In May 2023, Feng Gong, the newly appointed chairman of the China Quyi Artists Association, talked about the six major work directions in the next five years, the third of which is to continuously launch excellent quyi works and quyi talents.
The six major work directions of the music association are mainly aimed at all quyi industries, which are highly generalized, and do not give specific guidance on the direction of cross talk creation and performance.
On February 25, 2024, Feng Gong, as the artistic director of the China Broadcasting Art Troupe, said this in an interview with CCTV reporters backstage at the 5th Intangible Cultural Heritage Crosstalk Conference:
It is necessary to continue to draw nutrients and refine themes from the changes of the times, the progress of China, and the call of the people, and strive to create better works to live up to the expectations of the audience for quyi art.
The background of this interview is the intangible cultural heritage cross talk conference, and the China Broadcasting Art Troupe is the organizer of the intangible cultural heritage cross talk conference, so CCTV marked Feng Gong in the news report as the artistic director of the China Broadcasting Art Troupe.
Feng Gong is not only the chairman of the China Quyi Artists Association, but also a cross talk predecessor who has a large number of classic cross talk works and has made great contributions to the cross talk industry.
We can extract twelve words from Feng Gong's speech, which can be regarded as the core tenet of the cross talk industry in the creation and performance of cross talk works: the change of the times, the progress of China, and the call of the people.
These twelve words come from the original text of the important speech of the 11th National Congress of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles, and Feng Gong's quotation on the direction of the creation of cross talk works is undoubtedly very appropriate, with the guiding significance of hitting the nail on the head from a high position.
Times have changed. Cross talk works must keep pace with the times and keep up with the changes of the times, at best, this is the need of the times and the needs of artistic development, and at the smallest, it is the needs of the audience, so the cross talk industry pays attention to "dismantling and washing over and over again", and many old jokes can also be turned into new works by integrating elements of the new era.
To give a successful example, when Guo Degang became famous, he had a masterpiece "Dream of the Western Expedition", which is a new work that integrates nonsensical and funny elements of the Internet era on the basis of the traditional cross talk "Playing Bai Lang", which has the structure of traditional cross talk and the characteristics of the Internet era, and became popular as soon as it was launched.
There are also negative examples, Guo Degang smashed his peers in a performance in 2023 to "take paper notes and prepare to report them offstage", which is obviously far behind the times, the voice recorder has long been eliminated, any mobile phone has an audio and video recording function, how can it be possible to use paper and pen to secretly memorize, like this kind of lines are too outdated to inevitably be used by netizens as a negative teaching material for ridicule.
Of course, there are still the most positive examples in the cross talk industry, and many classic cross talks that keep up with the changes of the times have been born in the history of cross talk, such as Jiang Kun and Li Wenhua's "Taking Photo Like This", "Grandpa's Troubles", Jiang Kun Tang Jiezhong's "Reverie in the Tiger's Mouth", "Elevator Adventure", "Hurry", "Beautiful March", etc., Niu Qun Feng Gong's "Thief Company", "Auction", etc.
At the 5th Intangible Cultural Heritage Crosstalk Conference, there were also some works that closely followed the changes of the times, such as Liu Ji and Feng Yudan's "Superheroes", Dou Chenguang and Chang Pengxu's "New Newspaper Dish Names", Liu Yinghaonan's "Fashion Commentary", Fan Junming's "Intangible Cultural Heritage Live Room", etc.
China's advance. As far as the cross talk industry is concerned, from 1949 to 1978 to today, a large number of classic cross talk works will be born with every progress in our country, which shows the rapid changes in the construction of the motherland from all angles and levels, among which the representative figures are Ma Ji and Jiang Kun.
Ma Ji's works "Praise of Mountaineering Heroes", "Ode to Friendship", "New Peach Blossom Spring", "Small Scene of Mountain Village", Jiang Kun's "Big News", "Beautiful March", "Looking Back at Jiu", "Ming Chun Song", "Wonderful Netsheng", "New Tiger Mouth Reverie", Liu Wei and Feng Gong's "Qiao to the Film", Niu Qun Feng Gong's "The Best of the Asian Games", "Point Company", "Two Tide Makers", etc., as well as Hou Yaowenshi Fukuan's "Romance of Beijing and Kowloon" are all excellent works that can reflect the progress of the social development era.
At the 3rd Intangible Cultural Heritage Crosstalk Conference, Jia Xuming and Zheng Jian's "New Mythology", Dong Jianchun and Li Ding's "Beijing, Beijing, Get to Know" at the 5th Intangible Cultural Heritage Crosstalk Conference, and Feng Gong, Jia Xuming, and Cao Suifeng's "I Love Poetry 3" are also representative works in this regard.
