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The texture of the story itself will certainly affect the viewing experience, but the monotony of female characters may be the real sword of Damocles hanging over Ma Li's head.

Author | Feng Baika

Editor | Felicia

Title image: "Catching Dolls"

Ma Li is popular again. The long-lost “Queen of Comedy” made a movie that grossed 1.5 billion yuan.

According to data from Maoyan Professional Edition, as of now, the box office of her new movie "Catching Dolls" starring her and Shen Teng has exceeded 1.565 billion yuan. Ma Li has thus become the first female lead in China to have a cumulative box office of over 20 billion yuan according to Maoyan statistics.

Upper picture/"Catching Dolls", lower picture/Maoyan Professional Edition.

Having debuted for more than 20 years, Ma Li has played many vivid roles.

Her humorous charm is obvious to the audience. In "Catching Dolls", the slightly vain mother "Chunlan" pretended to cry while holding her husband's neck and whispering "Hermès orange lychee skin". She gently lifted her long hair and played a beautiful lady without stopping the funny.

Ma Li's performance in dramas, sketches and movies has been rising. She is the audience's laughing stock and a recognized "comedy goddess". She has too many halos, and the several movies she collaborated with Shen Teng were hits.

But looking back at the past, Ma Li has never had a real "female lead" in her comedy film career.

(Photo/Catching Dolls)

The hit "Charlotte's Troubles" is very good, and Ma Dongmei's straightforwardness contributed half of the audience's laughs; "The Shameful Iron Fist" is also very good, she plays the straightforward and naive female sports reporter Ma Xiao, and performs the "roughness" of exchanging souls with a male boxer. If she disagrees with someone, she will "stew herself in an iron pot" live broadcast - she is not afraid of destroying her image at all.

However, these works are almost all narratives based on the male perspective, and the existence of female characters is full of instrumental attributes. Ma Dongmei, who has been in love with Xia Luo since her student days, is a typical good wife. After graduation, she worked hard to earn money to support her family and her husband. Because of her unkempt appearance, she became the "wife of poverty and affliction" that Xia Luo hated.

(Photo/Charlotte's Troubles)

Ma Dongmei is rude, worldly, and even a little "ignorant". She can make the audience laugh as soon as she speaks, and her roughness itself is part of the joke. Staying away from her also becomes a symbol of Charlotte's escape from the past as a man. After discovering that he can travel through time, Charlotte immediately pursues his beautiful and elegant first love.

He was busy with love and career, and rejected Ma Dongmei's pursuit. He only wanted to shine once in his life and never live a cowardly life.

Charlotte is not a bad person. Ma Dongmei, who was "cruelly rejected" by him, could have turned around and chosen a better life. However, at the end of the movie, when Charlotte realized that he had missed the person who loved him the most, Ma Dongmei unexpectedly became the "Madonna" who accepted him.

(Photo/Charlotte's Troubles)

Ma Li in the movie is so cute. Her cuteness comes from her unpretentious sense of humor, which can easily resolve many discomforts caused by the contradictions of the female character.

The happy ending is of course gentle, but even without this shell, the stories of women are still cruel. Whether it is the commander Ma Lanxing who is secretly in love with the male protagonist in "The Moon Walker", who makes Shen Teng willing to transform from an engineer to a maintenance worker, or the "silly and sweet" Ma Xiao who is deceived by her boyfriend in "The Shameful Iron Fist", they are all foils to the charm of the male protagonist.

(Photo/"The Lone Moon")

They don't have a growth line, nor do they have too many inner activities to support the character arc. Ma Li takes on a considerable part of the comedy in the play, and also serves as a bright visual landscape in the movie.

Chunlan, the rich mother in "Catch the Doll", is a classic image of a noblewoman - she is much older than her husband, and her daily hobby is to ask her rich husband to buy Hermès bags. As a mother, she does not have much say in her son's education.

(Photo/Catching Dolls)

Over the years, the limited space for female comedy roles has gone hand in hand with the real difficulties faced by comedy actresses.

The documentary "Hysterical" once talked about the huge difference in working conditions between male and female actors in the comedy industry. In addition to treatment issues such as unequal pay for equal work and unfair opportunities to perform on stage, the first thing that female comedians have to face is the audience's general belief that "women are not funny."

In order to get a chance to perform on stage, actresses need to work harder, but once they are on stage, their performance space is still very limited. Actresses can either sing and dance like acrobats, or just act as a vase and a supporting role for men. To break the impression of being "not funny", they often need to make themselves look ugly and alienate their feminine characteristics to achieve a comedic effect.

(Photo/Charlotte's Troubles)

Jia Ling, who is the same age as Ma Li, also had a slim figure in her early years. However, in order to maintain her sense of humor, she never deliberately lost weight after gaining weight. She showed off her age in variety shows, ate chili peppers, and drank alcohol for several years, and only then did she become the "Jia Ling" that everyone likes.

However, being ugly means humor, but it also represents the decline of female charm. Ma Li once said in "Very Close Distance" that after "Charlotte's Troubles" became a hit, she wanted to rent a dress from a design brand to attend an event, but the brand refused because "your image is too rustic." She said, "Too many people define the appearance of comedians and think that they should be like this."

(Photo/Charlotte's Troubles)

Ma Li also once fell into the "bad movie dilemma". For a few years, the ratings of the movies she took on were frequently bad. Some people said that she had a poor eye for choosing scripts, which caused a surge in negative reviews. Later, Ma Li explained that some performances were to repay favors, while some performances were out of loyalty.

