Introduction

In the era of social media, people who were formerly passive receivers of mass media messages have become active creators and disseminators of content in line with their needs and interests (Chen and Gao, 2023; Lee, 2014). A desire for autonomy and freedom of speech, as well as dissenting views toward public affairs, commonly emerge on social media platforms. Satire is a cultural artifact in the era of social media, and its importance is reflected both in the large number of people who use satire and in how it generates continuous pressure on authority figures. By overturning state-sponsored discursive conventions, netizens poke fun at and ridicule politics and social issues, providing alternative portrayals of reality that mass media seldom report (Luqiu, 2017).

In a Western context, satire is normally defined as “a sub-genre of humor, which always has an element of social critique (Gray et al., 2009, p. 8).” Satire has often been regarded as deriving entertainment from politics. In the Chinese context, the subversive aspect of satire has been examined in research analyzing satire’s political implications for democratization and regime change (Link and Qiang, 2013; Luqiu, 2017; Shifman, 2013). Those who operationalize satire to resist current power dynamics are being strategic in their approach to expressing dissent, however. Rather than expecting the fall of the ruling party, people express dissent in a safe means (Lee, 2016; Yang and Jiang, 2015). Not all subversive satire can be appreciated and shared, and not all things can be joked about. Hence, the exploration of satirists’ motivation and how that motivation is manifested in a satire script is beneficial to understanding how a critical linguistic form can survive in a culturally and politically conservative environment.

Contrary to the popular empowerment approach that mostly focuses on the effects of satire on political engagement, this paper adopts a meta-discursive approach by analyzing the inherent motivations and reference frames behind the use of satire in the context of stand-up comedy in China. Stand-up comedy is usually informal and infused with dark humor and satire. The comedian takes a particular position in their interpretation of stories and privileges that position by satirizing behaviors and attitudes they disapprove of. The popularity of stand-up comedy in China is closely related to the variety shows Rock&Roast and Roast! (Chen and Gao, 2023). Social issues such as gender equality, employment contradiction, and urban–rural gap touched upon in the programs have become trending topics. For a time, it has been a craze for digital natives to express their authentic voices and engage in public discussions in a playful way.

Drawing on the satire scripts from 33 stand-up comedians and interviews with them, I employed the methods of computer-aided topic modeling, discursive historical analysis and semi-structured interviews to answer two questions: (1) What are the features of Chinese satire genre in the era of social media? (2) What reference frames and motives contribute to the formation of generic features in satire and the way how satirists use satire in the era of social media? Situated in the context of stand-up comedy in China, I found that most of current satires are created by drawing on micropolitical issues related to daily life. The formation of attitudes towards these issues and satirical targets derives from the satirist’s aversion to hypocrisy, the release of past pain, and the performative presentation of morality. Relief, kynicism, and symbolism anchor the motivation of choosing satire as a way of public communication. Thus, creating and employing satire reflects a form of meta-discursive adaptive agency. In the following sections, I first present the theoretical foundations of this argument and then present supporting empirical data.

Literature review

The motives of satire creation and consumption

While previous studies (Chen et al., 2017; Lee and Kwak, 2014) on satire’s role in public discussion have often focused on satire’s content and impact, understanding satirists’ motivations for creating satire as well as their opinions has become a popular research thread in recent years (Koivukoski and Ödmark, 2020; Nicolaï et al., 2022; Ödmark and Harvard, 2021). Scholars (Lichtenstein et al., 2021) are particularly interested in whether the creation and consumption of satire originate from a desire to promote democracy and political engagement. The findings of past studies can be divided into five lines: relief, cynicism, activism, ritual, and symbolism.

The first line of the relief view assumes that satire consumption comes from a desire for comic relief. In Bergson’s (2014) view, satire endows social life with elasticity. Individuals need to remain restrained and elastic to adapt to and cope with unpleasantness and accidents in regular life. If people lack elasticity and the ability to self-adjustment, they may go insane or begin to hate everything around them. Bakhtin’s (1984) carnivalesque theory also argues that laughter is the embodiment of innocence and wildness in human nature. People need a moment of carnivalization when laws, bans, and restrictions that determine the rules and order of daily life are temporarily suspended. When the power distance between people is diminished, people do not need to be as serious and rigid as usual. Although satirists translate their irritation and resentment into satire, the entertainment, carnivalesque and frivolous elements of satire water down the extent of the grievances and provide the pleasure that can substitute for the pleasure that would be attained by solving the problem (Boukes et al., 2015; Day, 2011; Wang and Shen, 2017).

The cynicism view refers to a pessimistic approach to satire creation. Cynicism is characterized by low trust, helplessness, and non-participation that deteriorate one’s sense of social reality and political efficacy and that present escape as a solution (Shao and Liu, 2019). Satirists who have a low level of political trust show their distrust in the current sociopolitical system by exaggerating the negative aspects of social life, as opposed to using satire to entertain (Morris, 2009; Towner and Dulio, 2011). This results in so-called “pseudo-satire” that comments on politics and politicians based on apolitical criteria without arguments (Lichtenstein et al., 2021). While cynicism has a nihilistic nature, Sloterdijk (1988) argued that being apolitical and critical does not necessarily include a loss of beliefs and no hope for change. Instead, Sloterdijk (1988) proposed a similar notion, “kynicism,” to argue that kynics and cynics both question the sincerity of everything, but the former expresses doubts in a constructive manner and remains hopeful for positive change.

Opponents of the above views believe in an activism view that satire-making originates from a higher level of willingness to engage in public affairs (Shao and Liu, 2019). Firstly, the humorous elements embedded in the satire can render a serious political discussion more attractive (Lee, 2014; Shifman, 2013). Satirists’ interests in serious topics could be activated by popular culture forms. Secondly, users usually hold negative views of satirical targets before satirizing them (Lee and Kwak, 2014; Chen et al., 2017). Negative emotions such as anger make satirists aware that things are not as expected and urge them to react quickly. Thus, comedians often use satire for emancipatory purposes, grooming a more informed audience and offering a critical public discussion that resists oppressors and subverts naturalized meanings and privileges (Griffin, 1994; Higgie, 2014; Kramer, 2013; Rossing, 2016). However, the activism orientation does not necessarily make satirists willing to take on missionary or interventionist roles. Rather, satirists would describe themselves as “eye-openers and questioners” (Ödmark and Harvard, 2021) who aim to problematize social norms rather than initiate a specific agenda or campaign (Koivukoski and Ödmark, 2020; Lichtenstein et al., 2021).

