May 17, 2023

"One of China’s leading comedy show companies has been fined £1.68m after... one of its comedians... told of watching two stray dogs he had adopted chase a squirrel."

"The phrase that came to mind, he said, was: 'Fight well, win the battle' – a punchline based on an eight-character slogan that is associated with China’s People’s Liberation Army. In an audio recording that was shared online, the audience can be heard breaking into loud laughs. But a member of the audience reportedly made a complaint... China’s ministry of culture and tourism bureau said... 'We will never allow any company or individual use the Chinese capital as a stage to wantonly slander the glorious image of the PLA'... Discussing the controversy on WeChat, a messaging and social media platform, one commenter wrote: 'The Chinese People’s Liberation Army is sacred and inviolable! The clown will be severely punished!'"

The Guardian reports.

Such a mild joke, but the audience laughed hard. They must really enjoy the opportunity to experience disrespect for the glorious, sacred, inviolable People’s Liberation Army. 

25 comments:

cubanbob said...

A rare opportunity to laugh at the CCP. It's not about the PLA.

Enigma said...

Don't dare to compare Chairman Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f1/9a/0f/f19a0fe9dde4c7b98f826ea4cf930ede.jpg

You were warned!

cassandra lite said...

I remember when Mark Steyn had to defend himself for telling a joke before a Canadian provincial tribunal. A comedian who didn't have Steyn's financial means had to cave. Wish I could remember what the punishment was.

rhhardin said...

Trump's humor works the same way.

gahrie said...

Tank Man could not be reached for comment.

tim in vermont said...

I have been listening to the novel Steppenwolf and in it there is a passage describing the jingoistic press in Germany in the '20s. It sounded like our own press today. "How dare you question the glorious righteousness of the Ukrainian cause!" Professors losing their professorships for political wrongthink, it's all there. We can laugh at China, I wouldn't want to live there, but we have a guy going to jail in the US for sharing a meme. It's the same motivation as the Chinese law, to show the people who's boss.

rhhardin said...

Glenn Loury John McWhorter episode removed by YouTube for hate speech, with a warning but no explanation
report and repost on substack.

It's like China around here.

Lawrence Person said...

A whole lot of military analysts think that The People's Liberation Army is a paper tiger who will wilt in actual combat.

Sebastian said...

"The clown will be severely punished!"

Hey, just what our own prog overlords want to do.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Nice work Althouse. Agree 100% with your take. Alinskey was a misanthropic kook but he was also 100% correct about the most potent weapon, mockery. Joe’s gonna learn all about that in 2024.

n.n said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
tim maguire said...

I'm sure the punishment was more about the laughter then the joke.

madAsHell said...

"Oh babe, it's harder than Chinese arithmetic??".......was the pick-up line that NEVER worked!!

I'm wondering if I would have more success with "Chinese comedy"??

Yancey Ward said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Iman said...

A lack of self-esteem shown by the PLP!

gspencer said...

Mockery of the left is our most potent weapon. They insist that we take them seriously, but when we don't they get angry and violent.

DanTheMan said...

>>Mockery of the left is our most potent weapon.

Which is why they are working hard to make mockery of the left's positions illegal.

tommyesq said...

A whole lot of military analysts think that The People's Liberation Army is a paper tiger who will wilt in actual combat.

That might be the one good thing about the uniparty military-industrial complex that rules America - our military rarely goes untested.

pacwest said...

A whole lot of military analysts think that The People's Liberation Army is a paper tiger who will wilt in actual combat.

I'd just as soon not put that to the test. Any war with the PLA is going to be played on their home field which gives them a big advantage.

tim in vermont said...

When is the last test of our military against a peer power? Iraq? We were able to knock out Iraq's air defenses early in the war, Russia keeps shooting down our anti-radar missiles, and if you want to dispute those claims, you can then wonder why the Ukrainian jets launching the vaunted Storm Shadow missiles keep getting shot down, along with the missiles. They have made a priority of defenses against cruise missiles since the '70s when the Tomahawk was first developed. They are sharing this tech with the Chinese.

Our Patriot is obviously vulnerable. China can outproduce us in terms of artillery shells, which, it turns out are very important, can outproduce us without breaking a sweat. The same is true with missies of every description, which we are learning are critical to combat. China is producing true hypersonic missiles, unlike the cobbled together ones that Russia has, and will be able to massively outproduce us in that category. The Chinese and the Russians have signed a mutual defense pact, meaning that in a war with China, we will almost certainly have to contend with Russia's formidable submarine fleet, which hasn't come into play in this current war. Just as if we extend the war into Russia, the Chinese will back them up. Crimea is an open question, still.

It's US doctrine to go nuclear in the case of unexpected reverses on the battlefield, BTW, which, I am thinking, applies to the oceans too. So if China sinks a carrier, is the US going to start a nuclear war? That's our doctrine. Carriers are so vulnerable, it's really the only way to protect them from a peer power in a peer war.

Don't wish for war with China, stop fighting Russia. It's crazy. Those people who follow Russia with some empathy are saying that, just as the months leading up to the invasion, Russia is sending signals that we better pick up the phone and talk to them, or a major escalation is coming. You know who hears these signals? Ukraine and Russia's Eastern European neighbors, and they are now making noises that this war need to end now.

https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-ukraine-refugee-question

Fuck these guys talking up how easy a war with China will be.

Temujin said...

At least he didn't misgender anyone. That would have been his end.

RNB said...

A Soviet judge walks out of his chambers laughing his head off. A colleague approaches him and asks why he is laughing.

"I just heard the funniest joke in the world!"

"Well, go ahead, tell me!" says the other judge.

"I can't -- I just gave some guy ten years for it!"

Rusty said...

China is asshole.
Democrats aspire to be like China. Right, Readering.

Ancient Mariner said...

One of the many, many evils of Communism is its total lack of a sense of humor.

mikee said...

Was the comedian referring to the dogs, or the squirrel, when he quoted the PLA motto?

Did he want the dogs to win? An easy victory, once they catch the squirrel, of course.
Invokes memeories of the tanks versus the protesting students in Tiananmen Square.

Did he want the squirrel to win? Unlikely to happen, as the squirrel is dog food when they catch it. And if the squirrel is standing in for the PLA, urging it to "fight well, win the battle" is both ridiculous and disrespectful.

So he is damned either way. But the joke is funny, to an American.
And apparently to a Chinese audience.

Does Xi go to a correspondents' dinner every year for a bit of roasting?
Ha, ha, I make joke about Chinese being asshole!