Probably since Xu Zheng's "People on the Road" series in 2010, Chinese films have begun to enter an era dominated by comedies, and comedies have often refreshed the box office records of that year every year, such as "Charlotte Troubles", "Mermaid", "Catch the Demon", "Hello, Li Huanying", "Heart Flower Road Release", "The Richest Man in Xihong" and other films with comedy elements have also successfully produced a large number of comedians, including Shen Teng, Ma Li, Zhang Xiaofei, Jia Ling and so on.
But does the box office hit of Chinese comedy reflect the overall level of our comedy films today? This is actually still debatable, the current comedy is almost a stable profit, less investment, large audience, the audience can be generally accepted, the theater is willing to give more scheduling.
If you try to go to theaters with questions and experience for yourself the reasons why comedy is popular in China, then you can easily find the answer, today's movies make it easier to make the audience laugh than to make the audience cry, and the audience laughs almost from the beginning to the end when watching the comedy movie.
But are these comedies really that funny, at least some people with high laughter points may not laugh out loud.
From a professional point of view, it must be easier to make people laugh in the movie theater than to sit in front of a computer, because "laughter" itself is contagious, and we are also following a herd mentality when "laughing". Just like the usual trick used in sitcoms in the past, whether it is funny or not, there is always a group of off-camera viewers smirking there, and practitioners call this "canned laughter", which is a psychological hint to the audience in front of the TV.
In the theater, after the not-so-funny bridge sections are encouraged by the laughter of others, if you don't react the same way, it always feels like you don't understand people's stems, which is a very humiliating thing.
Chen Peisi has great worries about the fact that comedy films have begun to study the audience's latent consciousness, in his opinion, the high-level comedy must be the characters and the story itself, that is a kind of heartfelt laughter, a kind of stoicism, rather than the actor trying to jump off the stage and creak the audience, while grinning his teeth and doing an exaggerated performance, while staring at the eyeballs and asking you: You see I have fallen on my head, do you not laugh?
Nowadays, the Internet is also the biggest accomplice to help comedy take shortcuts, if you really don't know how to amuse the audience, as long as you find some passages from the Internet and memorize them, use them on the comedy stage, then basically laughter can be guaranteed.
Some people think that "laughter" itself is not high and low, for comedy, making people laugh is the ultimate goal, if the audience laughs, comedy is considered successful. Chen Peisi obviously disagrees with this view, in his view, such a laugh is equivalent to the difference between fast food and cuisine. You eat a Buddha jumping off the wall and you eat a meal of "old dry mother" mixed rice to achieve the same effect in the end, all of them are filling the stomach, all of them maintain vital signs, but the difference in the process is indeed huge, which is the difference between high comedy and low comedy in Chen Peisi's eyes.
And the reason why our unsmiling comedies can succeed is because of the needs of today's audiences, all the people who hold tickets into the theater are actually ready to go to the theater to have a good laugh, in this 100 minutes or so there will be no accidents, so that the comedy itself has not been tested more.
Chen Peisi insists that comedy is the study of comedy technology itself, not the study of the audience. Just like a good dish, what it tastes like is what it tastes, you have to let the diners adapt to the character of the dish, not to say that in order to satisfy the taste of a hundred people, make a hundred flavors of kung pao chicken, and you can't make sweet because you have diabetic kung pao chicken.
From Chen Qiang to Chen Peisi, and then to Chen Dayu, this family has formed three generations of comedy inheritance, which is very important in Chen Peisi's view, through the efforts of three generations, they "plant crops on the cement ground", groping out a comedy creation and performance experience, and now they have continuously improved these experiences and knowledge, and constantly polished and improved on the drama stage. Chen Peisi hopes that the essence summarized and explored by the three generations can be passed on from generation to generation.
Unlike some of the more impetuous comedians, Chen Peisi plunged into the study of comedy, read a large number of books every day, conducted deep thinking, and took his own drama team on a national tour. In the Chinese Song and Yuan Southern Opera work "Zhang Xiezhuangyuan", he also saw the wisdom of the ancients, and also felt the profound achievements of the comedians.
The better "Zhang Xiezhuangyuan", the more anxious Chen Peisi is, and in the fifth season of "Round Table Pie", the host Dou Wentao said that he was "born less than a hundred years old, often worried about a thousand years".
Chen Peisi in the show kept shaking his head, he said: "Today's comedy movies don't look at so many box office, it is far from the level of the ancients, today's comedy movies are string sugar gourds, and the ancients have already stacked beds." Comedy will die sooner or later if it does this.
In Chen Peisi's view, comedy is definitely a great wisdom, and it is definitely a very advanced art, from the script, rehearsal, to the performance, a group of actions, a line after all, have been rigorously crafted.
Comedy should look at the eyes and the heart, just like stepping on a stone to cross the river, and each stone should be a bridge section that the creator presets, carefully designs, and arranges with heart.
And our comedy today is too childish, and also developed some not very good problems, such as like the "sad head and happy tail" mode, the early stage with a lot of paragraphs to creak you laugh, and finally suddenly a change of mood, caught off guard to give you a tear gas, do not know who invented such a twisted drama program.
In the "Gold Medal Comedy Class", Chen Peisi also criticized some drama actors, and the "Can't Forget" performed by Gao Haibao and Li Haiyin was not favored by Teacher Chen Peisi, who believed that this was a work of "performance has always been in the results", all of which are composed of paragraphs, can not see the actor's own acting skills and communication, lack of details, only the pursuit of results.
Although Chen Peisi's pursuit of material life is not high, he wears frugal clothes, the standard outfit is a pair of shoes, an old man's shirt, a bowl of ramen noodles when performing in other places, or simply squatting on the side of the road to eat a pancake. Today, Chen Peisi is still working hard for comedy, and he is running non-stop around the country with his own drama works in his 60s, not for fame and fortune, but for the sake of continuing to pass on the essence of comedy that he thinks.