‘The pinnacle of our era’: comedy in Stan Lai’s realism play ‘The Village’

Abstract

In 2008, Chinese playwright, director Stan Lai, and producer Wang Weizhong created the play ‘The Village’ based on over a hundred oral history stories. This play is a work of realist theatre that incorporates many comedic elements and has been hailed by the Beijing News as the ‘pinnacle of our era’. However, current academic attention to this play is primarily limited to studies focusing on nostalgia and historical context, with insufficient emphasis on its comedic aspects. This study aims to analyze the comedy in ‘The Village’ using Kant’s comedic theory and Chekhov’s comedic techniques, examining the comedic aspects through the play’s comedy plots. It intends to confirm its comedic nature and fill a gap in the existing comedy research on this work. This study also explores Stan Lai’s unique comedic style in ‘The Village’, enhancing the understanding of its comedic elements. Furthermore, the findings will contribute to the existing body of knowledge on Stan Lai’s work and expand the application of Kant’s Theory of Comedy.