Black comedy films in postsocialist China: Case study of Ning Hao's Crazy series

ABSTRACT Black comedy films are works that use humor to potentially challenge normalized social perceptions, affects and practices by inducing uneasy amusement and emotional release from taboos, traumas, crises and other subjects usually deemed serious by a given society. This article attempts to contextualize Ning Hao's Crazy series – films that initiated a ‘black comedy fever’ in the mainland Chinese market in the 2000s – with reference to China's postsocialist condition and to analyze the films’ coping strategies for dealing with contesting sociocultural forces. I argue that as consumer-oriented black comedies, Ning's films negotiate between the imperatives of the market, the state and society through commodification and carnivalization of both mainstream and non-mainstream sociocultural phenomena, providing a self-reflexive parody of popular film genres and other commercial cultural forms.