts turn to a few communist slogans and the Four Modernizations, but these fail to provide either escape or spiritual comfort:

A: [Shouting to spectators looking down into the tiger pit] Hey, up there! Shouting slogans won’t do any good, the tiger doesn’t understand them! Hey, up there! If you really want to emulate the spirit of Lei Feng, some of you should come down here and rescue me!

B: Did any of them come down?

A: “Communist Party members follow me!”

B: Are you a Communist Party member?

A: Uh, don’t ask. Anyway, it was obviously me who took the lead in coming down here in the first place! . . .

B: After all this time you haven’t thought of a way to escape!

A: Take it easy! Wait till I discuss this with the tiger.

B: Oh, so you’re going to discuss it with the tiger?

A: We’re going to do a little “ideological work”. [addressing the tiger] “Tiger! Tiger! Open your eyes and take a good look at me. I’m pretty skinny — no meat!…Tiger, if you have mercy on me today and don’t eat me, if you let me get out of this, I. . . I promise I’ll lead a good life. I’ll not only work for the Four Modernizations, I’ll even work for the Eight Modernizations. I won’t show up late for work at my work unit, and in the evening I won’t leave early. I’ll do everything my superiors tell me. At home I’ll be a model of filial piety, I’ll cherish my brothers and sisters. On the street I’ll obey the traffic rules, and I won’t spit on the ground!”

He then seeks some metaphysical solace in various religions — Christianity, Islam, Buddhism — but realizes to his dismay that he doesn’t know enough about any of these belief systems to take advantage of what they have to offer. When he is finally pulled to safety, he once again puts these metaphysical questions aside as he directs his attention to wooing the attractive young lady who helped organize his rescue.

The genius of the piece is its two levels of meaning. On the surface it is merely a humorous vignette about a hapless Everyman frantically trying to save his own skin, and Jiang Kun delivers a manic Jerry Lewis-like performance that makes this reading plausible. But the underlying message was evident to those who could read between the lines: namely that the Party, in abandoning the legacy of Chinese history and replacing it with merely a bankrupt and empty ideology, had failed to provide ordinary people with any moral or ethical grounding for their daily lives. Jiang and Liang had a hit on their hands, a piece that truly resonated with audiences — and it made it past the censors!

In another piece called “Self-Selection”, Liang Zuo manages to deal humorously with issues of gender identity, and even to flirt with the topic of homosexuality and bisexuality — issues that were not then or now acceptable topics for TV humor. The protagonist goes to the doctor and is told that he has come down with an extremely rare gender disorder: he is now exactly half-way between a man and a woman — he is neither male nor female. There is, however, an operation that can be performed on a special a gland in the brain. If the doctor twists the gland to the right, the patient will become fully male again; if the gland is twisted to the left, the patient will become a female. The doctor, realizing that this is a momentous decision, advises the patient to go home and discuss the options with friends and family members.

What follows is an exposition of the advantages and disadvantages of being one sex or the other in the Chinese social context. In the process of hypothesizing and weighing options, the protagonist keeps getting his gender roles confused:

A: As a woman I would still have to find a mate… Hey, how about if I choose a man as a mate?

B: Aren’t women supposed to look for men?

A: … Okay, I’ve got to make a careful decision. A matter of “Till death do us part”, I can’t choose just anybody. I’ll pick… Hey, how about Little Mengzi at our work unit? He’s in a leadership position.

B: You have to decide this for yourself.

A: Nah, Little Mengzi doesn’t have the right look. He’s only 1.65 meters tall…. He has these stupid-looking double-fold eyelids — his eyes look like two belly buttons! He’s so short and dumpy, yet he loves to wear blue jeans, his two little buns poking out so tight… I can’t figure out figure out why that Li girl would pick him.

B: Huh? Little Mengzi has a fiancé?

A: They’ve been engaged more than a year now.

B: Then why are you butting in?

