I'm afraid I lapsed in my adherence to the 'Four Noes' campaign after just a few days - although only on one element: I watched part of CCTV's notorious Spring Festival Gala last night (in a favourite neighbourhood music bar called Jiangjinjiu), although I didn't listen to it (the sound was turned right down, and completely drowned out by all the fireworks exploding in the square outside), or contribute to it (I have been in the audience a few times - but that will have to stop!). Whoops - I suppose I have just broken another of the commandments by talking about it on here.
I can't help feeling that it was a tactical blunder by the promoters of this 'Boycott CCTV' initiative to launch their crusade just before the Spring Festival. CCTV's annual special (first broadcast on New Year's Eve, but then extensively repeated, in part or whole, throughout the remainder of the two weeks of holidays that follow), a cheesy variety show of truly epic proportions (cast of thousands, 4 or 5 hours long, and apt to seem longer), is the biggest TV event in the world - watched, for at least part of the evening, by just about everyone in the country who has access to a television. The advertising slots are regarded as gold dust by manufacturers, and are allocated in a blind auction which generates enough cash to keep the network going for most of the year.
Trying to figure out what's going on with my negligible Chinese can be quite a challenge (the 'international' channel CCTV9 shows a version with English subtitles, but no-one's ever showing that; although last year I did catch quite a bit of it on the other international channel - a French/Spanish service that I can't get on my TV, and whose channel number I therefore forget - with Spanish subtitles..... which worked a little better for me than Chinese, at least). Without any sound at all, the experience becomes positively surreal.
I was particularly fascinated/horrified last night by a long comedy skit that came on shortly before 11.30, in which one of the characters was a screamingly camp waiter wearing a kilt!! I can't even begin to imagine what that was all about. I'm hoping one of my fluent-in-Chinese buddies will enlighten me in the next few days. It appeared to be simply about deriding homosexuals - a rather too common vein in Chinese humour, I fear. And yet the theatrical effeminacy of this comedian was really not so very much more pronounced than the behaviour I see from a lot of supposedly straight Chinese men. I mean, even that Wen Jiabao is rather exaggeratedly fastidious in his movements sometimes, rather elaborately dainty.... And he's definitely at the more macho end of what I'm thinking about! Some Chinese men really are as camp as a row of tents.
I'd better stop now - before I get my visa revoked.
4 comments:
His name is Xiao Shenyang (or as he says: "My Chinese name is Shenyang, my English name is Shenyaaanngr!) and his schtick is a kind of unholy mix of Sammy Davis' singing and impersonation skills with Jerry Lewis' awkward comic dopiness and a disturbing dash of Pee Wee Herman. The mincing thing is a bit much, but it's a key part of his stage persona.
It's actually all a bit different from the usual interchangeable comics who do these shows that I almost look forward to him when he's on. For what it's worth, he's one of YJ's favorites, and she's not easily impressed by anything on CCTV.
So, no gay jokes as such? Just a very camp persona obliquely inviting derision of gays?
I went to see the play Cesuo some years ago, with a view to possibly recommending it to some friends who were looking for some 'accessible' contemporary Chinese theatre to bring to Europe. It seemed quite promising in its conceit of using a public toilet as a microcosm of society, and drawing a parallel between the evolution of swanker, more hygienic toilets and the development of the economy and society in general. Great sets, too (the final scene envisaged a near future in which everyone would have their own Western-style 'throne' toilets at home: a cast of three dozen all sat on toilets on stage!). Unfortunately, there was no story to speak of, and the humour was very broad. One especially distressing running 'joke' involved a flamingly camp would-be transsexual who was not welcome in either the male or female side of the toilet, repeatedly abused and ridiculed by everyone. Shenyang's shtick reminded me rather of that.
B tells me Zhao Benshan played an uncommonly diminished role in this skit because he couldn't get any of his material past the censors.
And what was the thing with the kilt???
I hear you about the unsubtle nature of much Chinese humor. But if someone in China thinks that a non-gay person mocking homosexuality is funny (or to have a laowai to stupid things to the amusement of a studio audience) I suppose you could always use the nuclear option and show them Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast at Tiffany's" while lecturing them about why this sort of thing is NOT funny....
Maybe it's a movie your stylish lady lawyer friends might like to watch with popcorn..
Back in town tonight, plans?
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