I’m not particularly fond of Zhao Benshan. Even when negative stories about him were everywhere, I never went out of my way to follow the news. My tastes have always leaned toward people who can actually write with ideas behind their words—someone like Wang Xiaobo, or even Beyond in a different way. But that still doesn’t stop me from genuinely enjoying a lot of Zhao Benshan’s work. In the same way, I may not like Zhou Libo as a person, yet I still pull out Laughing About Thirty Years and Laughing About Old Shanghai from time to time just to give my laugh lines some exercise.
For years, Lunar New Year’s Eve meant waiting for Zhao Benshan’s sketch while half-distracted by the usual holiday rituals. The fact that I could laugh nonstop for more than ten minutes every time was proof enough that the wait of several hours was worth it. This year, without his performance on the Spring Festival Gala, there was still Miao Fu and Wang Sheng’s Man Fu Jing Lun. But once it got tied too tightly to official messaging, the comedy lost much of its punch. A nationwide celebration somehow turned into a lecture hall for ideological instruction. Some things may be good in themselves, but if you keep telling me every day how good they are, my first instinct is to start looking for flaws. Because nothing in this world is perfect.
That was the strength of Zhao Benshan’s sketches: they were simple. No forced sentiment, no lofty moral elevation, no obligation to serve some grand theme—just laughter. And on Lunar New Year’s Eve, after a year of work and exhaustion, being able to laugh is what matters most. The simpler something is, the easier it is to make people laugh. Children’s speech works the same way. Once too many extra layers get piled on, not only does the humor disappear, even the message itself becomes muddled.
I still remember people criticizing Not Short of Money by nitpicking the detail that donations could be made by bank card. That is what happens when someone takes plain, uncomplicated joy and turns it into an overworked mathematical proof. It’s absurd.
The same logic applies to people. For a long time, the propaganda machine spared no effort praising two professions above all others: teachers and doctors. The result was that whenever someone in those fields made a mistake—the kind of mistake any ordinary person might make—it got magnified without limit. A completely normal profession ended up thoroughly contaminated by impossible expectations. For a long time, I avoided mentioning that this was my own profession, and that was exactly why. I’m not saying people in these jobs, myself included, should be exempt from criticism. But the higher you lift someone up, the harder they fall.
There’s an American film, Flight, in which Denzel Washington plays a pilot who saves a doomed flight and becomes a hero. He starts out as an ordinary person, but once the hero label is attached, his life is put under a microscope. The hero quickly turns into a disgraced figure.
The same pattern showed up in the flood of criticism surrounding Chai Jing’s Under the Dome, which recently spread everywhere across WeChat and the blog world. The motives behind the attacks were all over the place. Some people insult everything out of habit, and some were just doing the predictable political dirty work. But others took aim not at the documentary itself, but at Chai Jing as a person. Based on my thirty-something years of observation, one common tactic in a more sophisticated smear campaign is this: discredit the person, and then everything that person says automatically becomes suspect.
A lot of American films have shown how powerful that tactic can be; Kill the Messenger is one example. But there was never any such thing as a perfect person to begin with. Even if Chai Jing has this flaw or that flaw, what exactly does that have to do with the content of the video? Criticism that actually addresses the argument is the only kind worth respecting. If environmental protection had really been handled well, why would the audience have reacted so instantly and so strongly?