While the above three propositions are largely based on motives of political opposition and repression, satire creation also has a social- or ritual-oriented side (e.g. social interaction through the discussion of satire), although ritual orientations can be appropriated for political purposes (Yang and Jiang, 2015). The ritual view regards communication as a collaborative practice of sharing, connecting, engaging, and possessing common beliefs. For those who share similar experiences, knowledge, and sense of humor, their interpretation of satire elicits a similar emotional response: laughter (Yates and Hasmath, 2017; Zekavat, 2017). Satire can act as a link between isolated individuals. The networked production and circulation of satire are not merely a practice of sharing similar ideologies or resentments; they also cultivate a sense of co-presence and collective life (Meng, 2011; Yang and Jiang, 2015; Yang et al., 2015; Fang, 2020). The act of “gathering together” has been more essential than the content that has been created and shared. As such, constructions of group identity, group solidarity, and in-/out-group exclusion are among the core objectives of satire-making and promise to facilitate a process of “pre-politization” by carving out spaces for new identity formations and promoting awareness among the public (Reilly and Boler, 2014; Marzouki, 2015; Mortensen and Neumayer, 2021; Zeng and Abidin, 2021).

Extending the ritual view, Fang (2020) posited that the use of satirical memes has a symbolic purpose. Satirical memes offer creators and consumers an arena for showcasing their superiority either in skill, knowledge, or morality (Day, 2011). The practice of creating and sharing satire evolves into a competition based on the cultural capital one can mobilize. Specific cultural capital is also a prerequisite for certain esthetic and entertainment activities. Anyone who does not have the background knowledge of the satirized target may miss the point of the joke and thus cannot use the material in their online communication. In this sense, the ability to produce, decipher, understand, and enjoy satire is a new form of literacy that is correlated with education level and socio-economic status (Fang, 2020; Procházka, 2014).

Notably, satirists often do not produce satire for a single motive but rather have a variety of parallel and even contradictory reasons for their work. In several journalistic studies on satire, researchers (Brugman et al., 2021; Nicolaï et al., 2022) determined that satirists waver between traditional values of news professionalism and eye-catching infotainment genres. The integration of professionalism and carnivalesque formats reflects the emergence of a hybrid and neomodern reporting genre of “investigative comedy” (Nicolaï et al., 2022) or “journalistic news satire,” (Koivukoski and Ödmark, 2020) a genre that questions the status quo based on factuality in a productive but less serious manner. However, investigation of the motives behind satire creation mostly relies on a democratic-corporatist media system that emphasizes the media’s role in public service and promoting collective consensus. Few studies have shed light on how satirists from outside news organizations elucidate their rationales in a non-Western context. Given that the influencing factors of satire use are beyond individuals’ own motives and role orientations, analyzing the socio-political climate of Chinese society is necessary to understand Chinese satirists’ work. By considering the influence of Chinese cultural and historical context, I engage in a more comprehensive interpretation of both the literal and implied meanings that contemporary satire tries to convey. Moreover, including the historical perspective also illustrates why Chinese satirical culture differs from the satirical culture in other countries.

Satirical thoughts in Chinese culture

The creation and use of satire in the Chinese context are inextricably linked to a number of traditional cultural norms and philosophical thoughts. In Chinese culture, individuals must cultivate tolerance, wisdom, and open-mindedness (Lin, 1946; Yue, 2010). Per Confucianist beliefs, people must remain serious and elegant. Hence, people refrain from jokes and frivolous entertainment, and humor suggests indecency and may harm social relations (Chey, 2011, 2013). Chinese people are therefore cautious with telling jokes.

In Chinese culture, satire should involve insights, progressiveness, and consideration (Chey, 2011, 2013; Zhu, 2018). Satire should be tasteful and should not incorporate indecent or vulgar words, nor should it convey backward, decadent, or depraved thoughts. Hence, Chinese people attach great importance to the symbolic orientation of satire use. Compared with the meaning of satire and its effect of amusing others, it is equally important and valuable to reflect the wisdom, insight, concerns, and tastes of creators and audiences through satire. Satire creation and sharing are not done to show off or embarrass others but to make audiences aware of shortcomings in an implicit way. Even if it is critical in nature, the characters and plots in satirical settings are normally fictional and should avoid disrespecting others in public (Lian, 1988). Marginalized or respected groups, such as the disabled and parents, should not be satirized because this can offend the ethical concepts of fraternity and hierarchy that Chinese society upholds (Lin, 1946).

In addition, in Chinese culture, satire is the art of meticulously examining a situation (Wang, 2015). Among the earliest satirists in Chinese history were Pai You, or pantomime artists who performed jokes and comedic plays to amuse rulers and aristocrats. These artists were allowed to say politically delicate things as long as they could provoke laughter (Chen, 1985; Liao, 1998). However, most of the jokes were created based on a third-person perspective to entertain those in power, meaning that the primary audience of the jokes was the upper class. Satirists remained prejudiced against ordinary citizens who were uncivil and poorly behaved from the view of the superior. Satire called attention to the lives of ordinary people but also perpetuated a superiority complex by ridiculing them. Traditional satire in China not only constrained the subversion and destruction of satire but also consolidated existing sociopolitical norms. While satire can challenge some social norms, it can also strengthen others to avoid embarrassment or conflict.

