Today I’m translating a joke that targets a shortsighted man for his foolishness. In that way it’s similar to the last installment of this series, which translated a joke called “The Rice Cake Is Mine!” In this one, a father is so eager to treat his son’s illness that he doesn’t realize that the treatment is worse than the disease. Both these jokes fit with a superiority theory of humor. According to this view, the joke is funny because we can see how foolish the characters are being, and since we have a better understanding of the situation, we can laugh because we feel superior to them. The joke I’m looking at today is different from the previous one, though, because this one is also about Koreans at the turn of the 20th century learning to navigate the modern world — in this case, modern medicine. The disease in question is malaria. Experts say the history of malaria can be difficult to trace because before modern germ theory was developed, words associated with malaria were used for a variety of fever-causing conditions not necessarily caused by the malaria parasit