Kim Jong Il's funeral on Wednesday was the latest spectacle in a regime well-versed in totalitarian theater. The death of the Dear Leader, with all of the pomp and histrionics of a Kim family event, marks the third act in North Korea's 60-year tragedy. It is also a reminder that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) is a seriously funny place.
In the final days of Kim Jong Il's reign, I stood in a freezing cave in North Korea. My government guide pointed up at the stunning stalactites winding their way down from the cavern ceiling. He placed a hand on my shoulder and asked me a question I did not expect.
"Which one does yours look like?"
Dick jokes, it turns out, are huge in the DPRK. They are standard fare for the country's stand-up comedians, who from adolescence endure an intense training process -- think Flashdance, but with jokes -- to end up in one of Pyongyang's comedy clubs. Imagine that: being required to pursue the arts. In the Red-Confucianist spin on 1984 that is North Korea, even the laughs are planned. Orwell would have a field day.
Here's another paradox: the regime forbids alcohol in comedy clubs but encourages drinking at the shooting range. Welcome to public policy in North Korea.
These arcane contradictions, like Kim Jong Il's decadent rule over a nation that is infantilized, brutalized, and starving, are part of the DPRK way. When my guide invited me to shoot a live chicken over a round of North Korean beer, I declined the first and downed the second, unsure whether to enjoy the irony or despair over the 24 million people trapped in this totalitarian paradox writ large.
And yet North Koreans laugh -- a lot. They have a real sense of humor. Self-conscious and a bit immature, perhaps, but funny and endearing -- a celebration of the mundane and those human universals, including marriage, love, and the corresponding anatomy. Aside from food and drink, which were difficult to savor in a starving country, laughing was the one unadulterated joy I shared with locals. Humor has no borders.
But it does have boundaries. One local attempted a joke -- the first and only line was "George W. Bush," followed by a planned, awkward pause for laughter and a quick "thank you very much" -- but you will never hear a Kim Jong Il joke or a famine quip in North Korea. In the hermit kingdom, those aren't laughs; they're treason. An estimated 200,000 North Koreans are now in labor camps, many for crimes more innocent than a joke told in poor taste. While I laughed my way along the Youth Hero Highway, 50,000 people were fighting to survive in the concrete walls of Yodok Camp.
How can the rest of the country laugh, then? I asked another of my guides, a porcelain face in her 20s, to tell me her favorite joke.
"OK," she said, giggling. "There is a boy, and all day he is saying that he has to pee, so his mother tells him, 'It is rude to say you have to pee. If you have to pee, just say you have to whistle.'
"That night the boy wakes up because he has to pee. So he wakes up his father and he tells him, 'Father, Father, I have to whistle.'
"And the father says, 'OK, but do it quietly in my ear.'"
Two nights ago, I told a joke about Kim Jong Il during a show in Los Angeles. I got some laughs. But the joke about the whistling kid killed in Pyongyang.
How is that possible? Until two weeks ago a brutal dictator ruled the country. This capricious, nuclear, unstable man inherited a regime from his charismatic father, along with the most severe daddy issues in the dictator club. With a mix of brutal reign and shrewd negotiation, he created a state so laughably powerful, so aimlessly ambitious, that the democratic world had to accept the paradox and work with a nuclear dictator who wore heels to appear taller.
The line between policy and comedy blurred with the help of North Korea's propaganda machine. Official statements, riddled with supernatural hyperbole, read like a Sacha Baron Cohen script. The Pyongyang Times, a propagandist rag, could easily be mistaken for The Onion. You only need to read about Kim Jong Il's gastronomical obsessions or peruse the catalogue of 1,500 works he claims to have authored as a university student to realize that Kim Jong Il was the first dictator-clown in history.
Kim Jong Un, the baby-faced spawn of Jong Il, has assumed control of the DPRK as the "great successor to the revolutionary cause," a tired euphemism for a cruel experiment. He will likely continue the inhumane policies of a totalitarian system, relegating millions of his people to privation, fear, and a repertoire of dick jokes without a two-drink minimum.
