Timothy Thurston
Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2025. 236 pages. Hardcover, $110.00; paperback, $35.00. ISBN 9780295753102 (hardcover), 9780295753119 (paperback).

Zurza—literally “eating sides” in Tibetan—is the art of satire and sarcasm brought vividly to life in Timothy Thurston’s Satirical Tibet: The Politics of Humor in Contemporary Amdo. Filled with descriptions of jaunty Tibetan poems, tales, televised sketches or skits, and hip-hop music, all of which are designed to make Tibetans laugh at themselves, Thurston’s book is the first study of zurza and its remarkable penchant for mobilizing political satire. The book pivots around a rich collection of zurza that are sometimes biting, sometimes boisterous, and mostly gathered during fieldwork conducted among famous Tibetan cultural producers, comedians, and intellectuals who, from the 1980s to the present, have used zurza to unleash new movements that critique problems in their own society. By weaving his fieldwork findings together with traditional oral and literary zurza, Thurston brings a veritable line-up of zurza forms into focus, starting with dokwa verbal sparring matches in which nomads put witty name-callings into verse. Khashag comic dialogues come next and typically take the form of Abbott and Costello–styled “crosstalks” that stand out for having, until recently, filled the airwaves of Tibetan radio broadcasts and audio cassettes. Garchung televised sketches follow and feature visual movement added to khashag dialogues that captured people’s imaginations on state television, video compact discs, and the internet. But perhaps the most popular zurza form to have emerged yet is zheematam rap, which while “neither verse nor speech” is pervasive across the Tibetan hip-hop world, digital and otherwise.

Thurston connects each of these zurza forms to the social movements they helped to spawn, offering us something of an insider’s eye into the political satires at play. We see that just as khashag comic dialogues helped to spearhead the late-twentieth-century Tibetan “May Fourth Movement” and its championing of scientific modernity, so garchung televised sketches are, at the time of writing, helping to spread the purist language movement to protect Tibetan language and traditional cultural knowledge across the grasslands. The creation of new zurza and their accompanying social movements has, as Thurston shows, enabled many Tibetans to envision—and re-envision—themselves on multiple levels, both to themselves and to the wider world. Conversely, the reception of zurza reveals the enthusiasm many Tibetans have unpacking their own assumptions about the world through satire.

Famous garchung sketches that include foreign characters show just how far-reaching some Tibetan satires may go. Thurston describes how Gesar’s Horse Herder (Gesar Htardzi), a sketch by the celebrated comedian Menla Jyab, pokes fun at narrower understandings of ecological conservation that value scientific study, but to the exclusion of the conservation knowledge inherent in local cosmologies. In this garchung sketch, Uncle Horse Herder (played by Menla Jyab himself), Hongmei (played by a Tibetan teacher), and an Englishman called Jersey (played by a tall white man) exchange lines that veer between tongue-in-cheek humor and the mordant. Jersey comes to the grasslands to see black-necked cranes that breed on the Tibetan plateau and is accompanied by Hongmei, his guide-interpreter who hopes to attract eco-tourism to the area. However, Uncle Horse Herder is incredulous about their visit. Not only does Jersey speak Tibetan and English, but Hongmei peppers her own Tibetan with Chinese to such an extent that Jersey starts to become the more intelligible of the two. Neither understands what the reluctant Uncle Horse Herder knows—that the cranes are both the Tibetans’ spirit bird and the soul bird of Drukmo, the wife of the legendary Tibetan hero, Gesar. Because the cranes reside on Small Treasure Lake, a body of water in the village that serves as Drukmo’s mirror, they are tied up inextricably with the village’s fortune. Uncle Horse Herder therefore decides that he has no other option than to push back on his visitors’ request. The upshot, as Thurston explains, is that “in refusing the outsiders’ perspective, Menla Jyab simultaneously promotes environmental conservation as a Tibetan [emphasis in original] value, and provides a rebuke of narratives that . . . overlook indigenous environmental knowledge and instead center Western scientific practices” (111). Revealingly, the studio audience for Gesar’s Horse Herder picks up on the resonances between this garcheng sketch and China’s state-subsidized ecological migration program that set out in the early 1980s to “conserve” the grasslands by moving Tibetans off them. The audience’s biting laughter holds a mirror up to all parties at once, including global conservation movements that fail to take account of the many people, perspectives, knowledge forms, and cosmologies that fall within their purview.

Many rewarding zurza like this appear in Thurston’s highly accessible book, including some that illustrate the tensions between older and newer generations of Tibetan cultural producers, their zurza practices, and the social movements that they advocate. Thurston shows how this works in his discussion of the zheematam hit City Tibetans (Drongchyer Wodpa) by rapper Uncle Buddhist, which provides a new perspective on the Tibetan purist language movement. The City Tibetans video starts with imagery of an auspicious blood moon but soon gives way to night scenes in which eerie figures evoke the glorious Tibetan past until Uncle Buddhist is ushered into the sunny Tibetan grasslands. His emergence from darkness to light signals the dissociation of many city Tibetans from the grasslands, their language, and their culture. Yet Uncle Buddhist blames his lack of linguistic and cultural fluency on himself rather than on an earlier generation of cultural producers who prioritized scientific modernity. His zheematam rap cries out that all Tibetans, himself included, should take responsibility for the fact that city educations have their own drawbacks—which, Thurston adds, are “a shortcoming suggested also by the song’s ungrammatical title (which would normally require a genitive particle)” (135–36). Notably, Uncle Buddhist’s vision sits alongside those of other Tibetan hip-hop artists, such as Jason J, who, however, inverts the titles of famous zurza poems by earlier cultural producers and re-presents them as new instances of political satire. Inverting verses is a traditional zurza technique, but Jason J applies it to the lines of cultural producers who favor modernity in order, as Thurston observes, “to create an indirect critique of the broader epistemic positions for which they stand” (140). Jason J’s zheematam push back on those modernists who, he feels, have overlooked their Tibetan indigeneity.

One key finding of this book, then, is that many (if not all) Tibetan cultural producers have their own artistic visions of zurza, of the social movements it should support, and of what it might achieve. Thurston shows how these cultural producers fulfill their visions by freeing their irrepressibly trickster-like qualities through zurza and inviting others to do the same. He goes further by concluding that many Tibetan cultural producers harness different forms of zurza, which are suffused with their own innovative meanings, contours, and valences, “to make Tibetan [emphasis in original] futures out of their present conditions”—an act that is ultimately both satirical and a form of “cultural healing” (149). What new expressive potentialities might emerge from zurza is anyone’s guess. But Thurston’s book points to a future filled with multiple irrepressible visions of what it is to be Tibetan, indigenous, and modern at all once.

Katherine Swancutt
King’s College London