A recent news story reported the alarming news that the Chinese
government has banned puns in radio, TV, and films. The rationale is that
wordplay makes promoting cultural heritage more difficult and tends to mislead
people, especially children. A recent directive decreed, “Radio and television
authorities at all levels must tighten up their regulations and crack down on
the irregular and inaccurate use of the Chinese language, especially the misuse
of idioms.” Altering accepted patterns of speech risks “cultural and linguistic
chaos,” the Word Nazis have decreed.
The director of Chinese Studies at Beijing Capital Normal University,
whose name, curiously enough, is David Moser, says that wordplay is part and
parcel of Chinese heritage. He points out, for example, the traditional wedding
gift of dates and peanuts stems from the fact that the Chinese words for these
foods—zao and huasheng—are homophones for the phrase Zaosheng guizi, which means “May you soon give birth to a son.”
Moser faults whoever gave this order as “conservative, humorless,
priggish, and arbitrarily purist.” He suspects the real reason behind the
ruling is to prevent jokes about government officials, which often rely on
puns for their humor. One recent example plays on the nicknames of President Xi
Jinping and first lady Peng Liyuan to come up with the word for
“marijuana.” In another political
example Mao Zedong’s phrase “Serve the people” has been transformed into “Smog
the people,” using two words that are homophones.
One rather naughty example of a political Chinese pun is the phrase “grass
mud horse,” an anti-censorship symbol that has become a widely popular Internet
meme. It is usually represented by an alpaca as the mascot for citizens
fighting for free expression. In Mandarin Chinese the phrase “grass mud horse”
sounds very much like the phrase “fuck your mother.”
The Bard of Buffalo Bayou is an inveterate punster—everything he
writes is inverse.
The
Chinese all run from a pun,
So
this question is one they must shun;
It’s
a terrible quandary
Much
too double-entendre-y:
Who
came out? The sun or the son?
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