Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Wednesday, January 30, 2002
17:18 - Shaolin Kung Fu is Wonderful!	(top)
Last night I saw Shaolin Soccer, a kung-fu comedy from Stephen Chow, the director who brought us The God of Cookery (which I still haven't seen-- but I know I must, soon). And what a hoot it was. I'm not entirely sure why, though. The style of slapstick humor is really very different in texture from what we're used to here, but I can recognize and appreciate it as humor; but what's particularly special about its humor style is where it differs so spectacularly from Western-style slapstick. Sure, a lot of giggles arise from the bad Engrish subtitles, but more come from scenes like the star player gradually building up his striking power kicking a ball against a target painted on a wall-- every successive shot, he's standing further back and hitting more accurately, until finally he's standing about 100 yards away and blasting it repeatedly into the bulls-eye with enough speed and force to dig a crater into it. It's got a lot in common with Jackie Chan's comic martial-arts, and it's an interesting experiment to slow down and think about why it seems to funny to us (and to wonder whether it's funnier to us, in all its alien nature, than for the Chinese market for whom such movies are primarily targeted). What do we find so hysterical? It's the time-tested "surprise in the face of your expectations" concept that's at the basis of pretty much all humor, but in this case it's surprise at how artfully some physical feat is accomplished, or with how much power or complexity or speed. The surprise registers because we're expecting something more pedestrian, I guess-- we expect to see a fist-fighting slugfest or a soccer ball that obeys the natural laws of physics, so when we instead get a guy running straight up the crack between two walls or a guy blowing the goalie straight through the back of the goal or using kung-fu to clip hedges or avoid slipping on a banana peel (a Western gag re-imagined through cross-cultural pollination), we can't contain our gales of laughter. Whatever the basis for it all, it's just a riot. Go rent it now if you have a soft spot at all for that good ol' Jackie Chan style of humor. Oh-- and for any Hans Zimmer fans out there, pay close attention to the score-- particularly right at the climactic moment, when Mui the goalie stops the Evil Team's inexorable strike and prepares to launch her return. The music right there, for about thirty seconds, is structurally lifted straight from The Lion King. The chord progression is very similar, and the last four bars are almost identical, to the same triumphant moment in Zimmer's score. Just a little bit of trivia that I couldn't help noting-- especially since (I'm told) I'm not the first person to have noticed this...