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In their article "About English-language Scholarship on Humor in Ancient Chinese Literature" Peina Zhuang and Lei Cheng present an overview of scholarship by English-language Sinologists on humor.Zhuang and Cheng argue that while English-language scholars have played a path-breaking role in making prominent an important aspect of ancient Chinese literature, their studies also display weaknesses including questionable choices of source material, decontextualized analysis, or even mistranslation. They posit that the study of humor in ancient Chinese literature ought to be performed in a contextual perspective including linguistics, literary history, society, politics, etc. Peina Zhuang and Lei Cheng, "About English-language Scholarship on Humor in Ancient Chinese Literature" page 2 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015):  Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao Peina ZHUANG and Lei CHENG About English-language Scholarship on Humor in Ancient Chinese Literature Although the phrase for humor (幽默) was introduced by Lin Yutang in the 1930s, the concept of humor has long existed in diverse forms in Chinese (see his An Autobiography 86). There are many outstanding texts Sinologists have produced throughout the years. For example, in his 1901 A History of Chinese Literature Herbert A. Giles devoted a section to wit and humor from classical Chinese texts. Giles wrote that "it is a novel of real life, and to omit, therefore, the ordinary frailties of mortals would be to produce an incomplete and inadequate picture" (433). Further examples include Henry W. Wells who in his 1971 Traditional Chinese Humor: A Study in Art and Literature covered humor in the genres of poetry, drama, and fictional narratives and Jon Kowallis's 1986 Wit and Humor from Old Cathay is a compilation of humorous anecdotes in ancient Chinese literary texts. What distinguishes Kowallis's book from other publications is the selection of original material from sources which go beyond texts by ancient philosophers. Further, in the 2001 The Columbia History of Chinese Literature Karin Myhre discussed the characteristics of humor in Chinese literature and it is the most detailed investigation of humor in Chinese literature in terms of source materials, as well as in terms of the time span covered. The 2011 Humor in Chinese Life and Letters, edited by Jocelyn Chey and Jessica Milner Davis, is a two-volume collection of articles about various forms of humor from early times to the twentieth century (on the history of humor in Chinese literature see also Yue). Further important studies on humor in ancient Chinese literature include Alvin Kohen's "Humorous Anecdotes in Chinese Historical Texts, "David Knechtges's "Wit, Humor and Satire in Early Chinese Literature (to A.D.220)," Christoph Harbsmeier's "Humor in Ancient Chinese Philosophy" and "Confucius Ridens: Humor in the Analects," Weihe Xu's "The Confucian Politics of Appearance and Its Impact on Chinese Humor." Although the terminology of humor was borrowed from the West, humor is diverse in Chinese literature as manifested by abundant expressions equivalent to the meaning of humor including 笑话 (joke), 戏谑 (jest), 滑稽 (buffoonery), and 嘲讽 (satire). The Chinese characters for humor did exist before Lin Yutang's introduction, but they meant nothing related to being funny in its first use in a poem by Qu Yuan (屈原), a Chinese poet from the pre-Qin period(221-206 BC). The term Qu Yuan wrote was 幽默 (humor) meaning "quiet." Further early uses of the idea include the term 戏谑 (jocosity) in the 诗 经 (Book of Songs). Jin Li holds that "'Jocosity without harm to others' has been regarded as the origin and standard for humor in ancient China"(2; unless indicated otherwise, all translations are by Zhuang and Cheng). Despite its presence, humor in Chinese literary history rarely attracts critical attention, and, what is more, most of the time it is not even seen as "genuine" literature in the Chinese tradition. Considering the fact that, in the past, the novel had not been classified as literature either, maybe we should not be surprised that literary texts with humor was not considered a genre per se in Chinese literary history. Although Giles's exploration of humor was important in that he introduced basic information about forms and authors and because he was the first English-language scholar who studied it. Myhre furthered Giles's efforts and presented a more elaborate analysis where humor appears as worthy subject in itself: "While other types of literature may be identified by formal generic characteristics or historical period, the boundaries of humorous literature are comparatively indistinct ... It was only in the Ming and Ch'ing periods, as popular literature became more acceptable and the audience for written versions of these age-old forms grew, that jokes and humorous drama and fiction were