Humor the Uncomfy.

YMCA Baseball Team is a comedy based on an unfunny history. To fulfill its entertaining purposes and still be solemn and thought-provoking at the same time is a subtle maneuver. Some particularly amusing and noteworthy scenes: the grieved family member reading Lee Ho-Chang’s love poem as the last words of the deceased; YMCA team singing Three Bears; and the encounter between Lee Ho Chang and the crane. They are all somehow juxtaposed at the clash of cultural or personal identities, entailing the uncomfortable. Indeed consider the scenes immediately follow: Japanese soldier intervention along with the collaborator; stunned and unresponsive audience; the news of his brother’s death. Facing the sensitive, is laughter the only way out?

The guy with nerdy glasses seems to be the comical figure. He represents the upper class of the “pro-Japanese collaborators” as well as the colonized, patriotic Korean mass. His ambivalent attitudes and indecisive, even pusillanimous character is humorized at large because he serves as the Korean mentality impersonated – even of history, when the concept of nationality was not yet widely applied. Serious moral dictation would still stir sensitivity and sentimentality.

From the reading we see the paradoxical Korean mindset of on the one hand seeking national independence, and on the other recognizing mutual ancestral affiliation with Japan – even a time of pleading to be “liberated”. To humorize the sensitive could be the best response to the historical problems unresolved. Or to horrify them, as we have seen in Gidam.

This is hardly news as throughout the century, all over the world, humor and horror become the main mechanisms of criticizing the unsatisfactory and releasing the unwanted. Post-war Germany produced a generation of proliferate humorists and elusive mythists. America, Israel – we could see the number of humorist literature surges after, always after the traumatic events.

Does humor educate the world then? I don’t know, but I prefer to be taught by a whole bunch of jokes, man.