A: Isn’t everybody advocating “the third party sticking their foot in the door” these days? [Chinese term for the third member of the triangle in an extramarital affair]

B: Who’s advocating that?

A: Well what are all these articles in the newspapers and magazines on the subject?

B: They’re all opposing it!

A: … Well, anyway, who’s “the third party” after all? Little Mengzi’s fiancé is the “third party”, not me! I’ve been sharing a bunk-bed with Little Mengzi ever since I started work at the factory. Has she ever spent the night in the same room with him? Plus, if I get married to Little Mengzi, it’ll save a lot of trouble. We wouldn’t even have to apply for housing, we could just move my bedding from the top bunk to the bottom bunk and that would be it! The housing situation is so tight these days, it would save the leaders of the work unit a lot of hassle!

B: You’ve got an answer for everything!

A: Sure! With so much competition for housing, you leaders have to think of some solution. If everyone did like I’m proposing, men marrying men and women marrying women…[pause] Uh, I guess that would be crazy wouldn’t it?

B: You’re finally catching on.

In the end the protagonist, having discovered that both genders have their advantages, chooses not to have the operation at all. “I’ll just stay like this — right in the middle!” he says. Again, for the vast majority of the audience, the humor of the piece is perceived to center around the protagonist’s obvious violations of “common sense”. But to hipper members of the audience — and especially gays and bisexuals — exchanges such as the above were knowingly evocative. In China’s homophobic society, where crowded same-sex dorm rooms and living arrangements are the rule, the situation hinted at here would be immediately recognizable to many as the only means for homosexuals to enjoy relatively safe, long-term clandestine sexual relationships. Furthermore, merely toying with the blurring of gender roles in a humorous context can lead to deeper reflection and awareness of these issues on the part of the average Chinese, who might never encounter an open and serious discussion of the subject elsewhere. As a piece of social satire operating in the context of the relatively more restrictive social environment, one might make a comparison to the 50’s Hollywood film Some Like it Hot, where cross-dressing and gender-switching were all played for laughs, yet a more challenging — even subversive — subtext was there to be read by anyone sensitized to it.

The best Liang-Jiang collaboration was a piece entitled “Big News”, which was premiered as part of the televised Chinese New Year’s festival in the spring before the Tiananmen Square crackdown. The piece was an immediate and phenomenal hit. The premise is as follows. A tells B that he has heard it through the xiaodao xiaoxi, (“back alley information”, i.e., “the grapevine”) that the government is about to come up with a bold new experiment: Tiananmen Square is going to be converted into an outdoor free market, where hundreds of getihu enterprises would be allowed to set up stalls and hawk everything from blue jeans to VCRs. The straight man is incredulous that the historic square would be converted to such a crass commercial venue:

B: Tiananmen Square is the window of China. How could it be appropriate to plunk an outdoor market down there?

A: Window of China? Right! Foreigners don’t know what China is like. They can take one look at the square and say “An open-air market? Hey! China has a commodity-based economy!” Taking another look, they say “Hmm, and everything is pretty cheap, too! Okay, now we know!” And that’s the first step.

B: Oh, so now they know.

A: A window, you said. They take one look and get the picture. Foreigners take one look and think “Not bad!” … It’ll put their minds at ease. “So much bustling activity, so much prosperity! Surely China will have no trouble repaying its debts!”

The jokester proceeds to counter all of the straight man’s objections. You say the marketplace will clutter up the front of the Great Hall of the People? This has advantages for the leaders — when they get hungry during a particularly exhausting meeting, they can just step outside and buy a bowl of wonton soup! You say the open air market would be a distraction during important governmental activities? On the contrary, the market would provide visual aids; when the topic of the meeting came around to the problem of poor quality-control in industry, all the goods arrayed in the outdoor stalls could serve as handy examples. And so on.

