LAUGHING THROUGH HISTORY 8 'Devious Teacher, Cunning Students'
Teacher and students circa 1895 / Courtesy of Robert Neff Collection
“Bwahahahaha” is a weekly column that explores the roots of Korean humor through the joke book “Kkalkkal Useum,” originally published in 1916.
By G.S. Hand
The joke I’m translating today features a teacher and students. The student-teacher relationship shown here isn’t idealized. In particular, the failed deception — the teacher’s attempt to control the students’ understanding, and the students’ ability to immediately see through it — is winningly true to life.
The teacher pretends to follow moral norms while being secretly greedy and dishonest. And although the students admit to misbehaving, they pretend to be much more afraid of the consequences than they actually are. In the final scene the students clearly knew that eating the persimmons would not be fatal, and the teacher likely understands that, but he can’t criticize them without admitting to his own dishonesty. This impossible position explains why he’s lost for words at the end of the joke.
What interests me about this situation is that even though this isn’t a moralistic text and the relationship depicted isn’t idealized, the norms of an idealized relationship still guide the characters’ behavior — or at least their justifications.
Devious Teacher, Cunning Students
There once was a teacher who was of devious character. A friend gave him a bunch of dried persimmons, and during the day when he took one out to eat he would say, "This is medicine."
One day he had to leave the classroom. He told the students firmly, "If you eat these round, red things in the cabinet, you'll die. Whatever you do, don't eat them."
As soon as he left, one of the students said loudly, "Let's take those persimmons out of the cabinet and eat them."
The other children: "We want to eat them, but the teacher will hit us with a switch."
The first child: "Don't worry, because here's what we'll do…"
The children took the persimmons out of the cabinet, divided them up and ate them. Then they took one of the teacher’s treasured possessions, a porcelain chamber pot, and smashed it to pieces on the ground. After that, they all lay down like they were dead.
Before long the teacher came back. He shook the children and shouted, "Children! Why are you lying around sleeping instead of reading?"
The children: "We were playing and we broke your chamber pot. We were scared that you would switch the backs of our legs, and we thought it would be better to be dead, so we took the round red things out of the cabinet and ate them."
The teacher couldn’t say a word in reply. All he could do was turn around and grin.
G.S. Hand is a graduate of the Translation Academy at LTI Korea, a winner of the Fiction Grand Prize of the 53rd Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards and has a master’s degree in Modern Korean Literature from Korea University. He lives in Seoul.