This dissertation is a revisionist study examining the production and consumption of comedy film--a genre that has suffered from relative critical and theoretical neglect in film studies--in a culturally understudied period from 1949 to 1966 in the People's Republic of China. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, it scrutinizes the ideological, artistic, and industrial contexts as well as the distinctive textures of Chinese comedy films produced in the so-called "Seventeen Years" period (1949-1966). Taking comedy film as a contested site where different ideologies, traditions, and practices collide and negotiate, I go beyond the current canon of Chinese film studies and unearth forgotten films and talents to retrieve the heterogeneity of Chinese cinema. The varieties of comedy examined--mostly notably the contemporary social satires in the mid-1950s, the so-called "eulogistic comedies," and comedian-centered comedies in dialect and period comedies, as well as lighthearted comedies of the late 1950s and the early 1960s--problematize issues of genre, modernity, nation, gender, class, sublimity, and everyday life in light of the "culture of laughter" (Bakhtin) within a heavily politicized national cinema.
Situating my study in the current scholarship of comedy and Chinese cinema, Chapter 1 historicizes the genre of comedy and provides an overview of its definitions in both Western cinema and Chinese cultural criticism. Using Unfinished Comedy--a 1957 satire banned before its completion--as a starting point, Chapter 2 revisits the crisis of the genre in the early years of the PRC and examines the tensions between artistic autonomy and the control of the authorities through a case study of the director Lü Ban. Chapter 3 looks into the mechanism of how ideal social relations were imagined and articulated in eulogistic comedy. Chapter 4 focuses on dialect comedies and film adaptations of folk comedies across regional divisions, which engage a complex dialogue between the local and the national. Chapter 5 examines how filmmakers tried to fuse satire and eulogy in lighthearted comedies of family life and work life. The epilogue reflects on how comedy films transcend a binary opposition between propaganda and entertainment, and it seeks to prompt further studies on the resonance of films from the Mao era in contemporary China.