Which is both hilarious and true. And if absurdity is a recognition of the truth, then an appreciation for the absurd would be a step forward in our approach to the regime. We must be honest in order to be effective. North Korea is genuinely funny. It is also unquestionably diabolical. Let's take a cue from Pasternak and call each thing by its right name, rather than deny the absurdity of a regime we hope to one day open up.
Follow Gabriel Mizrahi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GabeMizrahi
There is a new clean energy technology that is one tenth the cost of coal. LENR using nickel. Incredibly: Ni+H(heated under pressure)=Cu+lots of heat. This phenomenon (LENR) has been confirmed in hundreds of published scientific papers: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf
"Over 2 decades with over 100 experiments worldwide indicate LENR is real, much greater than chemical..." --Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center
"Energy density many orders of magnitude over chemical." Michael A. Nelson, NASA
"Total replacement of fossil fuels for everything but synthetic organic chemistry." --Dr. Joseph M. Zawodny, NASA
According to Forbes, electricity will be "too cheap to meter" if Rossi's Oct 28 demonstration succeeds: http://www.forbes.com/sites/markgibbs/2011/10/17/hello-cheap-energy-hello-brave-new-world/
Here's the latest, according to MSNBC it passed the test: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45153076/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.TrNo9rJqwe4
By the way, here is a current survey of all the companies that are bringing LENR to commercialization: http://www.cleantechblog.com/2011/08/the-new-breed-of-energy-catalyzers-ready-for-commercialization.html
I've been following the DPRK's infrastructure development but it's unclear how effective it really is. The country can barely keep the lights on and water running, but then again, it allocates resources to high-priority ventures, like (I imagine) producing energy and keeping the Kim Il Sung mausoleum ice cold.
Are you suggesting that energy independence is making the place even more hermetic?
but I didn't see that the joke was on me, oh no.
I started to cry, which started the whole world laughing,
oh, if I'd only seen that the joke was on me.
I looked at the skies, running my hands over my eyes,
and I fell out of bed, hurting my head from things that I'd said.
Til I finally died, which started the whole world living,
oh, if I'd only seen that the joke was on me.
"I Started a Joke" by the Bee Gees
There are also many dreams in our heart.
There, over there that mountain is Baekdu Mountain,
Where, even in the middle of winter days, flowers bloom.
"Arirang," unofficial national anthem of Korea
The DPRK mourned Kim Jong Il. He, and especially his late father, are revered almost like gods by people who lived through some of the most terrible times in the twentieth century. They know how Kim Il Sung, WW2 hero against brutal occupier Japan, then rallied their nation to resist intervention in their civil war. US bombers levelled every large structure in the DPRK, killed over 2 million (a tenth of the population), and still refuses a peace treaty. 43.000 US troops are stationed on their border, with constant overflights and espionage. The son tried his best to shepard the nation through floods and famines of epic proportions without letting their guard down. These facts, and more, must inform any evaluation of North Korea.
Mizrahi calls Kim Jong Il "capricious, nuclear, unstable" and makes fun of his elevator shoes. Asians are short, I am married to one. A North Korean could try to joke about Obama and his 1000 bases in 100 countries around the world, while Kim Jong Il never had one DPRK soldier on foreign soil. Not funny. Who dropped the A-bomb on Asians? All three Kims waited, and will wait, for the US to agree to a peace treaty before relaxing their vigilance. And maybe Mizrahi can find other material for his jokes.
Nice work!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kinabalu/collections/72157628638480911/
Here's a pic of Gabriel after getting off the Vominator coaster at the Pyongyang Fun Fair: http://flic.kr/p/ak3969
Great article Gabriel! It definitely summed up how it felt to be in the hermit kingdom the final days of KJI
Guns, girls and beer at the North Korean gun range
http://www.flickr.com/photos/josephferris76/sets/72157627814170959/
and Frisbee diplomacy
http://www.flickr.com/photos/josephferris76/sets/72157627490517029/
I was just talking in terms "human farming". Gov increasing country's output by giving people freedom to work and invent. Gov then taxes work and products. This increase the wealth of leaders more than strict controls.
happy new years ~Anne
http://thenorthkoreablog.com/2011/11/09/spies-entrepreneurs-and-the-internet-in-north-korea/
24 million people are imprisoned. I hope they get to join the world too.