Review
Books
Culture
4 min read

Remembering red on red

The cultural revolution's factions have a disconcertingly contemporary feel.

Simon is Bishop of Tonbridge in the Diocese of Rochester. He writes regularly round social, cultural and political issues.

A Chinese stamp depicts a map of the country from which people march holding a little red book
Long Live the Overall Victory of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, stamp, 1968.
Public domain, via Wikimedia.

Modern era China has suffered human loss on an unimaginable scale.  The Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century cost over 20 million lives, more or less the global total from the Great War of 1914-18.  The vicious Japanese occupation in the 1930s led to 15 million Chinese deaths.  The famine begun in 1958, precipitated by the Great Leap Forward, caused around 40 million deaths.   

For one nation, however large, these are appalling losses.  By contrast, the fatalities in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) amounted to one million or more.  But the impact of this communist insurgency within a communist state is profoundly felt today, for its generation is still alive.  The trauma of those years has wounded the bodies and minds of millions; people who are unsure how to come to terms with it because of the uncertainty of what can be safely talked about.   

Mao’s incitement to younger people to turn on their teachers and elders in vitriolic criticism and violent attack, including torture and murder, was an attempt to re-boot the revolution by exterminating elements of western capitalism and traditional Chinese authority – the so-called Four Olds of ideas, culture, customs and habits.  The humiliation of teachers and parents was profoundly at odds with the Confucian culture of respect for elders, and it was embedded in young minds whose frontal lobes had not fully developed and where empathy was unformed.  The ensuing violence, pain and hardship was sickening, encompassing millions. 

Many of the bereaved and injured, the perpetrators and the victims, are still alive.  Some bury their memories as a way of coping; others search for meaning, but run up against an authoritarian government with new digital tools that make totalitarianism possible.  In her book Red Memory (Faber and Faber, 2024), Tania Branigan has produced a masterpiece of literature.  Interviewing survivors, bystanders and instigators of the violence, she has produced a history of their guilt and trauma, while reflecting on the uses of memory.   

The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.   

The word remember is coded with meaning.  When we piece together our memories of the past, we re-member them and the members are frequently not put back together again in the way an event happened.  This becomes more pronounced with the passage of time and the known tendency for people to make themselves more central to a story than they were at the time.  We also narrate the past in ways that burnish our reputation and preserve our conscience.  The Cultural Revolution has been reassembled in fragments; there is, and there will be, no initiative like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.  People can make of it what they want; but without justice, the losses fester. 

The lack of a shared public memory also means the Cultural Revolution can be made to service any goal.  Detached from the moorings of truth, it becomes a malleable symbol.  Xi Jinping suffered himself.  His father was purged, denounced as a counter-revolutionary, and sent to hard work in rural Shaanxi Province.  This is his creation myth, and how it made a man out of him.  But there are other lessons to be taken from that time which he has strategically and wilfully ignored.  The leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who followed Mao were determined that never again would one man develop a cult of personality like his, by ensuring limited presidential terms.  Xi Jinping has abolished this limit and introduced Xi Jinping Thought in an echo of Mao’s Little Red Book.  If there is one thing Xi has taken from his experience, it is the terror that chaos unleashes and the need to avoid it at all costs.  The collateral from this is human rights abuses on an industrial scale, to ensure there is no opposition to the CCP as the true expression of being Chinese.

Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work

The cult of Mao was idolatrous, usurping Christ.  Jesus said he would divide families: ‘father against son…mother against daughter…mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law’.  This divisiveness was located in his claim to be the way, the truth and the life.  He did not seek to divide families, but knew his claims would do so.  Mao intentionally turned families against themselves - the foundation of a civil society - to ensure loyalty to him would not be compromised.          

It is easy to identify this several decades on and at the safe distance of several thousand miles.  Idolatry is much harder to identify in our own culture, yet it is here we need to do this work.  It is also sloppy to make links between the ideological fervour and purity of Maoism and today’s social media culture.  There is no direct link, despite some claims.  But the story of how groups coalesce righteously and are manipulated into ever more extreme forms of factional purity has a disconcertingly contemporary feel. 

Review
Comedy
Culture
Film & TV
1 min read

Last One Laughing: we’re less in control than we think

"Humour is human" and deeply strange.

Jonathan is a priest and theologian who researches theology and comedy.

A montage shows a group of comedians trying not to laugh.
Amazon MGM Studios.

10 comedians shut in a room. Last one to laugh wins. 