Lastly, satirists have the agency to resist political and moral constraints, although resistance is not straightforward and demands creativity. An essential feature of satire is that it often elicits laughter through deviance from the orthodox aims of inspiration and political correctness (He, 1982; Lian, 1988; Yue, 2010). The satirist’s agency is traditionally legitimized by entertaining the audience and making people laugh. In most cases, satirists can simply adjust the setting and satirize politically sanctioned targets (e.g., capitalists in the Mao era) to meet the requirements of “healthy” jokes and educating the masses without changing the underlying structure of the work. In situations where restrictions on the freedom of speech are relatively loose, satirists could switch back to the original and politically unadulterated version of their work. The satirist’s agency combines individual tactfulness with satire’s reinterpretation and contextualization characteristics (Zhu, 2018). However, the flexible adjustment of satirical targets and the diversified styles of satire also mean that satirists have never formed stable values through satire creation.

Overall, the motives for the use of satire in Chinese and Western contexts are based on the assumption of context-of-satire. The context-of-satire attends to the environmental factors that affect satire production (Filani, 2015). It reflects the opportunities and constraints of audience composition, political systems, and cultural norms on satire creation and sharing. These environmental factors determine the knowledge satirists share with audiences and inform the inferences between the said and the unsaid. However, certain micro-level factors, such as the inherent features of the satire genre and an individual’s life experience and ability to gather and develop content, can also affect satire creation. Thus, my analysis focuses on the context-in-satire, that is, how satirists incorporate their perceptions of social events into their scripts according to the stylistic features of satire. The content of satire does not come from sudden flashes of inspiration but is grounded in submerged and invisible background experiences, emotional structures, and meaning networks that satirists have experienced. Adopting a process approach, I seek to clarify how the satirist’s cognition of cultural norms, policy regulations, and social issues combines with their production of satire content to better understand how context-of-satire and context-in-satire manifest in satire scripts in contemporary China.

Methods and data

I performed a discursive historical analysis (DHA) to examine the representation of the satirist’s and satirical targets’ identities and the discursive constructions of these identities. DHA is a type of critical discourse analysis that accounts for historical and socio-cultural contexts and macroscopic structure, as well as the particular discursive types and genres embedded in discursive events (Wodak, 2015). This approach is widely used to analyze the discursive construction of cultural identity and aims to explain “why certain interpretations of discursive events seem more valid than others.” (Wodak, 2015, p. 33) Critical discourse analysis assumes that discourse is an important way to maintain and reproduce unequal power relations. Hence, DHA explores how linguistic and semiotic practices reproduce and mediate ideology and “demystif[ies] the hegemony of specific discourses by deciphering the underlying ideologies,” (Wodak, 2015, p. 48) which is associated with my research aim of disclosing the underlying assumptions and motivations of satire use. In addition to the DHA, I also employed semi-structured interviews to cross-refer with the results of the textual analysis.

Participant recruitment and data collection

The data used to conduct the DHA comprised satire scripts collected from 33 satirists. The age range of the participants was between 20 and 50 years old, with over 70% being male. Most of the informants were aged 25–35 with bachelor’s degrees. They worked for private companies during the day and as part-time comedians at clubs at night. To distinguish between comedians and satirists, it is essential to “evaluate the intention” (Feinberg, 1967, p. 4) of their works. Greenberg (2018) indicated that whether laughter is considered a means or an end is the major distinction between comedy and satire. Laughter in satire is a means of pursuing greater goals. Comedians do not intend to direct public ire. Hence, only comedians who provoked laughter in order to lead audiences to critically reflect upon a public figure or an issue were recruited as satirists. From September 2020 to April 2021, I worked as a stand-up comedian in seven different comedy clubs in South China and became familiar with the informants. Upon my request, these satirists shared their scripts with me and approved the use of their intellectual property for this research. These satire scripts constitute the main materials for analyzing the features of satire in China.

The use of satire scripts as the object of textual analysis is mainly due to the following considerations. In previous studies (Chen and Gao, 2023; Yang and Jiang, 2015), most of the analyzed texts are secondary data collected from online forums, social media, and variety shows. These scripts are often the end products constituted after repeated revisions by show producers to the original scripts produced by satirists in order to cater to the audience’s preferences and the show’s objectives. Moreover, the mere analysis of the second-hand satire script de-contextualizes the text and ignored the nuances behind satire production. To gain a more complete understanding of the satire production process, I collected the original first-hand scripts created by satirists for textual analysis. Because these scripts have not been subsequently modified by show producers, the content in these scripts provides the closest access to the original ideas and motivations of the satirists. Further, by interviewing the satirists who created these scripts, I can situate the analyses of the satire contents in the scripts in the contexts that motivated the satirist to create the scripts to better examine the nuances underlying the political, cultural, and technological opportunities and constraints that satirists have encountered when producing their scripts.

The collection and screening of script data mainly went through two steps. In the first step, I asked all respondents to provide me with all scripts that can be called satire in their minds. Then, I manually screened the script data based on the conceptual and operationalized definition of satire. Conceptually, satire is a linguistic genre that exposes the weakness of society through provoking laughter (Gray et al., 2009). Operationally, satire achieves its moderate and implicit criticism through the use of linguistic devices and techniques such as irony, parody, and humor. I referred to the methods of detecting satire in the research of Chinese natural language processing (Liang et al., 2021; Tang and Chen, 2014), and summarized three operationalized indicators of satire: (1) the use of positive adjective/noun with high intensity in a negative context; (2) words or phrases that are recontextualized by making fun of the existing discourses; (3) words or phrases that reprimand someone by belittling, undervaluing, or disparaging the target, or are excessively self-deprecating. Any text that did not use the above linguistic devices to express some concern about social issues would be excluded from the corpus. When encountering the “points” that I can’t appreciate, I would look for informants for the core meanings of the scripts, so as to confirm whether the script ascribed to the scope of satire. The retained scripts after the manual screening were then used for data analysis.

