| Summary: |
Comedy film in the early Mao era is a site of negotiation and contestation. The ephemeral presence of satirical comedies in the Hundred Flowers period (1956–1957) and the long–awaited reemergence of the genre, albeit in the form of eulogistic comedies, in the early 1960s bespeak at once the challenge of producing sociopolitically appropriate laughter and the unceasing popular yearning for it. Recent studies have explored the determinants of laughter’s tortuous path to screen by paying great attention to the varied kinds of conflict and negotiation among film artists, audiences, critics, cultural administrators, and party authorities.¹ They have also...
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