China warns comedians against stirring up gender discord ‘for the sake of being funny'
In a notice issued over the weekend, the Zhejiang provincial publicity department criticised comedy shows for becoming a "battlefield" and simplifying gender issues into opposition between men and women.
The authorities called out The King of Stand-up Comedy show on streaming platform iQiyi but did not name any comedian.
The caution came after a number of recent performances by women comedians related to gender bias gained popularity in the country.
Women's rights in China remain a contentious issue, with the government accused of systematically dismantling almost all expressions of independent feminist activism over the past decade, including the MeToo movement.
'Criticism is fine,' the notice on WeChat said but stressed that it should be 'constructive rather than revolve around gender opposition for the sake of being funny'.
It suggested that instead of "mocking 'blindly confident men'', comedy was much better used exploring the social causes for this mentality.
"Instead of blindly ridiculing 'materialistic women', it is better to reflect on how consumerism shapes gender roles," it added.
"We sincerely hope that the rising stand-up comedy scene can become more rational and profound, with less division and more understanding."
The King of Stand-up Comedy featured a performance earlier this month by 50-year-old comedian Fan Chunli, popularly known by her stage name Fangzhuren, that revolved around her marriage and why she had left her husband.
Members of the audience were moved to tears and clips from the show went viral on Chinese social media.
The Zhejiang warning was criticised on social media for being overly sensitive when "something is discussed from a female perspective". "Simply stating the facts now counts as inciting conflict between men and women?' a commentator on Weibo asked.
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Times
9 minutes ago
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Tom Lehrer obituary: devilish musical satirist
Before Tom Lehrer opened his mouth, he seemed the image of decency. Sitting at the piano in a tux as sharp as his jawline, looking a little nerdy with his slicked-back hair, large-framed glasses and bow tie, he could have fooled his listeners into thinking that they were about to hear a mild selection of show tunes. Yet as soon as his fingers hit the keys he revealed himself as the imp he really was, gleefully mocking staid mid-century morals, goading his listeners to clutch their pearls. He sang The Masochism Tango, exclaiming that 'I ache for the touch of your lips, dear/ But much more for the touch of your whips, dear.' And he sang about that bucolic way to spend a Sunday afternoon: Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. In I Got It From Agnes, he sang about the transmission of 'it', a venereal disease, through a series of increasingly depraved couplings. Masterfully avoiding recourse to a single rude word, he made eyes bulge with tell of how 'Max got it from Edith, who gets it every spring/ She got it from her daddy who just gives her everything/ She then gave it to Daniel, whose spaniel has it now/ Our dentist even got it and we're still wondering how.' He won renown among those of discerning bad taste in the Fifties and early Sixties for 37 such songs. They also included I Hold Your Hand In Mine — the seemingly sweet murmurs of a lover who has in fact murdered his darling and kept her hand as a souvenir — and When You are Old and Gray, in which, inverting Yeats's poem, he pleaded: 'So say you love me here and now, I'll make the most of that/ Say you love and trust me, for I know you'll disgust me, when you're old and getting fat.' He sang such lyrics with blithe zest and remarkable vocal dexterity, wending his way through the most tangled tongue-twisters. As if to prove a point, he arranged all the known elements to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Major General's Song. Part of the joy of listening to him sing was the thrill of hearing him vault such high hurdles as 'Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium/ And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium/ And gold, protactinium and indium and gallium/ And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.' Lehrer was such a confident performer that his songs could seem like spontaneous outbursts, but really he laboured over them intently, shaving off spare words and notes until they were as elegant as equations. A Harvard mathematician who retreated from the limelight back to his alma mater, he found the same satisfaction in fitting a satirical message into verse as he did in solving such abstruse mathematical problems as 'the number of locally maximal elements in a random sample'. Many of his songs originated as party pieces to play to his friends at Harvard, where he matriculated in 1943 at only 15. He made a record of a dozen of his songs to give to them as a memento, hoping to sell the rest of the 400 copies at gigs. Having managed to sell them in a couple of days, he printed more, and employed freshmen to help him to dispatch them by mail order. His fame spread by word of mouth, and by 1954 he had sold 10,000 records. He also began playing in nightclubs such as The Blue Angel in Manhattan and the Hungry I in San Francisco, and at benefits for liberal and anti-war groups. A left-winger of the strait-laced sort who would soon be drowned out by the hippy movement, he endeared himself to his comrades with an 'uplifting song in the tradition of the great old revival hymns' about nuclear annihilation. It went: 'We will all go together when we go/ What a comforting fact that is to know/ Universal bereavement, an inspiring achievement/ Yes we will all go together when we go.' By 1957 he was performing at Carnegie Hall. Lehrer's fame reached Britain that year, when Professor JR Sutherland, awarding an honorary music degree to Princess Margaret from the University of London, let it be known that she was a fan of his music. Talk of his songs spread through university papers and record shops, prompting the BBC to ban most of them from the airwaves the following year. In 1959 he recorded a second album, More of Tom Lehrer, and sold out several venues in the United Kingdom. Yet it was at this moment that he began to tell his friends he wanted to stop performing. He had never gone out of his way to seek fame. At Harvard, once inundated with invitations to perform at parties, he had doubled his fee. The number of invitations halved, which suited him just fine. At the end of 1959, having toured Australia, and the UK once more, he decided to let his records earn his living for him, and return to Harvard