Data analysis and analytical procedure

In applying DHA, I used natural language tools to aid my analysis. I examined how satirists perceived their satirical targets and what social realities are reflected from their scripts when referring to the target. My analysis took the following three steps: (1) exploring the key themes of discourses; (2) identifying the key actors and discursive strategies used; (3) analyzing the linguistic means in the discursive construction. I used computer-aided latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling to identify satire themes. LDA topic modeling was first proposed by Blei et al. (2003) and has been increasingly used to explore hidden thematic structures within a corpus of documents. Each file is a collection of various topics, and each topic is regarded as a collection of relevant words. Through the combination of documents, topics, and words, LDA extracts the topic distribution based on the possibility distribution (Jelodar et al., 2018; Ostrowski, 2015).

The advantage of LDA is that it can clearly give the probability that a word is associated with a certain topic, which is extremely helpful when interpreting words with various connotations. In carrying out the LDA topic modeling, I firstly removed the stop words and punctuation marks as these provide few insights into the content, and I implemented the tokenization process that divided the text into individual words. After the preliminary text processing, I manually examined the processing results to remove other English and Cantonese stop words that were not in the Chinese stop words dictionary, such as “anyway” and “嗨.” After the computer-aided preprocessing and manual screening, I performed a frequency analysis of the remaining words and the topic modeling by R.

My interpretation of the results is based on the three dimensions of the DHA: nomination, predication, and argumentation (Li and Song, 2019; Wodak, 2015; Xi et al., 2022). Nomination indicates how satirists and satirical targets are discursively constructed in the script. I identified nouns to explore the ways satirists labeled themselves and their satirical targets. Predication refers to the attitudinal and evaluative characteristics of a social actor. I isolated adverbs and adjectives used to portray satirists, satirical targets, and relevant others to explore satirists’ judgments of themselves and others. Argumentation indicates the means to legitimize a satirist’s judgment. I analyzed the underlying rationales and frames of reference when satirists rationalize their demonstrations and seek recognition. By examining the linguistic elements and the associated situational, cultural, and socio-political contexts, I strived to disclose the multifaceted categorization of actors that leads to opposition between satirists and satirical targets in satire scripts.

Finally, I performed 33 semi-structured interviews with the participants to better interpret the computer-aided DHA results and to explore the deeply rooted rationales and motives behind satire creation. Interviews were conducted either face-to-face or via WeChat phone calls in Chinese and were then transcribed into the same language before being translated into English. All interviewees were ensured anonymity. Consents to make audio recordings of our conversations were acquired from the respondents. In the interviews, I firstly asked general questions about satirists’ daily routines, work experience, and the perceived benefits and challenges of satire-making in China. Then, to explore participants’ satire scripts, other questions were asked regarding the satirists’ motives, rationales, and influencing factors. Each interview lasted between 40 and 150 min.

After transcribing and translating the interview materials, I conducted a two-step open and deductive coding process based on the transcripts (Saldaňa, 2009). The first step identified “facts” describing basic attitudes and behaviors that participants described having in the interviews. I selected words and phrases from the transcripts to illustrate what satirists have done, in which places, and with what moods and attitudes when producing satire. In the second step of the coding process, I paid attention to explanation and theorizing by critically examining and categorizing the first-order codes, referring to motives for satire creation in the literature, and exploring the assumptions of responses. The combination of secondary codes based on interviews and thematic modeling based on satire scripts helped unveil the origins of satirical thoughts and satirists’ schemata.

The features of satire in contemporary China

The results of the frequency analysis are presented in decreasing order in Fig. 1, with the highest frequency responses on the left. The word frequency results presented in Fig. 1 were truncated at a frequency of 20 occurrences due to space limitations. Then, to understand the background and values behind satire use, I analyzed the speech properties of high-frequency words.

Fig. 1: Frequent keywords.
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Highly frequent words in collected satire scripts.

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The data in Table 1 suggests that Chinese satire production has two major characteristics. Firstly, it is mostly depoliticized and is concerned with mundane everyday issues and topics. As shown in the nomination row, most of the protagonists involved in satire have nothing to do with macro-level actors such as the “country,” “nation,” or “political power.” Satirists appear to be more concerned about individual, family, or employment topics, such as gender issues (e.g., “girl”), parent-child relationships (e.g., “my mother”), and employer-employee relationships (e.g., “work”). By focusing on everyday topics, the probability of inadvertently crossing political red lines is greatly decreased because satirists avoid macro-level actors as the target of satire and are thus unlikely to be accused of threatening the legitimacy of the regime. Secondly, satire appears to be a channel for expressing complex emotions in China. Satire is employed to vent anger and to complain (e.g., “domineering”), but satire can also be used to convey positive emotions and expectations, such as being “considerate.”

Table 1 Top five most frequently used nouns and adjectives/adverbs.
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It is important to note that words may have different meanings in different contexts. In order to match the meaning of words with their corresponding context, I completed topic modeling. The first step of topic modeling is to determine the optimal number of topics in the corpus (Jelodar et al., 2018). I used the similarity coefficient score proposed by Cao et al. (2009) in my analysis as it is one of the most widely used criteria for analyzing Chinese texts (e.g., Wang et al., 2018). While varying the number of topics, Cao’s et al. (2009) team computed the similarities between pairs of topics over several instances of the model. Iterations were then conducted by varying the number of topics and estimating the Dirichlet distributions (Jelodar et al., 2018; Ostrowski, 2015). The optimal number of topics of a given dataset is acquired when the intra-topic similarity reaches its minimum score. As shown in Fig. 2, the smaller the score, the more optimal the number of topics. Figure 2 illustrates that dividing my textual data into 12, 4, or 15 topics produces the lowest coefficient scores. To strike a good balance between too few and too many topics, I finally divided the corpus into four topics as per Fig. 3, which also presents the high-frequency words of each topic.

Fig. 2: Optimal number of topics.
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Computing the optimal number of topics in topic modeling.

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Fig. 3: Topic modeling.
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Topic modeling of the collected satire scripts.

