Professor Xiao RAO’s Talk about Literary Jokes in Song “Remarks on Poetry”
On November 18, 2024, Dr. Xiao RAO, Assistant Professor of Chinese in the School of Humanities at the University of California Irvine, gave a talk in the CAS Seminar Series on literary jokes in Chinese “Remarks on Poetry,” a poetological genre that emerged in the Song dynasty (10th to 13th century). The talk explored the place of humor in Middle Period Chinese literary criticism by focusing on a dozen humorous anecdotes selected from “remarks on poetry” (shihua?诗话), a loosely defined and late-developing subset of Middle Period Chinese anecdotal jottings about poetry. These anecdotes, which feature puns, twisted interpretations, or outright nonsensical verses, are conceptually linked to an important notion in Chinese literary criticism known as “Poetic Defects” (shibing诗病). Initially used to describe shortcomings in a set of prosodic rules, the term “defect” (bing?病) expanded during the Tang-Song period to encompass a broader range of poetic aspects. Probing this relation between humor and poetic defects, Dr. Rao’s talk demonstrated how humor was deployed by Song literati to critique those poetic values and practices that were considered problematic during the period of an expanded literati class and the vernacularizing of elite culture. The talk was also a fascinating dive into theories of humor and laughter, which are relevant in many areas of scholarship, also outside of Asian studies. Apart from its purely intellectual merits, the talk was also lively and fun, not least because Dr. Rao managed to create laughter in the room, using elements of audience-participation to test everyone’s grasp of jokes and cultural knowledge. I felt that the audience, mostly consisting of undergraduate and graduate students, loved the talk and took a way many important pieces of knowledge about a range of subjects as well as inspiration.?