For many Hong Kong audiences, Chow Yun-fat is not only an action or melodrama star, but is also a good comedy actor. Many of his comedies yielded a good investment return for the film studios during the late 1980s and early 1990s. For example, Chow's The Eighth Happiness (1988) and God of Gamblers (1989) reached box-office totals of HK$37,090,776 and HK$37,058,686 respectively, and both topped the local box office in the year of their distribution (Hong Kong Film Archive n.d.a, n.d.b). In fact, Chow's comedies not only featured consistently in Hong Kong's local box-office top ten between 1986 and 1995, but also often outperformed Chow's own acclaimed action films at the box office. His Now You See Love, Now You Don't (1992), for instance, earned HK$ 36,475,536, nearly double the box office take generated by his well-known action film Hard Boiled (HK$19,711,048), and more than double that of Full Contact (1992) (HK$16,793,011) (Hong Kong Film Archive n.d.c, n.d.d, n.d.e).

Jenny Kwok Wah Lau (1998: 24) pointed out that ‘the recognition of humor depends heavily upon the understanding of the complex dynamics involved in the interaction of the symbolics, such as gestures, icons, linguistics, and so on, which are defined by their own social and cultural traditions’. Although Hong Kong comedies, as noted by many film scholars and critics, could sometimes be regarded as a less sophisticated stream of mass culture because of their depiction of jokes about people's appearances, accents, sexual orientations and even disabilities (Sek, as cited in Chan et al. 2000: 125; Lau 1998: 24), they are valuable for investigating specific local experiences at the time. What, then, was the kind of specific, local social mentality expressed in Chow's comedic images in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In order to understand the popularity of Chow's comedic image, this chapter pays particular attention to Chow's music albums 12 Fun 10 Fun Chuen (1988), in addition to the original film posters for Chow's comedies. 12 Fun 10 Fun Chuen is one of only two music albums that Chow ever released. It consists of only two songs in total, one of which bears the same title as the album, while the other is the theme soundtrack to Chow's 1988 comedy The Diary of a Big Man – ‘Very Nice’.