BWAHAHAHAHA 10 'Married in December, Still Childless in January'

A Korean house in the late 19th or early 20th century / 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.

One of my favorite movies is Charlie Chaplain’s “City Lights” (1931), but one scene is unwatchable: the one where the rich fop is roaring drunk, trying to drive himself home while careening all over the street. The timing is as clever as everywhere in Chaplain, but drunk driving feels like something that can’t be laughed at anymore.

Humor is often amoral, or at least the protagonists of humor usually aren’t moral exemplars. So why does a moral taboo destroy humor so quickly? Within humor psychology, benign violation theory claims that something is funny if it violates some norm, but the violation ends up seeming harmless. From this perspective, if drunk driving can’t be considered ultimately harmless, then it can’t be funny.

This punchline of the joke I’m translating today depicts — a trigger warning — domestic violence. It isn’t funny, but the reason I’m translating it is that as part of the collection “Kkalkkal Useum,” it’s part of the picture of what was considered funny in early 20th-century Korea. I can recognize elements of a successful joke in it: the portrayal of the impatient young man is striking, and the logical fallacy at the end works as a punchline. The idea here is that since the couple is married on the last day of the year, they’re in their second year of marriage after being married for less than 24 hours.

Notice how the abuse is portrayed, though. It isn’t considered initially harmless — the bride’s cries of suffering shock the family, and indeed, the act of violence itself isn’t actually described. (Would directly describing an act of violence have spoiled the humor for the original audience?) The expected reader response here seems to be guided by the natural empathetic reaction to a person in pain. For the original audience, then, how does this incident come to be interpreted as harmless enough to laugh at? Is it perhaps because it’s explained away as an expression of the son-in-law’s quick-tempered personality or because it’s explained as an expression of a natural and laudable desire for a son? Or simply because the final sentence carries the situation away from reality and into the realm of the absurd?

Married in December, Still Childless in January

A man was looking for a son-in-law. He thought someone indecisive would experience hardship in old age, and someone quick-tempered would be successful early in life, so he was looking for someone quick-tempered.

On the last day of the year, a bachelor used the outhouse behind the man’s house. It was taking the young man too long to undo his belt, so he cut it with a knife.

The homeowner proposed that the young man marry his daughter and said, "Choose a day and let me know."

But the young bachelor replied, "Why bother with that?"

This made the father-in-law even gladder, so they held the marriage that very day.

The next morning the bride suddenly started wailing inside the marriage chamber. The whole house was thrown into confusion, and when they asked what she was sobbing about the girl replied, "My husband said the point of getting married is to have children, and he hit me because it's already the second year of our marriage and I haven't given him a son yet!"

G.S. Hand is a graduate of the Translation Academy at LTI Korea and 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.