Examining the emergence of Hong Kong identity: A critical study of the 1970s Cantonese sketch comedy, The Hui Brothers Show

Abstract

Research on Hong Kong identity has focused on several pivotal periods (the 1997 Handover, and the 2014 and 2019 protests), which situates local, postcolonial Hong Kong identity as oppositional to a national Chinese identity. While these time points are critical, it is also important to attend to earlier Hong Kong media, including humorous works. Better understanding of how Hong Kong humour operates expands our knowledge about humour, identity and media studies beyond the prolific cinematic output. This article reports on the content analysis of 8.8 hours of the sketch comedy show, 雙星報喜 (The Hui Brothers Show) 1971–72. The Hui brothers broke the ‘two fools’ tradition of vernacularized and self-deprecating comedy by incorporating content reflecting Hongkongers’ everyday experience and coinciding with a rise in television viewership. We report three representative themes: (1) luxury and novelty, (2) social commentaries and behaviour governance and (3) the normalization and centring of working-class lifestyles as ‘Hong Kong’ lifestyles. We argue that these themes from the 1970s have planted the seeds to Hong Kong identity boundaries that have been (re)constructed and (re)imagined in contemporary Hong Kong history thus offering opportunities for collective self-reflection about what it meant to be a Hongkonger then and what it means now.