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In Fig. 3, the vertical axis represents the high-frequency nouns and adjectives in each topic, which are arranged from high to low frequency. The horizontal axis represents the correlation coefficient between words and the topic, which is determined by the distribution of a word across different topics. In Fig. 3, the appearance of high-frequency words such as “accent,” “Cantonese,” and “Andy Lau” (i.e., a Cantonese pop star) demonstrates that theme one is related to stereotypes of a specific region, including its language habits, perceptions of marriage, and fashion style. Satirists often tell stories that embarrass themselves because of prejudices and stereotypes that they have encountered. Theme two appears to reflect anger and annoyances in the working environment, as evidenced by high-frequency words such as “domineering,” “boss,” “stingy,” and “company.” The satire in theme three includes sexual imagery and innuendos, suggesting that the scripts involve encounters with “good-looking” girls in seedy entertainment places such as “massage” shops and “bars.” Theme four relates to emotional relationships with partners and family. Parents and male partners are often satirized as being “subjective”, dominating, and authoritative, whereas women are often characterized as weak victims, with satirists criticizing a feudal, patriarchal ideology such as son preference, unfair gender divisions of labor, and unequal status for women.

The distribution of satire themes and high-frequency words illustrates both compliance and deviation from traditional Chinese morality. The satire clearly has the purpose of providing entertainment. Elements that were regarded as inferior to folk cultures in Chinese thoughts (Lian, 1988; Kaikkonen, 1990), such as sexual innuendo and regional stereotyping, have become the main ways for satirists to create punchlines. Individual satirists are eager to reflect on human nature in moral gray zones to enjoy greater latitude in freedom of creativity. At the same time, the satire also follows the values of Confucius’s morality, which maintains that people should behave cautiously and seriously to safeguard their reputation and remain consistent with orthodox values (Lin, 1946; Yue, 2010). Satirists generally target those who hold power and indicate concern and respect for those who suffer under the current system of power relations.

However, the satire examined here exhibits unique characteristics that are markedly different from traditional Chinese satire. Firstly, compared with the historical satire used to comment on public issues and anecdotes told from the perspective of bystanders (Lian, 1988), most of the analyzed satire is based on the first-person perspective. Most of the topics and linguistic choices involved in satire come from satirists’ personal experiences of daily life and their feelings. Current satire is therefore more grounded and personalized in its narrative style and intimacy with the audience. Secondly, satirists often embed values into their work. Unlike the historical satire of China which was devoid of socio-political consciousness (Zhu, 2018), contemporary satire is rarely value-neutral and often uses adjectives and adverbs to express value judgments and preferences. Moreover, despite the compulsory indoctrination of Communist ideology in the early years of the Mao era (Kaikkonen, 1990; Kaori, 1995), there is no prescribed “gold standard” in terms of appropriate values or ideology in contemporary Chinese satire. For instance, “parents” are often criticized for being authoritarian, while the “massage workers” are praised as “good-looking.” In other words, parents may not always be beyond reproach, while sex workers are not necessarily to be despised.

Finally, the production and use of satire are deeply interwoven with the satirists’ social relations. Pluralistic values interweave with traditional family values and emotional attachment to significant others, allowing satirists to explore complex feelings while making value judgments. This point is reflected in greater detail in the following sections presenting the findings from the interviews. By combining analyses of the content of satire scripts with interviews about how the satirists interpret their reference frames, I can illustrate their sources of information and inspiration and their cognitive schema from three angles: inconsistency, pain, and performance.

The inconsistency between idealized values and actual practices

Based on the theory of incongruity, the reason for laughter is simply the sudden recognition of the mismatch between a concept and the real things expressed by this concept (Veale, 2004). Laughter is the expression of this disharmony between implicitness and explicitness. Individuals’ behaviors are based on their values and are often expressed without the individual necessarily being aware of the relationship between the two (Herzfeld, 2005). However, when confronted by external reality or the requirements of specific social situations, individuals have to think reflexively about their inherent values and the gap between these values and the situations they are facing. This kind of inconsistency between what should be and what actually constitutes the source of satire creation.

“I don’t know if you often have a feeling that you can’t say something frankly,” my interviewee DM said when discussing his love for satire. In his 30s, DM lost his job several times after retiring from the army. He eventually found a position as an on-campus residence administrator in a university with the help of his parents’ guanxi (i.e., personal connection). DM’s years of financial instability allowed him to understand “the way of the world,” but his experiences also left him feeling conflicted on many occasions. This conflicted feeling and experience was the source of inspiration for DM’s first satire script.

“One day, I graded the hygiene of the student dormitory, but I didn’t expect to receive my leader’s criticism the day after the score was announced. It was because I gave the lowest score to the dormitory where the son of an official of the Education Bureau lived. When I was scolded in my leader’s office, I could see a slogan on the wall: ‘Promote social fairness and justice.” (An excerpt from DM’s satire scripts)

Laughter results from the sudden shift from expectation to disappointment, from a disharmony between implicitness and explicitness. DM’s satire is amusing due to the disharmony between the idealized rule of law and the de facto rule of man. The explicit slogan on the wall goes against people’s lived experience, and people can recognize the implicit “unsaid” truth. One of the inherent contradictions of Chinese political culture is that people emphasize the idealized moral values in public life but take shortcuts to pursue personal benefits in their private lives (Pye, 1985). DM said he did not argue because pleasing the leader was the rule of the game at the university, and he wanted to continue making a living there. Furthermore, when he came to the university to look for a job, the leader who scolded him also offered to help him. Thus, he preferred to deal with his conflicting emotions by joking about the incident rather than filing a formal complaint. In this sense, satire can convey a meta-discursive situation of contradiction and ambivalence. Satirists may have themselves benefited from the unfair situations that they criticize and must view problems from a dialectical perspective. Satirists do not promote their ideas but attempt to negotiate a meaningful intermediate space somewhere between mainstream culture and their own values—a space where a reasonable and feasible standard for behavior can be discovered and expressed. However, since it is hard to achieve unified values and logical coherence, satire is often used for seeking relief and is mostly reduced to complaining about specific and isolated events.