It’s a simple concept, and with the addition of a few gimmicks, including games and surprise guests, Last One Laughing delivers on it. The show isn’t creative – there have been at least 27 previous versions in various languages – but it is successful and is a much-needed boost for Amazon Prime, whose content has tended to flop recently. 

I enjoyed the show. It amused me, which is what it was supposed to do. I didn’t necessarily laugh out loud, and I think I probably would have enjoyed all the comedians doing their own standup better. Some of the comics have made their infectious laughter such a part of their charm that it was a bit bizarre seeing them crack jokes without having a giggle (I’m looking at you Bob Mortimer). 

But overall, I had a good time watching Last One Laughing. I was entertained and I would recommend it. Jimmy Carr is unusually likeable as a host, though I wanted to hear more from Roisin Conaty, whose role as co-host was almost non-existent. Richard Ayoade was his normal genius self. And there were a few genuinely standout moments: I think my favourite was Rob Beckett whispering to Joe Wilkinson “you’ve doing a really really good job of showing off, lots of funny bits."

In fact, as that moment suggests, the show is probably at its best when it gets a bit meta, as the comedians reflect on their own comedy and what it is like to be a comic. Moreover, there is a genuine warmth between everyone, and an appreciation of each other’s talents, which gives the show a particularly endearing tone. 

It’s good, mindless, not particularly clean (definitely not family friendly!), fun. 

So Last One Laughing doesn’t tell us much we don’t already know. It’s not supposed to. It’s light entertainment. 

Comics are funny.  

Often the unexpected makes us laugh. 

Not laughing can be very hard. 

This last point, though, is perhaps worth thinking about a bit further. It is familiar to everyone. Who hasn’t felt the physical pain of trying to restrain the giggles in a moment when we really must not laugh? 

 But this is one of those things that is so familiar we often miss how strange it is. 

Philosophers since Aristotle have speculated that laughter is one of the things that makes humans unique, since we don’t know of any animals that laugh. Whether the claim about human exceptionalism is correct or not (and I confess I remain agnostic about this), it does seem that laughter is a practically universal experience of human beings. As Philosopher Simon Critchley puts it, “humour is human.” 

But if this is true, then laughter as a phenomenon also highlights some of the eccentricity of our humanity. For, as Last One Laughing shows us so clearly, laughter is only ever partially under our control. 

Our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within. 

We often like to imagine ourselves as rational beings, whose lives are characterised by making informed and free choices. We think we are in charge, at least of ourselves, and that we move through the world intentionally, with purpose and direction. 

And yet, into this nice picture of a life under control, laughter breaks in, often uncontrollably. Our muscles spasm. Our eyes stream. Our vocal cords erupt in strangely animal snorts and grunts. 

The fact that professional comedians and actors can’t maintain a straight face, sometimes in the face of their own jokes (take a bow Daisy May Cooper), should remind us that there is much in ourselves that is beyond our conscious control. Our laughter almost always has cognitive content. It involves our minds. We laugh at things. 

But it is always embedded within a body. Laughter, with all its bodily shakes and muscle twitches, sometimes just can’t be kept in, no matter what our minds and consciousness tells us. 

Christianity has long been aware of our lack of control. Paul, writing to the church in Rome, lamented that “I do not do what I want to, but I do the very thing I hate.” St Augustine, one of the greatest theologians of the Western Church, wrote in the fourth century that “I had become to myself a vast enigma.” Martin Luther, the sixteenth century German theologian, began the Reformation and changed history, in part over an insistence that we are far less in charge of ourselves than we like to think. 

Yet such writers do not counsel despair. Instead, they allow our lack of control to point to our need for God and his help. Paul, a few verses after the previous quotation, cries out: “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” 

Now, for all these authors, the stakes are high – they are talking about sin, death and damnation. The comedians in Last One Laughing are playing a much more relaxed game, all that they stand to lose is pride. Yet they too, one by one, discover that they “do not do the thing they want.” 

And so, they are learning a version of a Christian lesson – that we are less in control of ourselves than we might like to think. That our bodies, our spirits, even our minds, can betray us at any moment. That something we don’t want, even something good like laughter, can erupt from within. 

Now most of us, most of the time, probably enjoy the uncontrollability of laughter. It’s one of the things that make comedy enjoyable, both to watch and to perform. But it should maybe make us aware of other, less benign losses of control. Or at the least it should remind us that there is much in us that escapes our attempts at self-mastery. 

Last One Laughing reminded me that laughter is stranger than we think. Just as I am stranger than I think.