Hou Baolin (1917-1993), a native of Beijing, came from a poor family when he was young. He learned to perform Peking Opera when he was 12 years old, and later switched to cross talk. He successively worshiped Chang Baochen and Zhu Kuoquan as his teachers. He once performed in the Drum Tower and Tianqiao areas of Beijing. In 1940, he went to Tianjin to perform and became famous. Since 1940, he has been partnering with Guo Qiru in stand-up comedy. The two have a tacit understanding of each other and complement each other. They have cooperated for more than 20 years, which is relatively rare among their peers.

Hou Baolin lived in the years of great turmoil in modern Chinese society. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the political status of folk artists increased. Hou Baolin joined the rap group of the China Broadcasting and Art Troupe and actively promoted the "crosstalk improvement movement" to eliminate the unnecessary and retain the essentials in the art of crosstalk, making the street stalls and teahouses of the old era cater to the common people. The interesting cross talk performance is infused with healthier content and glows with unprecedented aesthetic brilliance.

Hou Baolin’s contribution to the art of cross talk is multifaceted. First of all, they took the lead in purifying the language of cross talk performances, improving the aesthetic taste of cross talk, abandoning the vulgar and low-level non-artistic elements of the past, and adapted many traditional programs to "turn decay into magic" and give them a completely new look. Secondly, while creating and performing, he paid attention to the theoretical research of cross talk, made friends with intellectuals and scholars, and co-authored monographs such as "Tracing the Origin of Cross Talk" and "Collection of Cross Talk Art" to move the art of cross talk towards artistic consciousness. direction of development. The third is to create, organize and perform more than 30 classic cross talk programs that can be regarded as high-quality. Among them, the representative ones include: "Marriage and Superstition", "Exquisite Hands in Trouble", "Guan Gong Battles Qin Qiong", "Night Journey", "Drama Talk", "Drama and Dialects", "Changing Careers", "Drunk", "Drama Fans" "wait.

Hou Baolin’s cross talk art is full of humorous wisdom. Take the two programs "Drunken" and "Adhesive Plaster" that show the mood of drunk people as examples. Their understanding of life and aesthetic view are very unique. "Drunken" shows the abnormal behavior and behavior of two drunkards after drinking: one can lose his composure to the point where he puts up a flashlight, turns on the switch and treats the beam of light as a real thing, saying, "Come on, you are not drunk, you can climb up from this pillar." You can't help but laugh when you hear words like that! The other person is even more happy, and seems to be sober in his drunken state: "What is this! I understand in my heart. I climb up? You turn off the switch when I climb up." Didn't you just fall off the pillar?" It can be seen that they are all very drunk, but there is a helpless ridiculousness in their anger, and the meaning of admonishment is self-evident. The situation shown in "Adhesive Plaster" is even more ridiculous. It tells the story of a drunkard who was afraid of his wife and came home late at night. Unexpectedly, the glass from a broken wine bottle hurt his buttocks. In order to avoid his wife's scolding, he used adhesive plaster himself. He patched the wound and fell asleep. Unexpectedly, he was woken up by his wife yelling at him early the next morning. He even argued that he was not drunk last night, but his wife called him to the full-length mirror and pointed to the adhesive plaster on the mirror. Asked: "You said you were not drunk, so where did the adhesive tape on the mirror come from?" It turned out that when he was drunk and put adhesive tape on his buttocks last night, he mistakenly thought that the person in the mirror was himself. This is really a kind of wisdom. Without careful observation, excavation and refinement of life, and without superb artistic thinking to express life, it is absolutely difficult to create this kind of humor.

In fact, Hou Baolin’s artistic wisdom and talent are far more than this. He is more sophisticated and adept at learning the singing styles of opera genres and imitating local dialects. "Miscellaneous Talks on Drama", "Drama and Dialects" and "Changing Careers" are representatives of such works. In addition, his speaking language is fresh and refined, and his typhoon is calm and free, forming an elegant style with scholarly background, which is known as the "Hou School". He himself is also revered as a cross talk master and highly respected in the art world.

Representative works:

"Marriage and Superstition", "Exquisite Hands Become Trouble", "Guan Gong Battles Qin Qiong"

"Night Journey", "Miscellaneous Talks on Drama" , "Drama and Dialect"

"Change of Career", "Drunk", "Drama Fan", etc.