The essence of comedy is tragedy

The word choice and portrayal of characters and plots in satire mostly originate from past negative and/or humiliating experiences. Past personal experiences with unfairness and suffering not only offer satirists a keen awareness of and sensitivity to the absurdity and inconsistency of some social practices, but they also help them to resonate emotionally with the audience. The target of satire is the source of the satirist’s traumatic experiences. Many of these painful experiences come from gender inequality due to a patriarchal system. This sexual inequality is reflected in the following satire excerpts:

“The preferences of Chaoshan families are consistent and unified. They like to have sons and send daughters away. I feel so lucky that I haven’t been abandoned by my parents.” (An excerpt from CL’s satire scripts)

“After getting divorced, I only like men who are not smokers or alcoholics, do not commit domestic violence, do not have affairs, and do not look like men.” (An excerpt from CG’s satire scripts)

The satirists’ painful past experiences have left deep-seated traumas. Because of gender discrimination, daughters harbor grudges against the perceived selfishness of their parents and families. Women who have experienced domestic violence are highly critical of men’s bullying and vices. These painful experiences prompt reflection on and change to unquestioning attitudes towards patriarchal and neoliberal norms. The process of the awakening of the agency goes back and forth between reflection and cultural unawareness or practical consciousness, between attentiveness and spontaneity (Huang, 2018).

However, satirists feel further conflicted because their agency cannot be exercised unilaterally. The ties of social relations always affect their determination to pursue social justice. CL, a young woman living in a traditional Chinese family with two younger brothers, said that she could not fall out with her parents just because of prior experiences of being mistreated. Even if she was not taken good care of, she could not bear to treat her parents poorly. This contradictory and complicated psychology is reflected in her scripts about gender issues. In the first joke above, CL not only satirizes her parents’ outdated preference for sons over daughters but also admits that her parents have treated her comparatively well; instead of abandoning her, CL’s parents provided her with adequate material support. Self-referential satire indicates an inward fissure in the subject (Zekavat, 2019a). Even if there is an obvious gap between the way one wants to see themselves and who they really are, a satirist’s sensitivity to unequal power relations and cultural consciousness can only be activated by a limited range of issues (Rorty, 1989; Sewell, 2005). Reflexive satire functions to escape pain and prevent satirists from excessively criticizing their targets (Oring, 1992; Zekavat, 2019b). While ridiculing her parents’ selfishness and cruelty, CL still mocks herself. Her jokes contain sadness, bitterness, irritation, and optimism, which together create a conflicted emotional drama.

The simultaneous presentation of traumatic feelings and self-consolation aligns with de Kloet and Fung’s (2017) argument that many Chinese subcultural forms are self-actualizing and conservative. Chinese people are thus expected to solve their problems by way of self-imagination and consolation. Satire can encourage resignation rather than rebellion as satirists usually have a reference object when describing their painful experiences (Meng, 2011; Huang, 2018; Zekavat, 2019a). Satirists mock themselves not only to express their suffering but also to place attention on moving on and to indicate that they are not living that badly. A satirist’s appreciation of authentic traumatic experiences resonates with the middle class’s conflicting feelings of motivation (Chen and Gao, 2023). On the one hand, satirists have felt defeated by and kynical towards the positive mainstream narrative that everyone is happy and productive. On the other hand, even if they feel trapped by social adversity, satirists still believe that they can improve their status. In this sense, a disadvantaged gender or class status provides satirists with sensitivity and kynicism towards their plight rather than the determination to change the status quo and solve problems.

Performance in the game of satire-making

The ultimate platforms for satire are the offline comedy show and the Internet via online variety shows and short video websites. Given the pressures of business models, audience preferences, communication logic, and personal gains, it is often impossible for satirists to authentically express their voices. More importantly, obeying the unwritten rules can provide satirists with greater profits. Choosing a specific target, formulating scripts from a specific socio-political angle and position, and performing as expected by the market and political institutions can maximize financial benefits.

The success of performative utterances lies in the social positioning of the speaker in relation to listeners (Bohman, 1999). A linguistic act relies less on who is speaking and more on the institutional power that the speaker serves to delegate. Firstly, in order to gain maximum media exposure and audiences in China, compliance with government regulations is obligatory. Satirists must be sensitive to taboo topics. The topics of political power, religion, race, and nationality are forbidden zones of satire creation in the Chinese context. Secondly, to highlight moral legitimacy, the selection of satirical targets is a performative presentation based on online opinions. The objects that the public disdain on the Internet are also the preferred targets for satirists in satire production. Given the tendency towards anti-elitist and people-centric views online (Guo, 2018), satirists generally conform to people’s expectations of disenchantment with the powerful and the elite. The following joke exemplifies this point.

“Many of you may run a WeChat or Taobao business, and you try your best to maintain good relations with loyal customers. In fact, this is the most basic job of fan maintenance. But what will those college professors say? They will say it’s called ‘private domain traffic.’” (An excerpt from XP’s satire scripts)

This joke satirizes professors who are over-eager to redefine common phenomena with abstract and unnecessarily complicated concepts in an effort to show off their knowledge and widen the social status gap with the illiterate. As a college student, XP explained that he determined his position according to popular opinion. His criticism of professors was inspired by the scandal of university teachers sexually harassing female students that were being shared widely on Weibo at that time. Seizing trending social interests related to university professors both increases the satire’s relevance and confirms the satirist’s choice of the target because it accords with widespread opinion. As Billig (2005) argued, satire does not encourage audiences to become critics in an absolute sense because their criticisms conform to the standards of the situations and times. Appropriate satirical targets in current satire are dynamic and fluid amidst the fluctuations of public opinion. Like historical satire, satire-making in the era of social media is the art of meticulously examining a situation based on personal interests (Wang, 2015); the difference is that contemporary satirists can constantly change their targets while still adhering to a common moral view of caring for the vulnerable and illiterate.

