LAUGHING THROUGH HISTORY 23 'The Mourner Who Lost His Hat and Ended Up in the Jahye Hospital'

A government hospital in Seoul / Courtesy of Robert Neff Collection

The joke I’m translating today is absolutely disgusting, and if you don’t like scatological humor you’ll probably be happier not reading it. It’s a common observation that Korea tends to be more comfortable with poop jokes than humor in English, while being less comfortable with other taboos like sexuality. Be that as it may, this example of scatological humor is unusually stomach-turning. Consider yourself warned that it’s super gross.

The joke benefits from a bit of background information. During the late Joseon era in Korea (which ended in 1910), when a man lost his parents he was expected to observe three years of mourning, which included wearing particular clothes that avoided fine materials or decoration. This man is described as wearing a bang-gat, a hat made of woven straw which was part of this mourning attire.

Jahye, or charity, Hospitals were a network of medical facilities established in cities throughout the Korean Peninsula beginning in 1909 to provide care especially for the poor who couldn’t afford medical treatment elsewhere. The best-known of these facilities was the one established on Sorok Island specializing in Hansen’s disease. Since the book this joke is taken from was published in 1916, the reference to a jahye hospital is contemporary.

The Mourner Who Lost His Hat and Ended Up in the Jahye Hospital

A man who was in mourning after losing his parents was walking somewhere when he felt an urgent need to defecate. He had no choice but to use the straw hat that was part of his mourning attire to cover himself while he attended to his business. Just then a dog came by and started licking the backs of his legs because it wanted to eat the poop.

The mourner shouted, “Get out of here, dog! Get!” but it wouldn’t go away.

It was too late for the man to stop, so as he was letting nature run its course he moved his bottom up and down, trying to shoo the dog away. The dog leapt through his legs, causing the hat to get caught around its neck, and the animal was so startled that it took off running.

The man grabbed the waist of his pants and shouted, “Hey! Hey!”

When he saw a passerby he shouted in a panic, “Did you see a dog wearing a mourner’s hat run by here?”

When the passer-by saw how the man was acting he said to himself, “This man is raving. It’s clear that he’s seriously ill.”

So he grabbed the man tightly and dragged him to the Jahye Hospital to have acupuncture performed on him.

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.