Telling Bad Jokes in Korea

We got off the subject by the late arrival of four female middle school teachers, laughing their way over to the remaining empty seats. They, like everyone else seated around the conference table in this meeting room in the new city library on a cold Thursday evening, had endured another long day of work, teenagers, spouses, children, the cost of living, and an extended set of duties and obligations, one of which is to be a member of associations, clubs, societies and forums on midweek winter nights, when what they all really needed was a long warm bath. Yet they were laughing. They wanted humor.

Nevertheless, I had my reference point, underlined the passage, and promised myself to come back to it.

The silence that followed was of the lambs. My friend who had asked me to moderate, the man who went to New Zealand and returned extraordinarily xenophiliac, my four laughing ladies and everyone else, all were addressing the table as if on it lay a document outlining in cold bureaucratic language why they were to be taken from this room and shot. I explained what and where Lourdes is, how to operate a pulley, crowd states of anxiety, and, to ensure the incident will haunt any future moments of minor self pride, imitated muttering an audible prayer. Still nothing. I then retold the joke, alternating between a tone of unwarranted humor and hand gesturing insistency.

I went on praising the wheelchair until I noticed that the meeting was breaking up for dinner, at which I asked a lot of questions about New Zealand. No one asked for clarification on the wheelchair story. Moderation is not as easy as it looks.

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This Gangster is One of Your Own and Korean Straight Lines, are now available. [email protected]

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