In terms of narrative style, contemporary satire emphasizes both dramatization and simplification. Interviewee HH described the logic of online communication as “imaging the big from the small.” The context of a story should be close to people’s everyday lives, but the contradictions and conflicts between the characters in the story should be exaggerated to the greatest extent. FE further explained that keeping a low profile and using tactful words are useless in the online environment. Social recognition can only be gained by standing firm on one position or even going to extremes. As long as it can make people laugh, satirists freely use emotional and inflammatory language and angles instead of rational and balanced perspectives. This technique is consistent with communication more broadly in the era of social media, which emphasizes conflict, dramatization, simplification, and personalization (Hameleers et al., 2017; Krämer, 2014; Mazzoleni, 2008). The tendency for polarization in online communication encourages satirists to exaggerate and exploit the common contradictions and quarrels of daily life, thereby increasing recognition of and resonance with general dissatisfaction and resentment. As more and more people join polarized debates, the social sentiments aroused by satire can be transformed into material benefits for Internet platforms and satirists through increased traffic. In this way, some satirists gain a public persona as social critics through satire-making that obscures their true purpose of converting their symbolic capital into economic capital (Bourdieu, 1987; Fang, 2020).

External institutional norms and constraints and the internal will and intentionality of actors are not necessarily opposed to one another. Agentic action does not have to be associated with an undominated self that exists prior to the application of power (Butler, 1997; Mahmood, 2005; Huang, 2018). Although satire is limited by its short length, superficial content, and sensationalist approach to exploiting media channels financially, satirists can take advantage of the distinctive communication characteristics of different platforms to better express their true voices. In interviewee AQ’s view, Weibo is mainly a text-based platform with a wide range of audiences. He often uses Weibo as an experimental laboratory to test interesting and unconventional ideas and to evaluate audiences’ comments without having to worry about pleasing them.

When formulating scripts for self-produced videos, satirists differentiate their production format and content in accordance with the preferences and recommendation mechanisms of platforms. Informant SZ mentioned that, compared with Tik Tok and Kuai, the scripts used for his Bilibili channels incorporate deeper topics such as death and mental illness. Bilibili’s recommendation mechanism is not so strongly associated with video length and update frequency, which provides more time to create something insightful and complete. Hence, the possibility of undoing institutional norms goes hand in hand with following the norms. It is necessary for satirists to draw attention to the norm of creating and dramatizing a “conflict” before they can become agentic and reformulate the norm in an unconventional way. By working within the gray zones and contradictions in the rules of the game of satire-making, satirists are able to bridge the gap between the performed self and the authentic self.

Discussion and conclusion

This paper explores satire scripts and satirists’ backgrounds, interpretation frameworks, and motives for satire-making in the context of stand-up comedy in China. The textual analysis of satire scripts and interviews with satirists indicate that, at present, Chinese satire mostly relates to the micropolitics of people’s daily lives. Through satire, individuals criticize the hypocritical, selfish, or overbearing behaviors of parents, males, and power holders within their social circles. Inconsistency, pain, and performance constitute the subjective resources for the formation of interpretive angles and stances. Satirists choose to use satire as a form of public communication for the intertwined motives of relief, kynicism, and symbolism.

Unlike the satire with fluid stances historically produced by satirists in China (Lian, 1988; Kaikkonen, 1990), satirists today have a certain moral innocence and stubbornness. They feel confused by and reject the gap between what should be and what is. Satirists’ painful experiences enable them to present satire based on an inferior position. This suffering cultivates the satirist’s attitudes toward the target of their satire as well as their sensitivity to the inconsistencies of daily life. At the same time, performing satire highlights the benefits that satirists can gain by employing economically and politically correct discourses and angles. Given the perceived irrationality of the sphere of public opinion, satirists usually construct formulized criticism of elitism and patriarchy based on a populist stance; this creates a pathway to wealth through the commercialization of moral discourse. The satirist’s motives for using satire for public communication and the reference frames for selecting and ridiculing satirical targets are both positive and conservative.

To avoid offending the audience and political powers, most satires in Chinese history have been narrated from a third-person perspective (Lian, 1988; He, 1982). The targets of satire and plots in stories were mostly fictional. In contrast, present-day satirists generally create satire based on their actual experiences and emotions. They are not worried about exposing their personal lives and thus have a distinctly realistic quality. As such, many satires risk offending established attitudes regarding, for example, male superiority and respect for seniority (Lin, 1946). They also dare to employ swear words, sexual comments, and other indecent behaviors according to traditional morality. All of these characteristics reflect satirists’ embrace of the openness and pluralism of the public sphere and the belief that the public is eager to explore and challenge morally and legally ambiguous questions.

However, the limitations of this schema are also apparent. Firstly, per Lichtenstein et al. (2021), most satirists take non-interventionist roles and do not aim to achieve societal changes through satire creation. The issues addressed in satire are mostly minor problems related to personal life. Satire only performs the function of criticizing the form and not the substance of human nature. This conservatism constrains the activist orientation of satire used for promoting discussion of issues such as policymaking and systematic reform, which are both more substantial and could better solve people’s suffering (Shao and Liu, 2019). The emphasis on one’s personal inadequacies also makes satirists repeatedly discuss similar topics such as men’s incompetence and the pressure to get married. Satire should criticize clichés, but in present-day China, satire tends toward clichés.

Secondly, the satirist’s interpretation of problems in the micropolitical field is defensive. The habitual and normative use of a certain language symbol formed within a specific historical and cultural context can still influence motivations for creating satire. Satire has the subtle metalinguistic function of expressing cultural intimacy in China (Herzfeld, 2005; Steinmüller, 2010, 2013). The use of satire means delimiting boundaries as well as refusing to discuss the satirical target and relevant issues in depth because it is embarrassing and humiliating to express suffering directly. It is far more important to improve one’s situation and show one’s open-mindedness and optimism in the face of difficulties through satire than to openly and directly discuss solutions to problems. Thus, the satirist’s creative practice is not as pragmatic as problem-solving nor as ambitious as constructing a unique identity and style. What satirists hope to obtain from this informal practice is a kind of narcissistic emotional comfort that can be used either to compensate for the trauma they have experienced or to make money.

