Way of the intercepting pun: language and the body in Stephen Chow's carnival of kung fu

This chapter considers the ways Stephen Chow’s performance style brings together comedy and kung fu. It explores differences and affinities between Chow’s mo lei tau humor and the carnivalesque bodies we see in kung fu comedies from the late 1970s (such as those of Jackie Chan). It examines the ways these films offered a narrative blueprint for the typical Stephen Chow film. Chow metaphorizes the martial arts to imagine forms of linguistic and cultural expertise and so articulate a political and social position allied to the downtrodden and to local Hong Kong identities. He does so through a mode of performance that is both strikingly verbal but also deeply rooted in a comic martial body. Chow’s amalgamation of kung fu and comedy is underpinned by the potential they share as carriers of a stateless, carnival, popular subjectivity that resists the ordering effects of “official,” national or high culture.

The full text, reproduced here after the publisher's embargo period, is an accepted author manuscript version, reproduced here with permission. The text is a non-final version of the chapter and is not to be cited. The final print version published by Bloomsbury is available via https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cinema-of-stephen-chow-9781350362130/.