LAUGHING THROUGH HISTORY 20 'As Stubborn as a Mule'

A market scene in the late 19th or early 20th century / Courtesy of Robert Neff Collection

One recurring conflict in Korean humor is between people from the capital city of Seoul and people from the country. People from the capital are presented as more sophisticated and worldly. Especially in early 20th-century humor, they are often also presented as more familiar with modern life, technology and the wider world, although the joke I’m translating today is more concerned with tradition.

It features a provincial official who visits the big city and is made a fool of, but the joke doesn’t explicitly mock his ignorance or lack of sophistication. It focuses on personal qualities — stubbornness and groundless arrogance. In addition, while not harming anyone else, this man’s ignorance causes him to mix the sacred (in the form of ancestral rites) and the profane (a chamber pot) in a way that, while silly, would also have been legitimately offensive to contemporary readers. The result is that the joke doesn’t encourage us to root for the underdog protagonist as an underdog, but against him as someone whose foolishness deserves contempt.

This joke is also a window on traditional culture as something that wasn’t fixed and unchanging, but which could be influenced by new ideas. The characters are ridiculous extremes, but this situation helps show how people’s ideas about traditional practices could change over time.

As Stubborn as a Mule

A provincial official from the middle of nowhere visited Seoul, and while passing a store he saw a pair of felt boots hanging up in the window and asked, “What are those?”

An unserious person standing nearby said, “Those are ceremonial headgear. You’re supposed to wear them when performing ancestral rites.”

The official asked, “What is that chamber pot for?”

The man answered, “That’s a dish to put food for the rites in.”

The provincial official bought the felt boots and chamber pot and headed home.

When the day of an ancestral rite came, the older and younger brother of the family each put one of the boots on their head, pulled all the way down to the bridge of their noses. They polished the chamber pot with the greatest of care and were about to put the rice for the ceremony into it.

Some family members who lived in Seoul and had come for the ceremony couldn’t help saying, “What is that?”

The provincial official angrily replied, “Why do you act so high and mighty if you live in Seoul and you’re still too ignorant to recognize ceremonial headgear when you see it?”

What an absolute moron.

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.