In The Misadventures of Master Mugwort: A Joke Book Trilogy from Imperial China, Elizabeth Smithrosser offers a translation of three collections of jokes, printed face to face in Chinese and English: Miscellaneous Stories of Master Mugwort (Aizi zashuo, late eleventh century), long attributed to Su Shi (1037–1101); Further Sayings of Master Mugwort (Aizi houyu, 1516), by Lu Cai (1497–1537); and Outer Sayings of Master Mugwort (Aizi waiyu, 1608), by Tu Benjun (1542–1622). As the titles indicate, the three collections share a protagonist, “Master Mugwort” (Aizi), a fictional philosopher and political advisor of the Warring States period. Like some figures in the Zhuangzi, Master Mugwort is sometimes clever, at other times obtuse. He appears in some jokes as a statesman, in others as a teacher. In some jokes he merely overhears a funny conversation or makes a clever comment about other people’s opinions or actions. Some of the humor, especially in the two Ming collections, lies in the parody and pastiche of Warring States texts, notably philosophical dialogues and the Intrigues of the Warring States (Zhanguo ce). None of the parody or pastiche, however, is very precise. Master Mugwort interacts with rulers in different states and across several centuries, he quotes the Lotus Sutra, and he negotiates with printers of religious images.

To explain the setting of the jokes to her readers, Smithrosser includes in her introduction two maps of the Warring States as well as a table with names and dates of rulers who appear in the jokes. Smithrosser argues that the jokes about Master Mugwort parody mostly the “persuasions” (shuo/shui) and the “disputations” (bian) of the Warring States (xxv–xxiv), as well as the “Biographies of the Humorists” in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), in which courtiers use irony and hyperbole to remonstrate with rulers. She emphasizes, however, that “the Master Mugwort collections are much less parodies of Warring States matters than they are satires of their own day and age, whereby the Warring States setup is a vehicle through which to poke fun at current affairs and human folly more broadly” (xxiv). The collections moreover allow us “to explore the extent of the ‘Warring States world’ as conceived in the Song and Ming. These are more than collections of fictional anecdotes. Rather, they are slideshows of how people in our past imagined their own” (xiv–xv).

Translating jokes is often difficult and sometimes thankless. Like a good poem, a good joke is concise and makes effective use of rhythm and idiom. But the audience of a joke has a more definite expectation than the audience of a poem, as a joke must end with a punch line and is written toward that punch line, as if to a deadline. In order to save a punch line, a translator sometimes must change the substance of a joke. Smithrosser generally handles these challenges well. She turns two rhymed verdicts into one, as the subject matter of the first verdict allows her to sustain the rhyme in English (127), and she finds a solution to translate a joke in which Master Mugwort at an inn thinks that the man in the neighboring room has completed “yet another poem” (you yi shou 又一首) whereas in fact the man has filled “yet another hand” (you yi shou 又一手) with diarrhea (46–49). In her acknowledgments, Smithrosser thanks one of the anonymous readers of her manuscript for pushing her “towards a boldness of approach that, I hope, does justice to the original text” (ix). This boldness makes the translations in this volume fluent and idiomatic. In addition to introducing many jokes with a brief explanation of historical details or cultural premises, Smithrosser also makes effective use of notes. She provides footnotes to explain literary allusions and historical context, and endnotes to offer more technical explanations and occasionally alternative translations.

The jovial vernacular that characterizes Smithrosser’s “bold approach,” however, does not always serve her well. Sometimes an easy colloquial style makes a punch line more obscure than it is in the original. For example, when a sixty-nine-year-old woman reluctantly yields to a seventy-year-old woman, she says, in Smithrosser’s translation, “I’m sixty-nine. But give it a year and I’ll have caught up with you!” (9). The simple rhythm and direct language of the original seem to me more effective: “I am now sixty-nine. But next year I’ll be the same age as you!” Similarly, when the Dragon King announces that he will behead all water creatures that have a tail, a worried frog says, in Smithrosser’s translation, “I’m terrified my past will come back to haunt me!” (31). The Chinese text again is more direct: “I am afraid that they will prosecute me for having been a tadpole!” When Master Mugwort dreams about Kui Xing, a deity associated with literary talent and success in the imperial examinations, the god turns out to be an impostor who buys an unearned scholar’s cap and answers the Jade Emperor’s classical phrasings in contemporary language (e.g., “I bought this one,” mai le zheige, 102), but in Smithrosser’s translation Kui Xing and the Jade Emperor both speak in the vernacular.

