BEIJING (Agencies) — China has launched an official crackdown on poor-quality humour, after officials, apparently irritated at the lameness of a joke about Mao Zedong visiting a bar with Henry Kissinger and Deng Xiaoping, ordered the jailing of a 17-year-old female student who “re-Tweeted” it to her friends.
Reports indicated that the joke, whose punch line – “I just got here from Yan’an on a ‘Mao’ donkey!” spoken by the Great Helmsman – failed to elicit a single smile among a test sample of Chinese and foreigners, was said to be the final straw for humor-loving officials.
“China has a rich history of hilarious humor. If foreigners thought this sort of joke was an actual example of proper Chinese wit, the country would lose face. We’d be laughing stocks, only not in a positive sense,” explained Ministry of Communications spokesman Guo Xidan.
The female student, identified only as Pan, faces a year in a re-education camp, where she can expect a series of courses on what properly constitutes ‘funny’. This will include watching edited highlights from CCTV’s annual Spring Festival ‘Chunwan’ gala, alongside a course personally conducted by Canadian TV personality Mark Rosswell, aka comedian Dashan.
The stern crackdown, which targets “poor, weak or generally lame jokes” as well as “stuff that just makes you shake your head and go ‘Oh, man’”, is expected to last several months, after which China will hopefully begin a new rise to become the world’s leading producer of witty asides and barbed put-downs. Twitter, meanwhile, is now banned in China.
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