conscientiously collected, published and preserved ... The meanings associated with words for humor in ancient China mirror verbal methods of constructing jokes, the conceptual functioning of jokes and humor, and the social and cultural effects of joking, which can create both harmony and division" (132-35). This also implies that classics are classics not because of their existence in a time span, but because scholars (and readers) construct them as classics and hence the study and inclusion of humor in literature contributes to a wider construction of Chinese literary history. Another aspect worth noticing in English-language analyses is the importance attached to the role of social, economic, and cultural factors in literature with humor in the Ming (1368-1644 AD) and Qing dynasties (1644-1912 AD). This resonates with Min Wang's observation that "The earliest literary history tends to expounds literature from the external social, economic, and cultural elements" (94). As a consequence, the analysis of humor, if separated from the historical course and external factors, will Peina Zhuang and Lei Cheng, "About English-language Scholarship on Humor in Ancient Chinese Literature" page 3 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.1 (2015):  Thematic Issue The Study of Chinese Literature in the Anglophone World. Ed. Shunqing Cao become rather blurry and indistinct. The question of translation is a further important aspect of the study of humor because the linguistic turn in philosophy in the 1970s translation is no longer seen as a static process of rendition between two languages. Instead, as proposed by André Lefevere, the process of translation is related to the ideology and poetics, as well as the universe of discourse and the language upon which translators base their translations. Apart from their purpose of cultural communication, foreign language versions become important materials for academic research in the West. Thus for scholars who do not have access to the original version of Chinese literature for various reasons, the translated version presents the whole world of Chinese literature and is the basis for their research. This may explain partly why Confucius's analects have become a common text for research on humor in Chinese literature where selected passages from Confucius's work have been translated and interpreted over and over since the first English version came out in the seventeenth century. What is more, translation sometimes turned into a literary variation of the original. Literary variation means that a literary text that travels to a new environment will inevitably undergo "various extents of variations owing to the new positions in the new environment and its new usages" (114]). Thus the aspect of "variation" is particularly relevant owing to the linguistic, literary, and cultural differences between Chinese and Western languages including English as illustrated in Shunqing Cao's 比较文学学 (184-217) (Study of Comparative Literature). Traditional Chinese humor can be classified as "soft humor" featuring indirectness because it does not match the extent of aggressiveness and exaggerations displayed in Western humor: "Western humor, mostly, has the naturalness of depending on the plot and atmosphere coupled with philosophic words full of wit, while the Chinese humor often takes the form of a story by describing the contradiction between a person's words and deeds, or between beauty and ugliness with idiomatic expressions"(Yin38]). Just like any reader the translator could also read humor into the text, thus causing a misreading. For instance, among the English versions of poems in the Book of Songs, one is translated in the following way: "On the tendrils long and short, / The water-mallows sway: / The lord sighs for the loved one, / Dreaming night and day" (Wells 53). Based on his translation, Wells believes that the poem presents "a sly comment on the unsuccessful attempts of a lord to seduce a peasant girl and that it is the part of the very essence of humor that it surprises us by showing the weaker in reality the stronger and to this extent, at least, sides with the underdog" (53). Without looking at the original Chinese text, one might be persuaded by this interpretation of the poem since it presents to readers a surprising situation of reversal, a conventional technique. That is, the superior party (the lord), who longs for the love of the beautiful girl in the end becomes the inferior party in the poem thus causing incongruity in readers' expectation. Incongruity is a central aspect in the study of humor and laughter first formulated by Aristotle and then developed by Kant and Schopenhauer the latter of whom assumed that the cause of laughter in every case is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation and laugh itself is just an expression of this incongruity (see, e.g., Attardo; see also Latta).Incongruity concentrates on th