The texture of the story itself will certainly affect the viewing experience, but the monotony of female characters may be the real sword of Damocles hanging over Ma Li's head.

When a good story direction is lost, the thinness of female characters becomes more prominent. In "Li Mao Plays the Prince", which has a Douban score of 4.3, Ma Li plays a wife with strong martial arts and a hot temper. She is sometimes delicate and sometimes wild. It is funny when playing memes, but apart from the setting, it is almost impossible to tell that the role she plays is any different from the previous ones.

The space for comedians is limited. It can be said that the charm of the comedy roles played by Ma Li is largely due to the charm of Ma Li herself.

(Photo: "Li Mao as the Crown Prince")

It is a consensus in the industry that comedy is difficult to perform. However, Ma Li showed amazing talent in her first attempt at comedy. When she graduated from the Central Academy of Drama, she staged a skit in which she played a village woman who spoke in Northeastern dialect. She remembered that the audience laughed as soon as she spoke. At that time, she did not understand comedy, but now she thinks back that she had actually started on the road of comedy a long time ago.

Few people imagine a successful comedian to be sexy and charming. In an interview, someone once asked Ma Li a question: "Do you want to be strong and capable, or cute and gentle?"

(Photo/"The Lone Moon")

Ma Li answered without thinking, "I have all of these qualities." Outside the play, Ma Li admitted that she is a quiet, serious and sensitive person. She has been inferior and cried for roles that she couldn't get. But apart from being funny, the outside world knows almost nothing about her. Too many of her characteristics have been blocked.

This seems to be a phase that every female comedian goes through.

In the 1990s, Hong Kong's entertainment industry also produced many female comedians. "The Laughing Aunt" Sandra Ng and "The Unparalleled Cousin" Teresa Mo, both played beauties in their early days. However, after becoming famous for playing "clowns", it became difficult for them to get even "normal" female roles.

(Photo/All's Well, Ends Well)

As many people laughed at the slovenly but virtuous cousin-in-law in All's Well, Ends Well, as many people were amazed by Sandra Ng in Juliet and The Return of the Condor Heroes. She and Francis Ng were in love in the film, and her long black straight hair easily portrayed the sensitivity and fragility of an artistic girl. But later on, she was rarely seen in roles other than comedy films.

The comedy market is expanding, but there are still too few comedy films that truly start from a female perspective. The "clown" combination of male perspectives and female active roles is still the mainstream.

(Photo/"Sunshine Robbers")

Perhaps they did not want to be framed by the image of ugly people, or perhaps they wanted to gain more space for free expression. Later, Wu Junru, who was in her 50s, and Jia Ling, who was in her 30s, chose to invest, produce, direct and act in their own films. The factors behind this may be similar. It seems that only by transforming into a director can a comedy actress have a chance to wait for another spring.

Jia Ling is a rare example of someone who can break through the circle. Why did her "Hello, Li Huanying" and "Hot and Spicy" become so popular? In addition to the stories themselves, it is also because she opened up a new track of telling women's lives through comedy with these two movies.

(Photo/Hot and Spicy)

Old comedy films are good at using women's bodies as a selling point for jokes. They observe and examine women with images and dialogues full of gazes. Even female audiences can easily put themselves in the perspective of judgment when watching.

However, in "Hot and Spicy", the audience empathizes with the depressed fat girl. The film's obscure sister, biased mother, selfish and cowardly scumbag, the complex causes behind obesity are dissected layer by layer, and the audience suddenly realizes that the desire for food is actually an addiction caused by psychological disorders.

It is difficult to describe the relationship between close friends and sisters who are like enemies but also friends. The story tells the jealousy, friendship, inferiority, resentment and failure among women in a comedic tone. This may be avant-garde.

(Photo/Hot and Spicy)

However, after the release of this film, many people still doubted Jia Ling. Some questioned her motivation for losing weight; some repeatedly speculated on the authenticity of her weight loss; some were puzzled: Why did she lose weight when she had already reached the peak of female comedy artists? Why did she want to transform? In the questioning public opinion field, it is hard to say that there is no stereotype at work.

A considerable number of viewers like the "harmless" feeling brought by her fatness. From a comedy perspective, such a body shape seems to really add a lot of dramatic elements. However, as a comedian, Ma Li knows what female artists have to face. Staying up late and the pressure of creation can easily lead to endocrine disorders. In the past, the seemingly funny jokes actually came at the cost of health.

Ma Li guest-starred in Jia Ling's movie. (Photo/"Hot and Spicy")

"No one really understands the problems that actresses have to face," this is something Ma Li understood very early on. Therefore, she had long advised Jia Ling to lose weight, and also tried hard to tear off the label of comedy on herself.

In order to prove that "Ma Li is a professional actor", she stepped out of comedy movies and took on urban emotional dramas and action dramas. Her works have been both good and bad, especially the role of the ruthless wife who paid her cheating husband in "Northeast Tiger", which solidly proved the plasticity of Ma Li's acting skills.

(Photo: "Siberian Tiger")

Perhaps the road to transformation was too difficult, or perhaps she realized that comedians must break through difficulties before they can leave. In 2011, she said in a program that she would continue to carry the label of comedian. Ma Li said, "I will never lose this label because it is too scarce."

But there is also a lack of fresh female comedy roles. Ma Li has been labeled as such for so many years, and even though she now has a box office of 20 billion yuan and has starred in so many comedy movies, she has not yet waited for the real "comedy heroine".

(Photo/Catching Dolls)