Writing in 1969, the critic Yi Ŏryŏng described the Korean literary tradition’s form of humor as one in which “extremes of tears become extremes of laughter.” For Yi, this meant that Korean humor was grounded in inversions, producing laughter out of the “tension of the hero’s reversal into the villain and the villain’s reversal into the hero.” It also meant that Korean humor used these inversions to bring new critical possibilities into view. Yi thus linked Korean humor to the “creative laughter of the fool” and to a form of “irony or satire that, by inverting everyday values, exposes buried truths.”

Taking inspiration from Yi’s vision, this panel seeks out new critical and scholarly possibilities by exploring the visibilities and invisibilities of humor in modern Korean literature, television, and film. Modern Korean cultural production has long been known for its emphasis on the tragic and the macabre in its articulation of anticolonial, anticapitalist, and antiauthoritarian forms of resistance. In contrast, less attention has been paid to its use of humor and its mobilization of laughter toward such forms of critique. Addressing this oversight, the presentations in this panel demonstrate the centrality of laughter to the way in which cultural production from both sides of the Korean peninsula makes its critical perspectives visible. Bringing together specialists at different stages in their careers who are working on a variety of visual and textual media from different historical and cultural contexts, the panel not only questions the existing somber image of Korean cultural production but also offers new perspectives on how to imagine Korean connectivity across historical periods, across media and genre, and across the thirty-eighth parallel divide.

First, in “Offbeat Awakening: Surreal Black Humor in Choi Inhun’s A Christmas Carol (1963-65),” Jaewuk Kim examines Choi Inhun’s (1936-2018) often-overlooked use of offbeat humor as a subversive means of questioning the normative assumptions of reality and navigating the absurdity of Cold War politics. In particular, Kim explores Choi’s serialized novel A Christmas Carol (1963-65) through the critical framework of “black humor” – what André Breton conceives as having a liberating effect – and its relation to the intentional ambiguity of language and space. Following Choi’s novel across its various spaces – the space of a family home, the streets of Europe, and the streets of Seoul, where an (in)visible flaneur bears witness to talking walls and ghosts – the presentation highlights Choi’s use of offbeat black humor to invite surreal juxtapositions of images and realities.

Next, in “The Restorative Power of Inappropriate Laughter,” Kelly Y. Jeong turns to South Korean films of the 2000s and 2010s in order to examine one particular kind of laughter: the inappropriate and/or macabre. In this presentation, Jeong discusses the way in which notable films including Bong Joon Ho’s Mother (2009), Lee Chang Dong’s Secret Sunshine (2007), and Hyun Hoon Cho’s Jane (2016) reveal how such laughter and its challenging of the bounds of propriety have the power to restore and begin to heal broken social relations as well as affirm common humanity amongst individuals. Jeong here suggests that shared inappropriate laughter is revealed as no less than an illustration of recognition and an acknowledgement of the other as a fellow human being.

Finally, in “Rebranding North Korean Sitcoms: Changes in Visual Media for a Global Audience,” Immanuel Kim examines creative changes to the aesthetics of a type of North Korean visual media that has received little if any scholarly attention: the television sitcom. Starting in the late 2010s, a sitcom about contemporary social issues called Let’s Get Rid of These Problems (Irŏn hyŏnsang ŭl ŏpsaepsida), which began in the late 1970s, opened with a completely new logo design, indicating an entirely different style and aesthetics. Focusing on this transformation in aesthetics and its relation to new digital techniques, Kim argues that the rebranding and modernizing of sitcoms were necessary steps for the television industry in the Kim Jong Un era to compete in the global market of virtual consumers and expand the visibility of the North Korea brand beyond its domestic audience.

As a group, the papers in this panel offer an alternative vision of modern Korean culture that centers humor, emphasizes the transformative and continuously transforming function of laughter, and offers new points of linkage spanning divides of North and South, divides of historical period, and divides of media and genre.