Laughing down the ages: A brief history of humour in China

It is a great honour to be invited to deliver the 2012 A. R. Davis Lecture, following in the steps of so many distinguished scholars in the Asian Studies field. I should like to take this opportunity to pay my respects to Professor Bertie Davis, to whose memory this lecture is dedicated. He was my teacher throughout my undergraduate years and supervised my doctoral thesis. He was my inspiration and my mentor, as he was also for many other students and colleagues. His 1984 lecture entitled 'In Search of Love and Truth' enshrines values that we still treasure and should be read by those who are now entrusted by the government with the task of applying the principles of Ken Henry's paper on Australia in the Asian Century. In his introduction to this lecture, he noted that the title referenced the famous work by the late nineteenth-century Chinese scholar Yan Fu, 'In Search of Power and Wealth', and deliberately proposed a contradictory title to show that studies of other cultures need not be aimed at improving the economy or increasing trade. He hailed those Chinese and Japanese scholars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who incorporated Western ideas into new literary and artistic forms and said they were the true 'pioneers in the pursuit of cultural understanding which is surely one of the great unquestioned aims of contemporary man'. This he called 'the search for love and truth', and this is the goal towards which we still strive today. It is to this goal that I dedicate this lecture.