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1Satirical Tibet, the first book-length study devoted to Tibetan arts of humour, and in particular to the comedic skits that emerged in Amdo in the post-Mao period, represents a major contribution to our knowledge of cultural practices in contemporary Tibet. Studies of modern secular Tibetan performing arts have until recently remained rather marginal (Henrion-Dourcy 2017). Timothy sThurston’s study is especially valuable because it examines forms of cultural production whose audiences – unlike those of better studied expressive forms such as modern Tibetan literature – included not only lettered, but also semi-literate and illiterate Tibetans.

2The book is based on four years’ fieldwork in Qinghai Province between 2011 and 2015, and shorter trips to the region until 2019. Thurston’s research methods combine participant observation, interviews, textual criticism, and the analysis of audiovisual materials. The author’s remarkable translation skills, along with the systematic inclusion of the original texts of all translated passages, will allow specialists and non-specialists alike to have a taste of Tibetan humour.

3The emic concept of zurza may be glossed as “satire,” but more specifically refers to a Tibetan practice of critique through indirection and humour. It ties together the different chapters to offer a richly contextualised account of “how zurza provides cultural producers with a traditional resource to tell Tibetan stories in post-Mao Amdo” (p. 16), allowing them to access tightly monitored media while simultaneously voicing meaningful critiques.

4Following an introduction that sets the scene and familiarises readers with the ethnolinguistic region of Amdo, which is about the size of France and occupies the north-eastern part of the Tibetan Plateau, the book is divided into five chapters. Chapter One provides an overview of various written and oral traditions of satire in Tibet, and describes how Tibetans came into contact with Chinese concepts of satire (fengci 諷刺) during the decades following their incorporation into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Comedic dialogues written in Tibetan, which first appeared in 1980, may be understood “as a sort of successor genre to traditional storytelling,” because audiences expect them “to both entertain and to instruct” (p. 54). As an eminent Amdo comedian explains, combining verbal art and humorous satire, they “all have a little criticism written in them,” and share the cultural foundation of “using zurza to solve problems” (p. 63). The varied expressive forms examined by Thurston are thus all instances of “socially conscious cultural production” (p. 62), linked to ideas of “ethnic pride” that flourished in the 1980s and continue to inform cultural discussions today.

5Chapters Two to Five, focussing respectively on the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and the post-2008 period, are built in a similar way. Starting with a commented excerpt from a comedic dialogue (khashag), sketch (garchung), or hip-hop (zheematam) video clip emblematic of the period examined, a succinct account of the social, cultural, economic, and political contexts in which they emerged is provided. Given the rapid transformations that Amdo underwent over the last decades (which sometimes align with, but often differ from those that occurred in other regions of the PRC), this is indispensable to help readers grasp the relevance of topics broached in the works under scrutiny. It also ensures that the changing technological and institutional conditions framing the production and access to the works considered are never lost from view. The author then returns to the chapter’s opening piece, deepening its analysis, and broadening the focus to discuss other cultural productions and intellectual debates characterising each period. More details about each chapter’s corpus (e.g., how often were khashag published in journals, or aired on radio or television? How many were produced?), and taking economic aspects into account would have allowed for an even more grounded description of the place of these expressive forms in Amdo’s cultural life, and of the ways in which their audiences evolved in social, geographical, and generational terms.

6Thurston reminds us that censors carefully scrutinise performance scripts, and alludes to the consequences suffered by the famed comedian Menla Jyab – who was indeed jailed around 1996 for using his stage performances to address the pervasive corruption of government officials (Donyol Dondrup and Makley 2018). Generally, however, issues of censorship and self-censorship are treated in more oblique ways, by showing what topics and behaviours could be placed under the satirical spotlight during each period, in accordance with the changing political orientations of the times, all the while meeting the public’s expectations for meaningful critique and entertainment. In contrast to Tibetan hip-hop, where references to Tibet and calls for ethnic unity may be explicit, skits produced within state cultural institutions always remain “locally focussed,” leaving possible generalisation to the interpretive work of audiences. The few references to government policies are always positive (e.g., in 1980, the Four Modernisations), or indirect (e.g., in the mid-2000s, mention of a “New Village” may remind audiences of “environmental migration” projects underway). Apart from the rare appearance of foreigners, the characters are all Tibetans, from different walks of life. In the skits described in Satirical Tibet, we meet, among others, several pastoralists and urbanites, a local Party secretary (in Dondrup Jya’s 1980 “Studying Tibetan”), a village leader and a comedian mistaken for a lama (in Menla Jyab’s 1990s “Careful Village” series), and a sinicised Tibetan teacher (in Menla Jyab’s 2007 “Gesar’s Horse Herder”).

7The focus of satire changes in different periods. Addressed to an insiders’ public of fellow Amdo Tibetans, it resonates with them not only because it touches upon issues of common concern, but also because it at times provides an uncomfortable mirror of their own attitudes. Thurston demonstrates that, in the 1980s, critique focused on those Tibetans who believed that their language had no value in modern society. In the 1990s, “social critique” targeted “unmodern” behaviours, such as blind religious faith, inter-village feuds, or neglect of education. In the 2000s, “cultural critique” exposed the lack of cultural and linguistic competence of certain educated Tibetans. In the 2010s, this cultural critique intensified in hip-hop, pointing to the current conditions of Tibetan life and the “failings of both the state and previous generations of Tibetan intellectuals” (p. 127).

8One theme permeates the four decades examined: the preoccupation with the continued use of written and spoken Tibetan, refusing the monoglot language ideology promoted by the state, which frames “minority languages and regional dialects as anti-modern ‘Others’” (p. 92). Although some Tibetan rappers pin-point the shortcomings of modernist intellectuals, they voice similar language-related concerns in the midst of accelerated urbanisation and policies that leave less and less space for Tibetan-medium education. Still-popular skits of the past and new videos and rap “collapse into a single logic of Tibetan cultural survival: their shared interests in modernizing communities through language” (p. 147).

9Satirical Tibet thus shows how cultural producers in Amdo have been able to exercise agency in the post-Mao period, using zurza “to foreground issues seen as particularly pressing for their communities in spite of the tremendously asymmetric power of the Chinese state,” acting strategically with the aim to “improve their own lives and those of their fellow Tibetans” (p. 151–2). As Thurston writes in his conclusion, “the future of Tibetan media and expressive cultures are very much up in the air at the moment” (p. 152). One cannot help but wonder how the 2026 Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress (Minzu tuanjie jinbu cujin fa 民族團結進步促進法) will impact Tibetan cultural production in the coming years, in Amdo and beyond.

10Editor’s note: this book is also available in open access (https://doi.org/​10.6069/​9780295753126).