to try to finish his PhD. He soon concluded, however, that he had nothing original to offer academia, and gave up on the PhD in 1965. He continued to dabble with songwriting, submitting tapes of his music to That Was the Week That Was — a precursor to Saturday Night Live — and releasing a third album, That Was the Year That Was. But it tired him to tour the world, playing the same songs over and over, and he all but gave it up. On a short tour of Scandinavia in 1967 he joked that all of his songs were 'part of a huge scientific project to which I have devoted my entire life, namely, the attempt to prolong adolescence beyond all previous limits', but it seemed that experiment had reached its conclusion. It was not only out of weariness that he retreated from the limelight, but out of a sense that popular culture had left him behind. His brand of dissent — droll, insouciant, recognisably an undergraduate parlour game — seemed an anachronism to the earnest and righteous rebels of the counterculture. About them he joked, 'It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee house or a college auditorium and come out in favour of the things everybody else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.' Contrary to a biographical note on one of his LPs, Thomas Andrew Lehrer was not 'raised by a yak, by whom he was always treated as one of the family', but born in Manhattan in 1928, the son of Morris Lehrer, a non-practising Jew and necktie manufacturer whose Gilbert and Sullivan records he would listen to constantly, and Anna (née Waller). He began piano lessons at the age of eight, and spent the summers of his boyhood at Camp Androscoggin in Maine, where he bumped into a younger boy whose music he would later idolise: Stephen Sondheim (obituary, November 27, 2021). 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Indeed, he famously said a year after he retired from performing that 'political satire became obsolete when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize'. Having relinquished fame so flippantly, he affected to care little about his legacy. When one would-be biographer came knocking, he rebuffed his offer to write his life story, but gave him the original recordings of his second album as though they were worthless to him. He felt no need to give an answer to those who wondered why one of the great lyricists of the 20th century would seem so indifferent to the fate of his own art. In 2020 he put his songs in the public domain. Yet as a younger man he did claim to feel a degree of emotional investment in the reception of his work, saying:'If, after hearing my songs, just one human being is inspired to say something nasty to a friend, or perhaps to strike a loved one, it will all have been worth the while.' Tom Lehrer, musical satirist, was born on April 9, 1928. 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Metro
38 minutes ago
- Metro
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To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video The latest trailer for an eagerly anticipated horror series based on one of Stephen King's most iconic novels is here, and it's terrifying. Welcome to Derry is a prequel series for King's IT, which follows an evil shape-shifting being that preys on the children of Derry every 27 years. It has been adapted for the big screen before, first in 1990 with Tim Curry taking on the role of the villainous Pennywise, and again in 2017 and 2019 with Bill Skarsgard taking over from the Rocky Horror Picture Show star. The TV adaptation for HBO is set in the 1960s, before the introduction of the Losers Club that takes Pennywise down once and for all. Ahead of its release in October, a second trailer for the show has dropped, teasing the signature nightmare fuel that comes with It. The two-minute teaser begins with a new family moving to the quiet town of Derry, but it doesn't take them long to realise there's something very strange going on in the town. 'Derry is a beautiful place, but things do happen from time to time,' a woman says, and she's certainly not wrong, as it doesn't take long for missing children's posters to begin appearing. A group of children begins researching the disappearance of one of their friends, placing them in mortal danger, signalled by an ominous, floating red balloon that fans of the franchise will be very accustomed to. We get a quick glimpse of Skarsgard's return to the role of Pennywise as the dancing clown lurks in the shadows with glowing yellow eyes – enough to give anyone nightmares. There are links to King's other work, with a quick flash of a Shawshank State Prison bus from his novel Shawshank Redemption, as well as the novella Rita Hayworth. We also see Chris Chalk's character Dick Hallorann, who fans of The Shining will know as the head chef of the Overlook Hotel and the man who explains the shining ability to young Danny Torrance. Fans were quick to take to social media to air their thoughts, with many saying it looks 'insane' and 'terrifying.' 'This prequel is gonna set the spooky bar high,' Kittu said, while Titli posted: 'The red balloons are back and so is the trauma.' Giii echoed the same sentiment, writing: 'childhood fear reactivated again. Thanks HBO.' Dp_burner added: 'finally a show that understands my fear of clowns is completely rational 🗡️ gonna need some new nightmares anyway.' Season one hasn't hit our screens yet, and producer and episode director Andrés Muschietti – who also helmed the It remake films – has teased what fans can expect from subsequent seasons. Speaking to Radio TU, he revealed: 'It's a story that's based on the interludes of the book. The interludes are basically chapters that reflect Mike Hanlon's research. They're fragments of his research. 'For 27 years, it's the guy trying to figure out what it is, what did it, who did it, who saw it, and all that stuff… So they talk about catastrophic events from the past, like the fire in the Black Spot…. the massacre of the Bradley Gang, a gang of bank robbers in the '30s… and the explosion of the Kitchener Ironworks. More Trending 'Every time [Pennywise] comes out of hibernation, there is a catastrophic event that happens at the beginning of that cycle.' So it seems that we could go back as far as the 30s, and maybe even the 1900s to explore Pennywise's origin story if Muschietti has anything to do with it. View More » IT: Welcome To Derry is released in October on HBO and Max Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: I'm a horror expert – these are the 7 best films of 2025 so far MORE: 'Masterpiece' 70s thriller with shocking twist now available to stream for free MORE: I physically recoiled at acclaimed horror's most disturbing and stomach-churning scene
