Sammo Hung: the Kung Fu comic's sublime body

After a brief overview of Sammo Hung’s prolific, protean, and highly influential oeuvre as martial arts performer, choreographer, director, and producer, this chapter focuses on his star image, as established in kung fu comedies during the late 1970s. Here, his skill and agility belied the expectations his rotund frame provoked. This performed a carnivalesque reversal of the muscular physiques typical of Hong Kong’s martial arts stardom. Hung consistently fashioned his star image in particular through play with the iconography of Bruce Lee. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s theories regarding laughter, the chapter proposes that Hung’s comedy brings the ideal martial arts body down to earth in a moment of bathos but also involves a sublimation of his emphatic materiality in an image of grace and physical freedom, celebrating corporeality rather than denying it. The chapter concludes by examining two recent films which seem to evoke Hung’s body: Kung Fu Panda (2008) and the Enter the Fat Dragon (2020).

The full text 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/fighting-stars-9781350365742/