Thirdly, the influence of the satirist’s social status on the formation of their schema cannot be ignored, particularly in regard to whose interests the exercise of agency serves. The satirists’ performative exposure of their grassroots images and their appropriation of moral discourses for commercial benefits reflect contaminated agency (Banaji, 2017). Many satirists’ challenges of social and political norms are not based on universal values such as fraternity, equality, or respect but are instead grounded in personal interests. In fact, satirists can discuss their suffering in a relatively relaxed and humorous way precisely because their current living conditions are not that bad. Additionally, their capacity to identify the most appropriate and safest targets in different fields is closely related to their strong educational backgrounds and tremendous breadth of experiences. Within this contaminated cognitive schema, the production and dissemination of satire in China may lead to a double-exclusion by both neglecting people who are really suffering and unable to extricate themselves and rejecting topics that have a significant influence on social life but are not politically correct. However, this criticism of satirists’ agency does not aim to belittle their efforts but rather to draw attention to their complex approach to exercising agency. For satirists who have experienced the ups and downs of life, focusing on enhancing their livelihoods is a more pragmatic option. Many satires thus incorporate teasing and ridicule of the powerful while also aiming to please this group, thereby reflecting both satirists’ dissatisfaction with the upper classes as well as their own desire for status, power, and wealth (Huang, 2018; Zhu, 2018). Hence, power struggles via satire are not merely a discursive issue; they are a reflection of how political and material dimensions of social structures can intersect in complex ways.

In this sense, I argue that current Chinese satirists’ interpretation frameworks for satirical targets and motives of satire use reflect an adaptive agency. Adaptive agency refers to one’s capacity to make sense of society and to make a difference via sensitive awareness and creative actions based on the premise of coexisting with other actors. Mbembe (1992) described a discourse of “convivial tension” that was widespread among Cameroonian people in the postcolonial era. People often associate the image and command of rulers with the reproductive organs of men and women and create a great deal of scatological satire to toy with power. This is similar to the “hidden transcript” proposed by Scott (1990). Based on common understandings and informal networks, farmers in Southeast Asia create losses for landlords through indirect confrontations such as slacking and arson. What Mbembe (1992) and Scott (1990) have in common is that they emphasize a moderated agency in a politically repressed environment. This agency neither directly confronts nor meekly submits to those in power. More importantly, the exercise of such agency is based on the assumption that satirists somewhat adapt to the rules of the game of satire-making. The satirist’s interpretation and practice of gender norms, traditional morality, and satire production regulations reflect this adaptive agency.

Contemporary Chinese satirists are willing to conform to existing socio-political rules, but they are at the same time eager to show that they are not satisfied with these rules by pushing the boundaries as far as they can. While the concepts of “convivial tensions” (Mbembe, 1992) and “hidden script”(Scott, 1990) were often used to understand the resistance of extremely vulnerable groups, adaptive agency points out an additional cultural dimension and elucidates how and why satirists with a wide range of backgrounds interpret social issues and personal suffering in China. Contemporary Chinese satirists are unwilling to confront power holders directly because they may have previously benefited from or have emotional ties with the power holders and their present living conditions are somewhat satisfactory. Although adaptive agency reflects a compromise among individuals in the face of asymmetric power relations, it is also capable of creative resistance practices that produce differentiated satire content and formats to best suit the characteristics of specific communication platforms to express values and ideas. Hence, Chinese satire cannot be classified as subversive or submissive or as constructive or destructive; rather, it exists in a space where various discourses and ideologies overlap, negotiate, and compete with one another (Chen and Gao, 2023). The adaptive agency is a long-lasting and resilient act of simultaneously affirming and re-establishing social norms in an unconventional way.

Conclusion, limitations, and implications

In summary, this paper examined the generic features of Chinese satire from a microscopic perspective as well as analyzed satirists’ motivations, backgrounds, and cognitive schema for satire creation and sharing. Textual analysis of satire scripts and interviews with satirists revealed that most current satire is formulated based on micropolitics closely related to individual daily life and filtered through the search for relief, kynicism, and symbolism. The formation of these attitudes derives from the satirist’s aversion to inconsistency between words and actions, a desire to relinquish past pains, and the performative presentation of morality. These motives and explanatory frameworks reflect the satirist’s adaptive agency. While they coexist with the current social system, satirists also constantly explore means of resistance. Adaptive agency is conducive to the understanding of the logic of the aggrieved individual’s interpretation of their sufferings and related social problems in a politically and culturally authoritative context.

There are several limitations to this study. Firstly, besides stand-up comedy, other forms of satire such as crosstalk and sketch are also popular in China. The emphasis on stand-up comedy alone and the limited number of satire scripts in this study may constrain the generalization of the findings, which may not be representative of the features of the satire genre. Further studies are needed to examine the explanatory power of my findings when applied to other forms of satire in China. Secondly, although my work deliberately chose China as the context, I hope to extend this to focus on satire in other authoritarian or post-authoritarian regimes. However, without direct evidence from these contexts, it is not currently possible to comment on satire’s status in these other political cultures.

Despite these limitations, my study expands the scope of studies on motives for satire creation and the perceived roles of satire in public communication. Taking Chinese stand-up comedy as the site of data collection and combining textual analysis with semi-structured interviews, I have comprehensively elucidated and cross-validated the orientations of satire-making within non-traditional professional institutions in a non-Western context. More importantly, the notion of adaptive agency proposed in this study enables a better understanding of the reason satire-making has overlapping and distinctive orientations in different cultures. Lastly, my findings and research approach offer certain implications for future studies on satire and infotainment. Studies on satire should not only analyze the visible characteristics of cultural artifacts and their prosumers in a specific static situation, but they should also pay attention to the pre-existing factors that inform these characteristics. For instance, satirists struggle to criticize their targets in an absolute sense because they also benefit from the targets in certain situations in daily life. Everyday practice, experience, learning, and social interaction provide an explanatory framework and creative resources for clear-cut actions. Only by combining actors’ behaviors and creations in a specific field with their thoughts, behaviors, and experiences from other pre-existing fields can we explain the orientations of cultural productions more comprehensively and accurately.