‘Who’s on First?’ Finds a Home in Chinese Clubs
By BENJAMIN HAAS
Published: March 2, 2011
BEIJING — Guo Degang, wearing sunglasses at night, strutted into the club followed by an entourage of sharply dressed men and was shown to an elegant private dining room in the back. He sat down and held court as friends from out of town presented him with gifts of liquor, rare mushrooms and artwork.
It could have been a scene out of a Chinese version of “The Godfather,” but Mr. Guo is more Ricky Gervais than Don Corleone.
He is a comedian who specializes in a traditional form of performance comedy called cross talk that has undergone a revival recently, largely because of Mr. Guo’s antics. Chinese media have dubbed him “the savior of cross talk” for attracting young and middle-aged audience members to the aging cross talk crowd.
But while the rejuvenated art form has been promoted by the government on some heavily watched television programs, subversive comedians sometimes use it to throw barbs at Chinese politics and society. Mr. Guo, a doughy-faced 37-year-old with a closely shaved head, is seen as a people’s hero for his populist humor, which skewers the police, bureaucrats and celebrities.
“I’m excited to say some things that weren’t allowed on the radio, that television stations wouldn’t air,” was how Mr. Guo began one show in a teahouse, followed by a hearty round of applause.
“Cops beat people just to beat them, yell at people just to yell at them, more viciously than any hoodlum,” he continued. “Meanwhile, gangsters are polite. They’ll help you when you need it. So, who’s the gangster and who’s the cop?”
The Chinese word for cross talk is “xiangsheng,” literally “face and voice.” The art form began during the Qing Dynasty in Beijing as street art. Jokes dealt with familiar themes: troublesome in-laws, regional stereotypes and impersonations. Creative puns were the norm.
Performed in teahouses throughout northern China, it usually consists of two performers dressed in traditional garb engaging in witty banter. Think Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s On First?” One example is a dialogue between a theater director working in Europe and an old friend. The director’s play is about “the three kingdoms,” or in his mind, France, Germany and Italy. But the friend understands it to mean the Three Kingdoms period of Chinese history. Confusion ensues, and audiences laugh.
Throughout cross talk’s history, performers have come from humble backgrounds. Aspiring comedians from poor families studied under a master for three years and performed with the teacher for one season before striking out on their own.
Mr. Guo seems to fit this mold. He started studying cross talk at age 7 and never finished junior high school. In 1995, he left his hometown of Tianjin to open his first club in Beijing.
In recent years, Mr. Guo’s popularity has exploded, and he leads more of a movie-star life than most of his peers. He has opened two more restaurant clubs in Beijing and has appeared in several blockbuster Chinese movies. From his cross talk shows alone, his income last year was estimated to exceed 20 million renminbi, or about $3 million.
But masters like Ding Guangquan, 76, who has appeared on China Central Television’s Lunar New Year gala — the most watched event of the Chinese television calendar — see cross talk increasingly marginalized by political controls and the Internet. Other cross talk elders say the money associated with the form’s popularity has commercialized the shows, watering down the traditional wit.
At the height of the Cultural Revolution, cross talk was exclusively used as a propaganda tool.
“You can’t laugh at how wonderful Chairman Mao is,” said David Moser, academic director of the CET Beijing Chinese Studies program in Beijing, who wrote his master’s thesis at the University of Michigan on cross talk and has been performing on and off for 20 years. “But there was a technique throughout the whole Mao period called ‘putting on the hat and shoes,’ where you start the piece with some revolutionary praising of the party, then you do business as usual, and then at the end you stick on something” revolutionary.
When the Cultural Revolution ended, cross talk performers immediately criticized the Gang of Four, releasing years of pent-up political frustration. But a brief period of openness was quickly quashed.
Today, cross talk topics as innocuous as Beijing’s notoriously congested traffic are forbidden on TV or radio.
“There are a lot of jokes about fake products and tainted food, but none of it gets put on the Internet,” lamented Chu Yang, 31, an avid cross talk fan who travels to Tianjin to see more provocative performances. “If those were put up, everyone would watch them and the videos would get removed immediately.”
Even traditionalists like Mr. Ding, who has been performing for nearly 40 years, acknowledged that cross talk faced fierce competition from online entertainment. The anonymity of the Internet means political humor posted on a blog is far more candid than a cross talk routine.
In recent years, several prominent celebrities have bemoaned cross talk’s decline because of censorship. Mark “Dashan” Rowswell, a Canadian television celebrity in China who gained fame through cross talk, rarely performs anymore. In a 2005 interview with the Chongqing Evening News, Mr. Rowswell said cross talk had become too scripted and had lost its way since going from street art to television spectacle.
Last year, Han Han, China’s most popular blogger and an outspoken critic of the government, declared “cross talk has been utterly destroyed” in a since deleted blog post about the political correctness of the televised New Year’s show.
Even Mr. Guo’s immense popularity could not shield him after one of his assistants got in a brawl with a Beijing television reporter last summer.
As retribution, China Central Television used a government campaign intended to stamp out “vulgarity” in the entertainment industry to highlight some of Mr. Guo’s more lewd jokes. His clubs were temporarily closed and his books and CDs were whisked off bookstore shelves.
Just as the advent of movies greatly contributed to vaudeville’s decline in the 1930s, Chinese people’s access to more outspoken forms of entertainment may one day relegate cross talk to the status of obscure folk art.
“Before, cross talk was a way to communicate with people, to educate people,” Mr. Ding said. “It had to be as good as listening to the radio or reading a book. But today, those performing cross talk are just doing it for the money.”作者: 陈章鱼 时间: 2011-3-3 17:10:39
“Before, cross talk was a way to communicate with people, to educate people,” Mr. Ding said. “It had to be as good as listening to the radio or reading a book. But today, those performing cross talk are just doing it for the money.”
在中国北方各地的茶馆里，我们都能欣赏到相声表演。通常是两名相声演员，身着传统的长袍马褂，极尽诙谐逗乐之能事。就好像是艾博特（Abbott）和考斯坦罗（Costello）的美国相声节目“谁在一垒？”（Who's on First?）其中有个例子就是一位在欧洲工作的戏剧导演及其朋友之间的一段对话。这位导演的戏剧讲述的是“三国”的故事，在他的思维中，这三国是指法国、德国、意大利。而他的朋友却理解为中国历史上的三国时期。于是，两人的对话中混乱迭生，各说各话，观众爆发出阵阵欢笑。
莫大伟（David Moser）是CET北京中国研究项目（CET Beijing Chinese Studies）的学术负责人，该项目在北京开展。他告诉我们，“当台上的演员颂扬毛主席有多么多么伟大时，这时是不能笑的，不过在整个毛泽东时代都流行这样一种做法，叫做‘穿靴戴帽’，就是说在写文章或讲话前，要硬加进一些对党和领导人的革命性歌颂之辞，然后就和平常一样该干什么干什么，等到结束的时候，要再次表明你的革命立场，首尾呼应。”莫大伟在密歇根大学完成了以相声为主题的硕士论文，20年来，他一直在断断续续地进行相声表演。
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