BWAHAHAHAHA 12 'Hearing That Made His Nostrils Flare'

A table is set up for an ancestral sacrifice ritual. Courtesy of Korean Studies Institute

The joke I’m translating today is based on a religious conflict between Christianity and Confucian belief. Although I haven’t been able to discover very much about the editor of “Kkalkkal Useum,” a man named Namgung Seol, I think it’s likely that he was Christian because this joke so clearly depicts the Christian as winning the argument — especially since it’s hard to imagine anyone finding this argument convincing. In 1916 only a small minority of the population of Korea was Christian, but the religion was more popular in Seoul than in rural areas, and was to some degree associated with modernization and Western-influenced education. In other words, I think it’s likely that the original audience for “Kkalkkal Useum” would have been more receptive to Christianity than the contemporary population of Korea as a whole.

As I discussed last week, the humorists behind “Kkalkkal Useum” didn’t (and probably couldn’t) use the recent colonization of Korea or the colonial government as the targets of humor or satire, but this joke shows no reluctance about using religious belief as a target. This conflicts noticeably with modern American humor norms, for example, which view mockery on the basis of religion as taboo, with contemporary politics instead one of the main sources of humor.

I think it’s a good rule of thumb that to be effective, humor should guide the audience’s attention to the delivery of the punchline, but here I find my attention overtaken by extraneous elements of daily life — the idea of having a household donkey, and the odd image of simply discarding it in the middle of nowhere. (Although if your donkey dies, I suppose I don't know what else you would do with it.) The strangeness of this scene, in combination with the man’s tone of absolute confidence, creates an atmosphere I quite enjoy.

“Hearing That Made His Nostrils Flare”

On Chuseok, a man visited the mountainside where members of his family were buried to hold a memorial ceremony. It just so happened that the donkey belonging to a Christian’s family had died, and the Christian was dragging it along to discard nearby.

The Christian lay the donkey down and grabbed a clump of grass, which he put in front of the dead donkey’s mouth and said, “Here, eat this.”

The man who had been performing the ceremony couldn’t bear to see something so pitiful, and he called out, “Now, see here! Please don’t be so foolish. How can a dead donkey eat anything?”

The Christian replied, “You are correct! But if you understand that logic, why call me foolish? I saw an obvious gentleman like yourself placing food in front of the graves of the dead and bowing, telling them to eat. So I decided to test whether my dead donkey would enjoy eating this grass.”

When the man performing the ceremony heard that, he flared his nostrils and went away.

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.