LAUGHING THROUGH HISTORY 24 'A Truly Dumbfounding Fate'
Three young girls are dressed for an outing circa 1900. Robert Neff Collection
Editor’s note
Laughing Through History is a column that explores the roots of Korean humor through the joke book “Kkalkkal Useum,” originally published in 1916.
Traditional Korean society valued boys over girls, in part because a male heir was considered necessary to continue the family line. But because parents couldn’t choose a baby’s sex, this became a significant point of anxiety when a baby was born. (It’s worth pointing out that this preference has decreased in contemporary Korean society.) And since one role of humor is to express social tensions, this lead to the appearance of a particular humor figure — the man with many daughters but no sons.
The two jokes below feature such characters. These jokes depend on the social background knowledge that having daughters but no sons is considered a terrible misfortune. In other words, the humor is sexist by definition.
The goal of translating them isn’t to make readers laugh (they probably won’t), but to provide a window to the era they come from, and possibly to provide insight into how humor from our own era works.
The second joke here mentions a theater called Gwangmudae, which existed from 1898 to 1930 and would have been in operation when this book was published. It was one of the earliest theater spaces in Korea, since traditional Korean performance genres used outdoor spaces and did not have separate buildings dedicated to them. Among the jokes in “Kkalkkal Useum,” this one stands out for depending purely on wordplay, with a string of synonyms used to make the man’s answer ironically indirect.
The Baby Looks Like Me Up Top, but it Looks Like My Wife Down Below
There was a prime minister who had nine daughters. His wife once again sensed that she was pregnant, and in the 10th month she felt that she was going into labor.
The prime minister sat outside the whole while, wondering whether she would give birth to a son this time.
Before long he heard a baby crying, and he impatiently asked, “Well, Wife? What did you give birth to?”
His wife thought for a moment, perplexed because it seemed too shameless to say she’d had another daughter, until finally she managed to force out an answer: “Goodness! I’ve been in such a state that I haven’t gotten a good look yet, but the top half of the child resembles you, your Excellency.”
The prime minister said with a sigh, “If it’s the top half that resembles me, the bottom half must resemble my wife!”
A Truly Dumbfounding Fate
There was an old man who didn’t have a single son but had 12 daughters. One day he went to see a performance at the Gwangmudae Theater and ran into a friend he hadn’t seen in a number of years.
After they exchanged greetings, the friend asked, “How many children do you have?”
He replied, “I have five girl children, four daughters, and three female offspring.”
His friend’s jaw dropped, and he replied, “Oh… Ohhh…”
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.