The piece was dynamite humor at the time. The ostensible premise was the perils of gullibly swallowing the absurd rumors circulated in the xiaodao xiaoxi, but more astute members of the audience were, of course, aware of the delicious irony of the true underlying subtext, which poked fun at the contradiction between China’s rapid economic reforms and its continuing rearguard political policies. Of course, “Big News” didn’t merely point out this dichotomy — it rubbed the government’s nose in it. Audiences at the time laughed gleefully at the incongruous image of the somber square filled with hundreds of small capitalistic entrepreneurs at their outdoor stalls catering to rowdy hordes of bargain-hunting shoppers. The piece continued to be performed and talked about during the following few months of 1989, as life imitated art: Tiananmen Square indeed came to resemble a kind of boisterous outdoor marketplace as the student protesters took over. The piece managed to achieve something close true political satire, a form of humor totally absent from the Chinese media.

Then came the night of June 4. After the initial chaos of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a new ice age for the arts set in. “Big News” disappeared from the public record, and Liang Zuo himself became fed up with the crosstalk domain, turning to more lucrative TV serials. He died of a heart attack in 2001 at the age of 44. Crosstalk’s slump began to deepen, with the routines becoming increasingly perfunctory and aimless — and not funny. Some of the more talented performers jumped ship, crossing over into movies or cashing in on their fame by starting their own companies. What was left was a core group of veteran performers who were reliably entertaining but increasingly irrelevant, and a rag-tag assortment of inexperienced rookies who could only recycle lame jokes or wail pop song parodies.

And so the situation remains today. The result is that crosstalk’s presence on TV and radio has diminished significantly. Nor is the situation much better with live theater performances. Beijing, the center of the art form, now has virtually no venues where one can enjoy a performance on any given night. The more traditional city of Tianjin fares a bit better, boasting a few traditional performing arts teahouses (perhaps the Chinese equivalent of comedy clubs) where loyal fans can pay five yuan and spend an evening munching sunflower seeds and drinking tea while watching crosstalk. Unfettered by the time constraints of television, veteran performers are free to spin out the traditional pieces (some lasting as long as an hour) in more or less their full glory. Good as these routines are, some of the pieces are more than 50 years old. It would be as if New York audiences flocked to a comedy clubs to enjoy reprisals of Jack Benny or the Marx Brothers. Classic stuff, to be sure, but humor must reflect the times.

Nobody is more painfully aware of these problems than crosstalk performers themselves. It is they who have to endure the nightly “flop sweat” arising from confronting bored and contemptuous audiences. The words of one veteran performer are typical:

Naturally we all agree that crosstalk just isn’t funny anymore. It’s the computer age, but we’re still up there doing pieces about Peking Opera and peddler’s cries. The tragedy is, there is plenty of material out there. Everyone complains about the traffic in Beijing. Can we make a joke about it? No. It would be construed as a criticism of the municipal traffic authorities. Everyone is downloading porn from the Internet now. Can we mention this in a joke? Forget it. It would be admitting that Chinese people have sexual hang-ups, too… And never mind poking a little innocent fun at our political leaders. Never in a million years. So what’s the point of even trying to be funny?

In fact, every facet of daily life is so politicized in China, that crosstalk performers actually find themselves avoiding indigenous Chinese subject matter for their routines. For part of his performance in the CCTV Spring Festival show for the Year of the Horse, Jiang Kun, the leading performer of his generation, simply revamped a couple of foreign jokes downloaded from the Internet. Surely one would think that some culturally relevant, home-grown Chinese humor would have been more appropriate for such an important TV event. Perhaps it was not worth the multi-leveled steeplechase that the censorship process entails.

The result of decades of constant conservative pressure from these TV censors is that the general tone of all the entertainment media in China is now unrelentingly laudatory, saccharine and Pollyanna-ish. And this style has become so ingrained that any content that is the least bit irreverent, iconoclastic, snide, or mocking (i.e., anything displaying the essential attitudes of humor) is perceived as downright crass and socially disruptive. Such an atmosphere of polite, cheery civility is not conducive to the performing arts in general, but for the purely verbal humor of crosstalk, it is paralyzing.

