A public hanok in central Seoul, Dec. 29, 2025 / Yonhap

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

The most common situation in the humor collection “Kkalkkal Useum” is conflict between husbands and wives. The joke I’m translating today also features a husband and wife, but it stands out in some interesting ways.

The first is that the stakes of the conflict are so much lower. Many of the other jokes feature conflict around significant life events like child-rearing, or a wife opposing her husband’s decision to take a concubine. In this joke, on the other hand, the only thing at stake is a silly wager about who gets to enjoy eating some rice cake.

Another difference is that in almost all the other jokes, the wife wins the conflict. In a more typical joke from the collection, the husband starts out with more social power and authority, but the wife uses quick thinking and wit to turn the tables and flip the hierarchy upside down. The situation in this joke is different because in the wager between the husband and wife, the husband wins.

And yet, from a wider perspective, he’s a loser. The couple has been so myopically focused on their marital rivalry that they haven’t even paid attention to the fact that a robber has broken into their house and is stealing their belongings right under their noses. The wife loses the wager, but only because she has enough sense to pay attention to what’s happening right in front of her. (To be fair, the wife doesn’t have much common sense either — just a bit more than her husband.) This joke has really stuck with me, because I think it says something meaningful about relationships and loss of perspective.

A married couple made rice cake.

Then they made a bet that whoever could go the longest without saying anything would get to eat it.

As they were sitting silently watching each other, a burglar came into their house. He noticed that neither of them said a word and asked, “What’s going on here?”

But there was no answer. The burglar said, “They must both be mute.” So he took all their belongings and carried them out of the house.

Source: Korea Times News