Wang Yi saw their expressions and sensed something was wrong. He hurriedly turned the two plates over.
The next moment, when he saw the four characters, he couldn't help bursting into laughter too.
In an instant, the entire study was filled with their laughter.
The laughter continued for a full two minutes before finally dying down.
Guo Degang returned to the calligraphy piece. Looking at the four large characters, he slowly read aloud:
"Not vulgar, not appreciated! What a 'not vulgar, not appreciated'! What a 'not vulgar, not appreciated'!"
His words set the others laughing again.
It turned out that when Guo Degang had been writing, he had been thinking of the four characters "Appreciating both elegance and vulgarity."
Those four characters were something he often said, and they had always been the principle he upheld in his crosstalk.
His crosstalk had once been branded "the three vulgarities" by mainstream crosstalk circles. They said his jokes were coarse, lowbrow, and pandering.
Guo Degang had responded to this criticism in his performances.
Some people said:
"Listening to a symphony is highbrow; watching crosstalk is lowbrow."
"Drinking coffee is highbrow; eating garlic is lowbrow."
"Viewing nude art is highbrow; telling dirty jokes is lowbrow."
Guo Degang's view was: "If you're so highbrow, why don't you go listen to Kunqu opera?"
Even scholars in the old days had to bring dictionaries with them when they went to listen to Kunqu opera.
The reason nobody listened to Kunqu opera anymore was that it was too highbrow.
It was so refined that people couldn't understand it at all, and so it lost its vitality.
Once an art form lost its vitality and could no longer even put food on the table, what was the point of talking about how highbrow it was?
So Guo Degang