The Chinese audience, now savvier and more internationalized, craves something spontaneous and honest, but crosstalk performers seem unable to provide it. One famous performer (who asks that I not use his name) laments that his career in the PRC has left him incapable of performing comedy in any other way:

I’ve been overseas, and I’ve seen these American comedians like Robin Williams interacting with the audience, and so much of it is just improvised. My fans say “You’re so funny, and quick-witted. I bet you could do that, too. Why not just get up on the stage and go with the situation, play it by ear with the audience? People would love it.” But I say, no, it’s really too late for me. If right now you gave me the total freedom to stand up on the stage and say anything at all, in the end I’d just end up mouthing the same old things, falling back on the same routines. It’s second-nature to me now. There might be hope for the next generation, but for not for me. This is all I know how to do now.

Yet where is this new generation to come from? The most serious sign of the crosstalk’s moribund status is that virtually no stars have arisen in the past ten years. Clearly, the art needs new ideas, new material and new faces, or it is in danger of extinction. But what new talent is going to want to embark on a sinking ship?

I was once at a party attended by several crosstalk performers. As the evening wore on and the maotai liquor flowed, a few of them began to get up and tell jokes that were popular at the time, including this one about police corruption:

A new cop, his first day on the job. After putting in a day’s work, he decides to go to a movie to relax. As he’s standing there in line, the person in front of him turns around, sees his police uniform, and says “You’re new, right?” The cop is surprised.

“Well, yes, how did you know?”

“Cops don’t wait in line, they just cut to the front of the line.”

The cop thinks, “Great! One of the advantages of being a cop!” So he cuts into the head of the line, and indeed no one dares object. He pulls out his wallet to buy a ticket and the ticket seller says “You’re new, right?”

“Why, yes, how did you know?”

“Cops don’t have to buy tickets. They just go in for free.” The cop, increasingly pleased with the perks of this job, goes into the theater.

He starts to look for a seat on the ground floor. Someone says “You’re new, right?”

“Well, yes, how did you know?”

“Cops don’t sit with the ordinary people. They go up to the reserved padded seats in the balcony.” The cop is pleased with this, and goes up to the reserved seats.

As soon as he sits down, the person next to him says. “You’re new, right?”

“Well, yes, how did you know?”

“Cops don’t sit politely with their feet on the floor. They always lean back and put their feet up on the seat in front of them.” So he leans back and puts his feet up. And he’s thinking this is a pretty good job.

Suddenly he receives a phone call on his cell phone. “We’ve just heard there’s a prostitution ring at the Chaoyang movie theater,” says the police dispatcher. “Go look around and get some evidence, and you can get a promotion!” What luck! The cop happens to be at that very movie theater. So he pulls out his flashlight and begins opening doors, looking for some prostitution activity. And sure enough, upon opening one of the doors, he sees a man in there with three hookers in bed with him.

Triumphantly he says “Get up, all of you! You are all under arrest, including you, buddy.”

One of the hookers says “Hey, you’re new, aren’t you?” Now the cop is really dumbfounded.

“Yeah, but how in the world could you possibly know that?”

The prostitute points to the man in bed with them and says “You don’t recognize your own chief of police??”

This joke is typical of the kind of humor that circulates among the general populace and gets sent around the Internet in China. Mild as it is, this joke could never be told on Chinese TV. After the laughter died down, the performer who told the joke complained to me:

You know, there is so much resentment against the police right now. I would love to be able to tell this joke on the stage. The audience would go crazy, for sure. I always feel that this is the kind of humor we should be making, stuff that the audience can identify with, stuff that really reflects the kind of problems they meet in everyday life. As years go by, news events come and go, and all kinds of these jokes make the rounds, but they never get aired on TV. Year after year all sorts of marvelous humor is produced and then forgotten, and never makes in on the public record. Centuries from now, people will look back and say “Where was the humor in China after 1949?” Well, it was here, folks, they just wouldn’t let us speak it out loud.

