On June 25, 2025, Professor Wang Zhuoyi from Hamilton College in the United States was invited to deliver the third lecture in the academic workshop series Cross-Civilizational Mutual Learning in an Era of Great Transformation. Titled Cross-Civilizational Mutual Learning Through Stand-Up Comedy and Film, the lecture used the Chinese blockbuster comedy film Good Stuff as a starting point to delve into the integration of stand-up comedy culture and filmmaking, as well as its underlying social significance. Hosted by Professor Li Yun of the School of Foreign Languages, the lecture brought together faculty and students from related research fields for an insightful academic exchange.
At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Wang Zhuoyi played classic clips from Good Stuff, guiding the audience to focus on the film’s unique language style and narrative structure. He revealed that the film’s extensive use of witty dialogues, satirical frameworks, and humorous reflections on everyday experiences are characteristic of stand-up comedy expression.Professor Wang then traced the semantic evolution of the term 女拳 in popular culture, exploring how this term has acquired new contemporary connotations through online dissemination.
The lecture further analyzed how the film skillfully reflects broader real-world issues. Professor Wang particularly emphasized that by setting the protagonist Wang Moli’s birth year as a temporal marker, the film contrasts the golden age of print media with the rapidly evolving media landscape of today. This metaphor of the decline of old mediums and the rise of a new generation profoundly suggests the historical continuity behind the evolution of communication platforms. He pointed out that while addressing social concerns, the film consistently conveys an optimistic outlook toward the future.
During the interactive session, faculty and students engaged in lively academic discussions with Professor Wang on topics such as the film’s meaning construction, artistic appeal, and its differences from live stand-up performances. In his concluding remarks, Professor Wang elaborated on the complexity of the film’s poetic vision for the future—one that embodies idealistic aspirations while maintaining a sober awareness of structural social issues.
Through its interdisciplinary interpretation of film and stand-up comedy, this lecture provided the audience with a new perspective for observing contemporary cultural phenomena, highlighting the social reflective value generated by the integration of stand-up comedy culture and filmmaking. The lecture not only revealed stand-up comedy’s unique advantage as a cultural buffer zone in addressing issues such as gender but also offered an inspiring local case for dialogues on social issues in cross-civilizational contexts. It further provided profound insights into how popular culture participates in and enhances the innovative vitality and inclusivity of mainstream culture, inspiring us to adopt a more proactive and constructive approach in addressing real-world challenges and jointly promoting cultural prosperity and development.
Speaker Profile:
Wang Zhuoyi is a tenured professor and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at Hamilton College in the United States. He has previously served as a visiting professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Taiwan Normal University and as an overseas expert in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. His research focuses on Chinese film history and comparative studies of Chinese-language cinema and Hollywood. He is the author of Revolutionary Cycles in Chinese Cinema 1951–79 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and co-editor of Maoist Laughter (Hong Kong University Press, 2019), which received the 2020 Outstanding Academic Title Award from the Association of College and Research Libraries. He also co-edited Teaching Film from the People’s Republic of China (Modern Language Association, 2024). Professor Wang has published over thirty academic papers, book reviews, film critiques, and cultural commentaries in both Chinese and English in academic journals, edited volumes, magazines, and new media platforms. He has been invited to deliver more than 150 academic lectures at educational institutions and organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and across Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
