Abstract:
Court variety plays and comedies of Chinese drama concerned the traditions of ridiculous amusement and “smooth and trivial irony” in Chinese culture. Between the Tang and the Song Dynasty, the barracks performance was gradually converted from sports competition to acting art competition, greatly adding to its value of appreciation and sports performance. The exaggerative and extravagant language of comedies made such plays finally turn into “hot plays”, the “competitively exaggerative” comical language of which deeply influenced a large quantity of writers in their daring innovation of language use styles. Su Shi was typical of such writers. Su loved variety plays all his life and was long indulged in them. The comical mood of his poems resulted from the influence of variety plays in the Song Dynasty. Su’s acceptance of the tradition of variety plays made him usually satire the current society amusingly and wittily, which foreshadowed the cause for the case of Wutai poems in later days.