It is ironic that China, with the world’s largest population, also wastes more human resources than any country on earth. An entire generation of talent was effectively lost during the Cultural Revolution. And it could be argued that, since 1949, China has metaphorically shackled and silenced all its Lenny Bruces, Mort Sahls, Richard Pryors, Dick Gregorys, Eddie Murphys and Margaret Chos. Of course, all cultures are different, and such potential Chinese comedic geniuses would have undoubtedly produced standup comedy with “Chinese characteristics”. The pity is that we will never know what that comedy might have been like.

If crosstalk is dying, it is not because of inexorable market forces, or because of some ineffable cultural difference. It is rather the fault of the Communist Party, whose paranoia and pathetic sense of dignity has produced a media environment in which nothing truly humorous can ever arise and flourish. It is the Party that killed the laughter. And this is truly no laughing matter.

]]> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/guorui/2009/01/29/no-laughing-matter-a-hilarious-investigation-into-the-destruction-of-modern-chinese-humor/feed/ 1 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/guorui/2008/10/03/%e6%88%90%e5%86%ac%ef%bc%9a%e6%96%b0%e6%9c%a8%e5%85%b0%e8%be%9e/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/guorui/2008/10/03/%e6%88%90%e5%86%ac%ef%bc%9a%e6%96%b0%e6%9c%a8%e5%85%b0%e8%be%9e/#comments Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:30:23 +0000 Rui Guo http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/guorui/?p=453 新木兰辞

成冬

吧唧复吧唧,小囝抱瓶吸。不闻啼哭声,唯闻母叹息。问母何所思,问母何所忆? 母亦无所思,母亦无所忆。昨夜看银屏,奶品大排名:毒奶十亿袋,袋袋有聚氰！夫妻三旬过,独子巧乖灵,突然急病患,疑似结石生！

东市听凶险,西市把夫搬,南市良医寻,北市去借钱。连夜排长队,冻饿道路边。不闻稚儿欢笑声,但闻同病群体哭一片。煌煌医院大,累累众人头,不闻稚儿欢笑声,满目童叟医护把心揪。万里查祸首,毒情报若飞。怒气传网络,寒光照血衣。宁我百次死,换儿健康归……

归来见黄榜,黄榜有名堂。免检七八载,粉饰百千强。专家答所欲,民众不用太惊慌;日饮乳品三升半,营养又健康。

爷娘闻奶来,变色扶门框;阿姊闻奶来,浇花阳台窗;小弟闻奶来,磨刀霍霍向奸商。环球清“国祸”,“世卫”叹炎凉,“友好”不给脸,“金牌”算泡汤。李局辞官准,田董坐班房,网上众马甲,马甲亦惊忙:特供数十年,难保三聚氰胺也入肠?

国检勤谄媚,CC更痴迷,科技银奖授,更多黑幕待揭皮！

Crazy Stone (2006)

Farewell My Concubine (1993)

In the Heat of the Sun (1995)

Platform (2000)

Mahjong (1996)

Shaolin Temple (1982)

Maybe to add some cartoon movies:

Baby Tadpoles Look for Their Mother (1960);

The Monkey King (1964).

The following two are just for fun. In 2005 Chen Kaige shot Wuji, which cost a huge amount of money but turned out to be a really crappy one. A netizen used some of his movie clips to make a humorous story named A Story of Murder Originated from A Piece of Bread, and then posted it on internet. The latter, aimed at making fun of Wuji, got millions of clicking from China and abroad. Chen was mad at the netizen and even threatened him with a litigation.

Wuji (2005); and a response video

A Story of Murder Originated from A Piece of Bread (2005) (19 minutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIU4udZRKEY

These films demonstrates the power of Chinese propaganda:

The Great Decisive War I, II, and III (1991).

You can find all these movies by simply copying and googling them. Enjoy, my friends.