The best jokes in the three collections, in my opinion, are those that set Master Mugwort in a setting that readers knew better than the fictional character does. In one joke, Master Mugwort travels to the state of Wei as an envoy for the state of Qi. At the Wei court, he boasts to King Anxi that the King of Qi has talented entertainers among his ministers, such as “Chunyu Kun with his caged birds, Sun Bin and his foot-juggling, and Master Dongguo who plays the pipes” (5). Readers of the joke knew that Chunyu Kun set free a goose intended for the King of Chu, that Sun Bin “was famously kneecapped for a crime he did not commit during his early career” (7), and that Dongguo was a musician famous for his lack of talent. The frequent anachronisms in the jokes (such as references to printing and to Buddhist monks, texts, and buildings) do not seem to contribute to the humor (as they do in the comic strip Astérix, for example), and seem rather to be traces of an incomplete transformation of Song- and Ming-dynasty jokes into jokes about Master Mugwort and the Warring States. The two Ming collections, both written in imitation of the Song collection, are more consistent in their pastiche and parody of Warring States texts than is the Song collection.

For this reason, I doubt the attribution of the Miscellaneous Stories of Master Mugwort to Su Shi. Smithrosser suspects that critics have rejected the attribution because they have deemed the “humor-filled and occasionally bawdy” collection “incompatible with a figure of such literary greatness,” and she hopes that “fresh textual evidence or new digital methods” will settle the matter (136). It may be impossible to prove that a particular person did not write a certain text, but we could ask instead what the Miscellaneous Stories of Master Mugwort might have looked like if it had been written by Su Shi. First, we know that Su Shi had a gift for pastiche. In one of his essays for the jinshi examinations of 1057, he invented an anecdote about Emperor Yao that was so convincing that when his examiners did not recognize it, they doubted their own memory rather than suspecting the candidate of having fabricated the episode.Footnote ¹ It seems unlikely that Su Shi would have neglected this gift for pastiche in writing a collection of jokes about a fictional Warring States philosopher. Second, modern scholars who have sought to substantiate the attribution of the Miscellaneous Stories of Master Mugwort to Su Shi have argued that he wrote the collection during his exile on the island of Hainan (135). During that exile, thinking that he would die, Su Shi wrote a commentary on the Book of Documents (Shang shu) that he regarded as his most important work—together with his commentaries on the Analects (Lunyu) and the Book of Changes (Yijing)—and also finished matching all surviving poems by Tao Qian.Footnote ² It is not clear why Su Shi would have compiled a collection of poorly written jokes during this time. The collection lacks the literary play with which he habitually amused himself, and there was no other audience. Finally, according to his brother Su Zhe, Su Shi found his voice and his style when he read the Zhuangzi. Footnote ³ If Su Shi had written the Miscellaneous Stories of Master Mugwort, he would no doubt have exploited the instability of the figure of Master Mugwort for humorous as well as philosophical effect. For these reasons, I doubt Su Shi’s authorship of the Miscellaneous Stories of Master Mugwort. The problem is not that its jokes are “occasionally bawdy,” but that Su Shi would have made better use of its conceits. His collection would have been better written, funnier, and more poignant.

In sum, Elizabeth Smithrosser deserves gratitude for her accurate, well-annotated rendition of three little-known collections of Song and Ming jokes. The book provides materials for comparative studies of humor and jokes, and it provides a useful reminder—to scholars as well as, perhaps, to undergraduate students—that literati of the late imperial period not only memorized and debated classical texts, but also parodied them and turned them into jokes.