Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2015. xvi, 335 pp. (Illustrations.) US$70.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-520-28384-8.
Christopher Rea’s new book, The Age of Irreverence, is an extensively researched study of laughter in a modernizing China. While noting roots even further back in history, Rea focuses on the transition and development laughter underwent that he argues began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the first several decades of the twentieth century with the establishment and flourishing of a modern print industry and culture. Beginning with the late Qing and extending to the beginning of open warfare between China and Japan in 1937, Rea describes his notion of laughter as, “denot[ing] a broad spectrum of attitudes and behaviors ranging from amusement to buffoonery to derision” (4). He continues, “The comic cultures of this historical period, I argue, were too heterogeneous to be reducible to a cozy sense of humor defined by ethnicity or nationality. They crossed barriers between high and low, Chinese and foreign, and between genres and modes of production as well” (14). The body of Rea’s study is split into five expansive chapters titled “Jokes,” “Play,” “Mockery,” “Farce,” and “The Invention of Humor.” These chapter headings are also the main analytical categories Rea deploys in his work. Though there is a certain amount of unavoidable overlap between these categories, these distinctions, and perhaps more interesting, the tensions developed between and among them, prove quite useful in elaborating the fertile ground Rea has marked out for his New History of Laughter.
Given the scope and limits of this review, I think it impossible to give a full account of Rea’s achievement in this book, even in summary. Instead, I will provide a mere skeleton in order to leave space for assessment. In a day and age in which publishers and authors frequently produce slim volumes of 150–200 pages, Rea’s book clocks in at 335 pages. I am the last to suggest that length alone is a sign of achievement; however, the weight of the work lies in the extent of the research Rea conducted in order to write this book. Again and again, Rea’s notes cite original publication of works in journals or newspapers and contrast this to one or multiple full-volume editions of the particular work in question (I have to admit, I also burst out laughing when I encountered the “bonus endnote,” number 95 on page 251). Clearly he has devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy into locating and consulting these various sources. Indeed, Rea’s text proper ends on page 165. Fully one-half of the book is end matter, including two very informative appendixes, meticulous notes, glossary, and bibliography. In truth, this is both strength and weakness: Rea’s extensive research is simultaneously exhaustive and exhausting. Yet, the scale of the research displayed in this book will certainly make this the first source any scholar wishing to approach this subject, or one related to it, will reach for.
Likewise, Rea’s close attention to the ways that print media industrial practices influence and inform the cultural practices of laughter is particularly useful. The modality of short forms, such as jokes or anecdotes, match the need for “copy” in journals and newspapers that have a uniform size but inconsistent amounts of articles, advertisements, announcements and so forth, and Rea argues this led to a demand for these genres. This demand, in turn, led to the generic development of literary modes—humor, farce, and so on—which in one way or another were intended to induce laughter. Thus, the overall orientation of the study is towards a chronological development of laughter in modernizing China. He begins then in the late Qing with familiar names such as Wu Jianren and Liang Qichao and gradually proceeds to the 1920s and 1930s to other familiar names such as Lao She and Lin Yutang. Lu Xun, and to a lesser extent Zhou Zuoren, are touchstones throughout the book, constantly invoked as backdrop but rarely if ever the focus of Rea’s attention. Against and alongside these canonical names, Rea places the entertainment industrial complex, including for example the ha-ha mirror of Shanghai’s The Great World amusement park and the fiction of Xu Zhuodai. These groups, so often understood separately in terms of canonicity/non-canonicity, are interlocked in Rea’s discussion, both in terms of their practice of humorous writing and in their arguments concerning humor’s purpose. I have not even broached the subject of Chinese-English or English-Chinese translation of humor that Rea discusses in some detail. There are any number of such contrasts and reshuffling of the standard groupings in our understanding of modern China, and especially in modern Chinese literature, that Rea enacts in his book. And these are the study’s biggest contribution to our understanding of the dynamics involved in China’s modernization.
What Rea does not give his readers, however, is any significant theorizing of the consequences that stem from regrouping the players in China’s cultural modernization in the ways he does in this book. The Age of Irreverence clearly demonstrates that these discourses, in all their various forms, on laughter and humor existed in the period from the late Qing, through the early Republic, and on into the years leading up to the war. What conclusions to draw form the recognition of these discourses is largely left up to the reader. This begs an obvious question: how large or small was the impact of these discourses of humor and laughter on the trajectory of modern China’s development, culturally, politically, aesthetically or in any other way? This question (or others) will have to wait for further analysis before we can address it.
As a side note, as I read the book (in late 2016 and into early 2017) I was reminded over and over of parallels to contemporary American society. Whether it be the alt-right insults of cuck or libtard, or the mockery and farce of liberal comedians such as Jon Stewart, we can find precedents in Rea’s study. The dynamics of this contemporary discourse often seem to mirror that of China a century ago. A theorization of humor’s social and political effects could prove most useful in this regard, so that these tools may be taken up strategically rather than merely haphazardly.
Andrew Stuckey
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
pp. 800-802