Three young girls are dressed for an outing circa 1900. Robert Neff Collection

Laughing Through History is a column that explores the roots of Korean humor through the joke book “Kkalkkal Useum,” originally published in 1916.

Traditional Korean society valued boys over girls, in part because a male heir was considered necessary to continue the family line. But because parents couldn’t choose a baby’s sex, this became a significant point of anxiety when a baby was born. (It’s worth pointing out that this preference has decreased in contemporary Korean society.) And since one role of humor is to express social tensions, this lead to the appearance of a particular humor figure — the man with many daughters but no sons.

The two jokes below feature such characters. These jokes depend on the social background knowledge that having daughters but no sons is considered a terrible misfortune. In other words, the humor is sexist by definition.

The goal of translating them isn’t to make readers laugh (they probably won’t), but to provide a window to the era they come from, and possibly to provide insight into how humor from our own era works.

The second joke here mentions a theater called Gwangmudae, which existed from 1898 to 1930 and would have been in operation when this book was published. It was one of the earliest theater spaces in Korea, since traditional Korean performance genres used outdoor spaces and did not have separate buildings dedicated to them. Among the jokes in “Kkalkkal Useum,” this one stands out for depending purely on wordplay, with a string of synonyms used to make the man’s answer ironically indirect.

The Baby Looks Like Me Up Top, but it Looks Like My Wife Down Below

There was a prime minister who had nine daughters. His wife once again sensed that she was pregnant, and in the 10th month she felt that she was going into labor.

The prime minister sat outside the whole while, wondering whether she would give birth to a son this time.

Before long he heard a baby crying, and he impatiently asked, “Well, Wife? What did you give birth to?”

Source: Korea Times News