Han Han Funny

Pinning down exactly what it is that makes Han Han so famous can be difficult. Why him? And what does his stature say about China? Han Han, as the Profile in the magazine this week explains (available to subscribers), is China’s most popular personal blogger; he is a novelist; he is a race-car driver. None of those, on the face of each, is perhaps enough to explain why he ranks as one of the most heavily sought-after terms on Baidu, the Chinese search engine.

But spend a few months around his fans and his writing and it becomes clear that his most successful innovation is a rare brand of humor. Like Henry Ford and the automobile, Han hardly invented Chinese political irony, but he has helped make it available to the young masses.

He can be subtle and arch. When he wants to mention a name that is politically sensitive enough to draw the attention of censors, Han is known to write, “sensitive word.” At times he resorts to a scatological riff, but like young gadflies anywhere, he is at his best when pointing out the flickers of hypocrisy or falsehood or pomposity that alienate Chinese young people from the system. Writing in Foreign Policy in January, the writer and translator Eric Abrahamsen captured the new era of Internet-enabled Chinese humor, with Han as a key player with work that “runs the gamut from sarcastic to subtle … without skipping past righteous fury”:

In 2009, a group of river boatmen, with the backing of local cadres, retrieved the bodies of students who had accidentally drowned in the river and then refused to hand the bodies over to the students’ parents without an exorbitant fee. Han Han’s recommendation was that all Chinese citizens carry the body-recovery fee on their persons at all times: “If you or a friend should fall in the water, you can hold the cash up above your head—that’s the only way these half-official body-recovery teams will bother fishing you out.”

Taken together, Han is telling his readers that solemnity and seniority are not to be trusted. That will get more difficult as he gets older and the stakes for him politically and financially continue to grow. But, for now, he is his generation’s keenest observer of the absurd. When I asked him if he was comfortable among political types, he described the specific form of discomfort that accompanies overly formal occasions in China:

I never know where I’m supposed to sit. I always find myself taking the mayor’s seat by accident. If I see a place, I just sit down, and everyone gasps. But then nobody will actually say anything! I don’t really understand all these things. There are a lot of these hidden rules in China. For example, there are certain things you can never do—when a leader is reaching for a dish, you mustn’t turn the lazy susan. Or when the leader is singing karaoke, you can’t accidentally switch to the next song. These are terrible things to do. Also, the rules about who sits on the left, and who sits on the right, what is appropriate to say, what is not—these are not the things you can change. If you really want to [become one of them], you will have to put up with it and become someone you hate.

Han Han in Hong Kong, 2010. Photograph by Laihiuyeung Ryanne, Wikimedia Commons.