This is an incredible movie.

• (The speech John Q. gives to his son)

I just need to tell you a few things. You always listen to your mother. You understand? Do what she tells you to do. She’s your best friend. You tell her you love her every day.

You’re too young for girls right now, but… there’s going to come a time. When it does, you treat them like princesses. ‘Cause that’s what they are.

When you say you’re going to do something… When you say you’re going to do something, you do it. Because your word is your bond, son. It’s all you have.

And money. You make money if you get a chance, even if you got to sell out once in a while. Make as much money as you can. Don’t be stupid like your father. Everything is so much easier with money, son.

Don’t smoke.

Be kind to people. When somebody chooses you… We talked about this. You stand up. You be a man.

You stay away from the bad things, son, please. Don’t get caught up in the bad things. There’s so many great things out there for you.

I’ll never leave you. I’m always with you. Right there. I love you, son.

我念小学的时候,参加过一个讲故事比赛.
“我的同学王小毛给我留下 印象最深.王小毛上台讲了一个故事:

‘从前有个地主,生了两个儿子,大儿子生来好吃懒做,对穷人从来又打又骂,小儿子同情穷人.小儿子爱上了穷人的女儿,地主不同意他们的婚事,就把财产全留 给了大儿子,赶走了小儿子.大儿子从此变本加厉,对穷人越发凶残.小儿子变成了穷人,也被他的哥哥欺负.后来小儿子家里实在没吃的,就去求大儿子借粮食, 大儿子说:你要是赶走你的穷人妻子,我就借给你粮食.小儿子想,没有粮食,两个人都得饿死.就把妻子赶走了.大儿子反悔,粮食也不借了.小儿子和他原来的 妻子就都饿死了.’
大家瞪着眼睛等下文,王小毛说:’故事讲完了‘.老师说:’一定是你没有看完书,故事不应该完.”王小毛肯定地说:”故事就到这里.’
老师很惋惜地说:’这个孩子真不诚实,明明没有讲完故事,还一定说讲完了.王小毛这个月的诚实小红花得不到了, 你们小组得第一也没希望了.’
我的故事讲完了.”

———————————————————————————–

讲故事的人说

1. 讲故事的用意

第一,这是一个故事,或者说是篇小说,我写,是因为它本身很有趣(有趣吗,我的读者们): 我的故事, 内容是我的同学王小毛讲故事,以及别人对它的故事的反应;

第二, 也许王小毛的遭遇,有点值得思考的地方, 例如: 王小毛也许很诚实,可惜老师不相信,而老师不相信又是有道理的–因为这样的故事通常有个好人好报的结局; 好人好报的故事固然老套且常常与事实不符,人们却更喜欢听;一个好人没有好报的故事固然新颖且更有事实依据, 人们却不喜欢听;一个孩子讲了一半好人好报的故事,却说讲完了, 这是撒谎; 这个孩子撒谎, 要好过他诚实地讲了一个好人没有好报的故事; 孩子讲好人没有好报的故事, 这是世界上极为可怕的事情,所以老师不愿意相信; 所以老师打心眼里相信,这个孩子说‘故事讲完了‘的时候撒了谎,而不是在说诚实话.

2. 忽悠

从现在开始,我要套一些后现代的理论来忽悠大家了:

后现代理论认为,真理在现代社会是被蒙蔽的;蒙蔽真理的,是一些为人们广为接受的宏大叙事,例如人类永无止境的进步,科学理论或者社会理论能解救人类脱离现在的苦海. 这些宏大叙事,有时候也被流行地称为“话语“, 把人们隔绝在远离真理的地方. 而当人们发现这些话语的欺骗性的时候,就是接近真理的开始–当然,发现这些话语的欺骗是极为困难的一件事,因为这些话语早在你开始学讲话之前就存在,你说话思考无一没有被它们影响甚至决定.

后现代不仅仅限于理论层面,而是人人都可以感受到的.利奥塔说,后现代是一种“状态“(mood),而不是一种与生活无关的高深理论.

