Zhao Benshan

In “Uncle Niu Promoted” (“Niu dashu tigan” 牛大叔提干, 1995), scripted by Cui Kai, Zhao plays Uncle Niu, who is sent by a poverty-stricken village school to a local
government-sponsored company seeking some funding. He is temporarily “promoted” to
fill in for the company manager, who has been hospitalized because of a stomach
problem stemming from endlessly attending business banquets.

Preparing for the guests’ arrival, Uncle Niu practices a toast, reading a text written by the manager’s secretary. But what the audience hears is just a stream of toned utterances except for some filtered words: “zhe ge . . . a, wo shuo . . . a” 这个 ….啊，我说… 啊 (well . . . a, I say . . . a).

Taken in isolation, the intonation itself would be empty and unintelligible. But here in the
extraverbal context, the audience bursts into laughter hearing the illiterate Uncle Niu
parodying the stereotyped, tedious, and overbearing tonal speech pattern of party cadres
and officials. The politically and culturally inferior addressee’s rendition of the superior
addresser’s intonation becomes a meaningful locution because of the performer’s and the
audience’s shared “knowledge and social evaluation of the situation.” What is said is
determined by what is unsaid; at the same time, what is said anticipates what is unsaid.

Zhao Lirong

“A Day in the Life of the Hero’s Mother” (“Yingxiong muqin de yitian” 英雄母亲的一天, 1989), scripted by Shi Lin and Zang Li, manifests the folkloric subversion enacted by local dialects against the official discourse represented by Putonghua. In this sketch, Zhao Lirong plays an ordinary rural old woman speaking Hebei Tangshan Mandarin.

Director Hou reads the bombastic and grandiose conception for shooting the documentary from his folder:

Through you, we want to set up a glorious image of a hero’s mother. Through you, we want to capture the spiritual perspective and the characteristics of the time period of women in the 80s; through you, we will track how the hero grows up; through you, we also want to reflect the aesthetic pursuits of Chinese women.

The subgenre of the “model-setup” has been an entrenched propaganda technique since the Maoist era. In it, the grand, ideal, abstract ideology is materialized and personalized by a concrete, real human body. In this sketch, the director, or the party, the authority, attempts to materialize Zhao’s body and to have her project the morality of a hero’s mother in the 1980s: an educated, urban, fashionable, and extraordinary woman with a positive outlook on life. However, Hou’s attempt at materializing the ideal is thwarted by Zhao’s materialization working in the opposite direction, that is, toward degradation and debasement, the essential principle of Bakhtin’s grotesque realism. At every turn, Hou’s sublime, ideal, spiritual, and grand message is lowered by Zhao’s flippant and vulgar utterances.

Hou: What do you do when you get up every morning?

Zhao: When I wake up every morning? There’s so much, especially in the morning.  When I finish this task, there’s that-

Hou: No, no. I mean, the FIRST thing?

Zhao: The first thing? Can I say anything?

Hou: Say whatever you’d like.

Zhao: The first thing is to GO TO THE TOILET.

Her response deflates the director’s expectation of something lofty or unique, and lowers the interview to quotidian, bodily functions such as excretion.

The sketch “A Day in the Life of the Hero’s Mother” makes frequent use of punning. For example, Hou’s identity as a daoyan 导演 (director), a prestigious job title, is degraded by Zhao as daoye 倒爷, a derogatory word for black marketeer/profiteer. The same holds true for punning on the abstract professional jargon term gousi 构思 (conception) with the word for the concrete, everyday food doufusi 豆腐丝 (sliced tofu), on jikuair 几块儿 (several episodes) with jikuair 几块儿 (several chunks of tofu), and on xiayige danyuan 下一个单元 (the next unit of camera shots) with xiayige danyuan 下一个单元 (a downstairs unit of a building), and so forth.