This article provides a brief overview of the Shandong fast tale tradition, a Chinese oral performance genre that began in rural northern China approximately four hundred years ago. Included in this overview are brief descriptions of the origins, audience composition, tale length, repertoire, and major characteristics of the stories and performances. Following these descriptions is a discussion of the expressive and rhetorical devices used by the tale-tellers as they perform live, such as formulaic language, repetition, character roles, shifts in speech register, body language, facial expressions, memory, onomatopoeia, physical humor, and hyperbolic language.