Bob Hope in China: Translating Hope's Jokes Into Mandarin and Cantonese

Bob Hope in China: Translating Hope's Jokes Into Mandarin and Cantonese

We taped the stage-show segments of our China special on July 4, 1979 at Peking's Capital Theater (one of the few things that Chairman Mao had allowed to contain the word capital) before an audience of PRC officials, foreign dignitaries, U.S. Ambassador Leonard Woodcock, his family, staff and American Embassy employees.

The language breakdown was about half Chinese, half English-speaking. Waiting backstage with Hope as the audience filed to their seats, we peered through a gap in the curtain as a dozen high-ranking Communist Party leaders were being seated in the front row. They wore gray, baggy suits with the impeccable tailoring of pajamas from Wal-Mart. They looked to be in the neighborhood of 80 and it must have been a rough neighborhood. Their lined faces reflected years of proletariat struggle, party in-fighting, industrial revolution and chain smoking.

Watching this grim potpourri of Maoists, Hope frowned. "Look at them. Not a smile and they don't even speak English. How am I supposed to get laughs?" "Don't worry, Bob," Gig offered soothingly. "How many peasants could they have purged? A couple of million. Three on the outside." Hope said, "You're right. What am I worried about? I survived vaudeville."

At rehearsal that afternoon, we had to settle on the most efficient method of translating the material. First, we tried projecting the Chinese characters on a large screen beside the stage, but the Chinese, well-known as fast readers, would laugh before Hope could finish each joke so we decided he'd need an interpreter on stage beside him.

We called for a volunteer and we got a good one - Ying Ruo Cheng, one of China's leading actors, who a decade later, would play the disgraced Mayor of Peking in the film "The Last Emperor." Cheng's sense of comic timing proved an equal of Hope's and he got as many laughs from the Chinese as Hope was getting from the Westerners. I had seldom seen Hope more delighted two laughs for the price of one.

Hope's opening line that night was hardly designed to divert the minds of our hosts from the Cold War:

"I can't believe I'm really here, but this must be China. Last night, I went to a movie called 'The America Syndrome'."

Starring Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda, "The China Syndrome" was playing to big box office in the states and concerned a threatened nuclear meltdown, a somewhat touchy subject in the PRC. But we were there to get laughs, and remember, this was before the age of political correctness. Hope continued:

"I've been seeing all the sights. Yesterday, I stopped by the Academy of Science and they offered me a job as an exhibit... Then I visited the Hall of Longevity. I promised my insurance man I would... And I loved the Great Wall of China. Of course, I love anything as old as I am."

Though at the time Hope was 77, until recently lines like these would never have made it into the monologue. But he was beginning to take a certain pride in having arrived in Senior-Citizenland. And especially in China, where age is revered, jokes like these fell on appreciative ears. Two years earlier, when he had reached 75, Jim Lipton, the producer of this special and many others during the 1980s, suggested we celebrate his birthday each year with a TV special. In 1980, 1981 and 1982, we celebrated at the nation's military academies so his age was no longer off-limits for the writers. That first year, he quipped "He's 75, he's 75 --- and I've lied to so many girls."

Hope continued:

"Then we visited the Forbidden City. What opulence! It looks like Caesar's Palace without the slot machines."

At this juncture, Cheng turned to Hope and asked, "What's a Caesar's Palace?"

The Chinese may have been in the dark, but as you would expect, the line got a huge laugh from the Westerners. Hope said, "It's a little place that takes the money the IRS didn't get." That's a pretty quick ad-lib, but you ain't seen nothin' yet. He continued:

"Yesterday, I visited your Marble Boat at the Summer Palace --- a boat made entirely of marble. At first they said it wouldn't float and then Billy Graham showed up."

Again, Cheng interrupted his translation and asked, "Who is Billy Graham?" And in one of the quickest ad-libs I had ever heard, Hope replied "Billy Graham is an adviser at Caesar's Palace." The line proved yet again what a consummate ad-libber Hope was.

During rehearsal, we got word that the Ministry of Culture had cut this joke from the monologue we had submitted for approval:

"They serve a drink over here called mao tai. One sip and your head feels like it's going through a Cultural Revolution. Two sips and it feels like a Gang-of-Four."

We gladly complied and excised the offending material. After all, we were batting .500. We lost this joke, but we managed to slip the America Syndrome line by them - most likely because they didn't have a clue as to its meaning.

Excerpted from THE LAUGH MAKERS: A Behind-the-Scenes Tribute to Bob Hope's Incredible Gag Writers (c) 2009 by Robert L. Mills and published by Bear Manor Media. To order: http://bobhopeslaughmakers.weebly.com

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