在人人可以感受的层面,有些话语统治我们是如此的隐蔽和巩固,以致我们常常受到蒙蔽还不自知.王小毛的老师并不是故意不相信他的故事,而是真诚的不相信. 希望王小毛自己足够坚定,否则–恐怕常常就这样发生了–王小毛自己也会很快相信自己是没有讲完,对老师撒了谎.

3. 故事的寓意

如果王小毛的故事是讲完了, 无疑揭示了世界的荒谬. 为什么世界上有大儿子这样的坏人, 他们欺压好人却亨通兴旺? 为什么小儿子这样的好人却受苦? 这个世界有没有正义可言? 如果没有,我们活在这个世界上还有盼头吗? 如果有,我们可以盼什么?是自己也变成大儿子那样吗? 如果没有盼头,我们还有什么理由活在这个世界上?

加缪说,自杀是哲学的唯一问题. 我的解读,就是一个人得回答上面这些问题,才有理由继续活下去.

The best memory of Off-Broadway show is A Stone Carver.

The son of an old stone carver, a recent local political star, has to persuade his stubborn father move out of the old house for the new free way. The old man refuses to talk to anyone about moving out from the house, which is built by him and bears the memory of his late wife. The son brought with his girlfriend back the house in the last day to have the last try.

The people in this show are amazing. The old father, especially, plays very convincingly. His love for the late wife and his family, though hard to understand by people from outside, is genuine, deep and touching.

2. movies

Besides Cars, I like a movie from free screening whose name I do not remember.

The story is about a young man commits suicide and enters into a suicide people’s world. To his disapointment, it is as dull as the world he is coming from. He works as a pizza boy during the day. At night he goes to bar, only talking to people about differnent types of suicide. Fantasying his girlfriend becomes his only comfort.

One day he feels that she is coming to the same world and then decides to venture out to find her. So he begins the journy with a friend. They meet a girl looking for “the man in charge” during the trip, and have her join them. The young man falls in love with the girl after spending so much time together and finding her virtues.

After several days of road trip, they meet an old man drunk on the road. The old man takes them to his camp, where miracles happen everyday. The young man find his girl friend during staying in the camp, when she comes with her spiritual tutor. He goes to her but she does not care. She believes in the spiritual guy, follows him jumping from a high wall, and dies.

The young man feels sad. What’s more, the girl looking for “the man in charge” left him mysteriously. He is left alone in this world. But he suddenly finds the old man is “the man in charge”, who helps the young man go back to the world.

When he wakes up in the hospital, he finds the girl looking for “the man in charge” with him in the suicide world is in the same room with him.

The movie’s style is similar to Big Fish: fascinating and fun. Obviously this one has a broader coverate of subjects such as the meaning life, love, and seeking a spiritual satisfaction, which provide it the potential to be a big hit in the future.

Here is a NewYorkTime Review:

“Generally considered one of the funniest American plays of the 1930’s, Room Service centers around a slippery theatrical producer, trying to find a backer for his new show while holed up in a Times Square hotel with nineteen starving actors. Hoping to forestall eviction, he convinces the show’s gullible young playwright to fake his own death.”

Another story about greed, but way more funny than Burley Grum. Written in 1930s, a time of depression, it bears an obvious feature of satire and ambitiousness. It seems to me people back at that time were ready to laugh when they see the plots of some clever guy are hatched and turn out to be very successful.

Today’s Show: Wedding Singer

Here is a review that attracted my interest to see it.

The music in the movie was a terrific collection of 80s songs. The music for the show is original to the musical except for Somebody Kill Me and Grow Old With You (which were written by Adam Sandler and Tim Herligy for the movie). However the original music stays true to the sound of the 80s and the lyrics are fun. (At intermission I went to the lobby to buy the soundtrack, but it hasn’t been recorded yet. They are playing to record it in the next few months.)