Chop Sockey

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Everybody was kung-fu fighting!
Those cats were fast as lightning!
In fact it was a little bit frightening!

But they fought with expert timing!
Carl Douglas

Chop Sockey is a rather disrespectful term, referring to fight scenes with an East Asian (especially Chinese, mostly Hong Kong) martial-arts style, but is often (see examples below) used to describe the whole genre of martial-arts films. They usually feature overly exaggerated and presentations of traditional fighting techniques, leading to dramatic sound effects, and sometimes questionable dialogue dubbing.

This is a parody trope is strongly based on the Martial Arts Movie genre, where stereotypical aspects of it are played up as either a Affectionate Parody to Pastiche.

Today, this trope can be found in everything from South Park to Mountain Dew commercials to video games (e.g. Kung Fu Chaos) to this XKCD strip.

Martial Arts Do Not Work That Way is a Sister Trope. Dragons Up the Yin-Yang is a common visual motif.


Examples of Chop Sockey include:

Parodies:

  • Kung Fu Hustle
  • Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, Steve Oedekirk's awesome tribute to martial arts flicks.
  • Wayne's World 2, in a scene which has Wayne fight Cassandra's Cantonese father in a chop sockey kung fu fight. The stereotypical sound effects, dubbing and dubious wirework are all aped for the scene.