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Christopher Rea. The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China. Nonfiction. Oakland. University of California Press. 2015. 335 pages. $70.00 USD. ISBN 9780520283848
There is no mercy when it comes to readers' expectations of academic books: When we read about painful subjects, we brace ourselves for discomfiture, but still resent a surfeit of gut-wrenching details as sensationalism. When the subject is humorous or sexy, however, we demand the text live up to its theme, expecting to be amused and titillated as well as edified. Christopher Rea's concise history of Chinese humor valiantly meets the latter expectations, nonchalantly kicking aside the old saw that humor cannot be translated across cultures. The tale he tells, with a prodigious vocabulary, nimble prose, encyclopedic erudition, and consummate wit, is one of translingual practice, commercial savvy, intellectual position-taking, and ideological crossfire, eliciting chuckles from the reader along the way but permitting no one to walk away thinking that laughter in China was ever merely a laughing matter.
The "protagonists," as Rea calls them,...