If comedy crossed borders as easily as noodle soup or cellphone operating systems, Stephen Chow would be in America what he is in Asia: an integral part of moviegoers’ lives, the man who makes them laugh so hard that they’re embarrassed the next day.
It’s not as if Mr. Chow, an enormously popular actor and director in Hong Kong for the last 25 years, hasn’t tried. His period gangster comedy “Kung Fu Hustle” got a big American push in 2005 and grossed $17 million, impressive for a foreign-language movie. But that breakthrough hasn’t led anywhere. He’s bigger than ever in Asia — “Journey to the West” was China’s No. 1 film last year at $202 million, beating “Iron Man 3” by $80 million in that country — but here he’s going backward. “Journey” grossed an infinitesimal $18,000 in the United States.
There are obvious reasons comedy doesn’t always translate, including language barriers — Mr. Chow’s films are full of Cantonese puns and invective — and differing cultural cues and styles. But Stephen Chow: The King of Comedy, an eight-film retrospective beginning Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, suggests another reason for his relative obscurity here: Maybe we haven’t been seeing the right Stephen Chow movies.
The series, which runs through Sunday, includes the more recent, bigger-budgeted films that have been released here: “Journey,” “Kung Fu Hustle” and the 2004 “Shaolin Soccer.” But it also offers some prime examples of his earlier work, the anarchic, hastily made comedies he starred in and sometimes directed in the 1990s. In that decade, he appeared in more than 40 movies; since then, just four.
Mr. Chow’s 21st-century movies retain the off-the-cuff goofiness of classic Hong Kong comedy, but they’re more polished, with comprehensible plots and expensive digital effects. The 1990s films lack the polish and coherence, but that’s no barrier to enjoyment. If “Justice, My Foot!” (1992) or “God of Cookery” (1996) had been released in America, their continuous, disorderly but inspired silliness might have found an appreciative audience in the years of Bill & Ted and Austin Powers.
“Justice, My Foot!,” the earliest film in the Academy series, was directed by the great Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To, and he keeps it moving at breakneck speed. Mr. Chow plays a shyster lawyer, Sung, who wins cases by firing off nonsensical arguments at an equally fast pace, bewildering the provincial judges who try to keep up with him.
Sung has a problem, though: His wife wants him to retire, because she believes that every time he helps an undeserving client win, one of their sons dies in infancy. She has a point — they’ve lost 12 sons, and when Sung helps out a troublemaker early in the movie, they lose No. 13. Sung finally promises to change professions — saying that if he breaks his oath, their next son will be born without a penis — but before you know it, his wife is so overcome with sympathy for a woman who’s being forced to marry that she asks him to return to lawyering.
Madam Sung is played by the Canto-pop diva Anita Mui, who died in 2003, as a scornful, no-nonsense spouse with kung fu skills, and in most of the movies in the series Mr. Chow’s characters are paired with iron-willed women who expose the comic hero’s vanity and weakness. In the major Hong Kong hit “The God of Cookery,” Karen Mok plays a disfigured night-market hawker who helps Mr. Chow’s arrogant celebrity chef rebuild his career.
“God of Cookery,” which Mr. Chow directed with Li Lik-Chi, is a quick-and-dirty parody of “Iron Chef” (created three years before in Japan) in which bodily fluids, savage beatings and childish sexual innuendo play as large a role as food. But the food is there, looking alternately delicious and inedible, in hilarious cooking-competition scenes scripted and staged like the hammy battles in Hong Kong kung fu flicks. The story, which Mr. Chow also had a hand in, swerves into gangster territory and martial-arts burlesque, as the chef discovers that the mythical China Cookery Academy is actually the kitchen of the Shaolin temple.
The last film Mr. Chow directed (also with Mr. Li) before “Shaolin Soccer” was the “King of Comedy” (1999), a transitional work with a fairly intelligible story and a well-worked-out theme of performance versus dull reality. Mr. Chow plays Wan, whose day job is supervising a sleepy neighborhood rec center but who dreams of being an actor. On the set of the kung fu thriller where his aunt gets him work as an extra, he spouts Stanislavskian theory and manages to ruin an elaborate shot even though he’s playing a dead body. (“Subconsciously,” he says, “I don’t want to die yet.”)
“King of Comedy” gives Mr. Chow two strong women to bounce off: Ms. Mok as a haughty actress and Cecilia Cheung as the bar hostess who falls for him. Everyone Wan encounters needs or wants to be an actor: the women who come to him for lessons in playing virginal girlfriends, the gang members who need to appear tough, the undercover policeman whose life depends on his acting ability. And in every case, Wan’s serious approach backfires; he gets his acolytes fired, beaten and shot. When he finally gets to play a love scene with Ms. Mok’s diva, he works himself into such a Method frenzy that he begins to cry as he leans over her and a long string of snot snakes toward her face. Now that’s funny in any language.


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