The call of the people. First of all, it needs to be explained that there is a difference between the people and the "people," and the people represent positive, correct, and advanced people.
In the face of the call of the people, cross talk actors must not only have a brave and innovative spirit, but also have the courage to be bold and satirical, and at the same time serve as the people's mouthpiece, reflecting those phenomena and problems close to the people's lives in their works, such works abound in the history of cross talk.
Hou Baolin's "Night Travel", "Marriage and Superstition", Ma Sanli's "Buying a Monkey" and "Beginning at Ten O'Clock", Ma Ji's "Multi-storey Hotel" and "A Salesman", Jiang Kun and Tang Jiezhong's "Elevator Adventure", "Hurry" and "Corridor Song", Niu Qun Feng Gong's "I Was Wrong", "Confused", "Tomorrow Will Be Better", Niu Qun Li Lishan's "Qiao Li Ming", as well as Jiang Kun and others' "Expert Guidance" and Hou Yaowen and others' "New Wave Businessman" are all classic works that can reflect the call of the people.
At the 4th Intangible Cultural Heritage Crosstalk Conference, Jia Xuming and Zheng Jian's "Contemporary Heroes", the two of them at the 5th Intangible Cultural Heritage Crosstalk Conference's "Routine, Water Margin", Chen Yinquan, Hou Zhenpeng's "Healthy Boy", Liu Zhao and Liu Di's "Impetuous", Wang Tong, Guo Wei, Cao Suifeng's "Who to Listen to", Jin Fei and Chen Xi's "Think Too Much" are also excellent cross talks that can reflect the call of the people.
Now the question.
After the end of the Spring Festival Gala in 2024, some bloggers on the Internet uploaded a batch of classic cross talk**, and in the comment area of Ma Ji and others' "Five Senses Fight for Merit"**, some viewers said: Don't sell cute, don't pretend to be stupid, don't pretend to be ugly, don't exaggerate, don't clip yellow paragraphs, and don't mention sister-in-law. It can make you smile and never forget it after listening to it, this is art, classic art.
In the comment area of Niu Qun Feng Gong's cross talk "Holding a Party", some netizens said: They all say that the current party is not good-looking, the reason is that the current people's appreciation level is high, so why is the replay of the previous cross talk sketches still so funny?
In the comment area of Niu Qun Feng Gong's "Sit and Enjoy It", netizens have a very classic sentence: never getting tired of watching is the only criterion for testing classics.
The voices of these audiences are, of course, also the voices of the people, who are dissatisfied with some of the chaos that exists in the cross talk industry now, and call on the cross talk industry to learn from their predecessors to create more good cross talk with content and themes.
In fact, for the vast majority of cross talk actors, it is not difficult to understand the twelve words "the changes of the times, the progress of China, and the call of the people", and they also know that the cross talk created according to these twelve character standards will definitely be welcomed by the audience.
However, why are there very few classic works in the cross talk industry in recent years, but all kinds of tofu scum cross talk like crawling cross talk often appear? This is true even on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala.
First of all, the way cross talk actors become famous has changed, in the past, actors became famous by their works, and now many actors become famous by hype, no matter how bad cross talk is, even if they crawl all over the ground on the stage, there is still a rice circle touting, in this case, although these actors with large traffic and low level occupy a lot of resources and stages, they can't come up with any excellent works at all.
Secondly, the creative direction of cross talk actors has changed, and many cross talk actors have been misled and regard "cross talk is Tu Yile" as the creative direction, which has given birth to a lot of bottomless and funny tofu scum cross talk.
Again, the evaluation criteria for cross talk actors have changed, and many people don't measure a cross talk from the content of cross talk, that is, theme, logic, connotation, etc., but simply evaluate cross talk from funny, which in turn affects the ecology of the entire cross talk industry, making tofu scum cross talk "deserved".
Cross talk is a language art that can make people laugh, but cross talk is not a funny entertainment method for the sake of being funny, for the current popular "cross talk is a picture of music" idea in the cross talk industry, Chang Baokun and Ma Sanli's partner, Hou Yaowen's **, Guo Degang's master Zhao Peiru has long had an opinion: Good cross talk cannot be without baggage, but too much baggage is not necessarily a good cross talk.
As a national intangible cultural heritage project, the value of cross talk should not only bring laughter to the audience, but also have innovative content, which can make the audience feel something while having fun, which is the true meaning of language arts.
The changes of the times, the progress of China, and the call of the people, the direction is here, the 5th Intangible Cultural Heritage Crosstalk Conference, especially the special session of the new works of the China Radio Rap Troupe, has been demonstrated, and then it will be up to the cross talk actors to do it.