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Even the Chinese Tell Jokes About North Korea

It’s a little old, but if I hadn’t seen it before, I figured not all of you had, either.  You’d think that the humor wouldn’t translate, but actually, it does, though grimly:

一个英国人，一个法国人，一个朝鲜人在一起聊天。英国人：最幸福的事情就是冬天晚上回家，穿着羊毛裤坐在壁 炉前面。法国人：你们英国人就是古板，最幸福的事情是和一个金发女郎一起去地中海度假，然后我们好和好散。朝鲜人：最幸福的事情就是半夜有人敲门，开门 后：” 康成美，你被捕了。””你弄错了，康成美在隔壁。”

A Briton, a Frenchman, and a North Korean are having a conversation.

The Briton: “I feel happiest when relaxing before the fireplace on a winter night.

Frenchman: “You guys are too old fashioned. I feel happiest when I go on vacation with a beautiful blonde and then beak up with her up on my way home.

North Korean: “One night, somebody knocked my door. When I opened the door, he said “˜Kang Sung Mi, You are under arrest!’ I felt happiest because Kang was actually my neighbor.   [Daily NK]

Maybe Sonagi and Spelunker will tell us if it’s funnier in the original Chinese.

It’s both ironic and inevitable that the Chinese would make fun of North Korea for being tyrannical, backward, and poor — perhaps without knowing how much China has done to keep North Korea tyrannical, backward, and poor, to serve its most conniving interests.  Even in South Dakota, after all, we used to tell North Dakota jokes, which tended to pick at North Dakota being marginally colder and less urbane than my home state, still one of the most rural, geographically isolated, and socially conservative in the country.  And our climate?  The Lakota took note of how our wrench-cracking winters made the very limbs on the trees shatter spontaneously.  The kettle shouldn’t assume that the pot takes itself seriously; in a way, knowing that made the jokes funnier.  So did the fact that we didn’t sell women from North Dakota into sexual slavery or truss them up like hogs and sell them for bounties.

On reflection, I think Kris Kristofferson put it best.

8 Responses

  1. Friendly suggestion: Next time please do not use italics with Chinese text, as it is hard to read.

    Koreans on both sides of the DMZ are often the butt of Chinese nationality jokes. None of the ones I’ve read online provoked even a chuckle.

    It’s both ironic and inevitable that the Chinese would make fun of North Korea for being tyrannical, backward, and poor — perhaps without knowing how much China has done to keep North Korea tyrannical, backward, and poor, to serve its most conniving interests.

    Oh, the Chinese know. They just don’t make the connection, so they don’t see the irony of ridiculing the sorry state they’ve enabled.

  2. Thanks for the link! The English translation by Daily NK is not very good. I can do better:

    一个英国人，一个法国人，一个朝鲜人在一起聊天。英国人：最幸福的事情就是冬天晚上回家，穿着羊毛裤坐在壁炉前面。法国人：你们英国人就是古板，最幸福的事情是和一个金发女郎一起去地中海度假，然后我们好和好散。朝鲜人：最幸福的事情就是半夜有人敲门，开门后：“ 康成美，你被捕了。”“你弄错了，康成美在隔壁。”

    A Briton, a Frenchman, and a North Korean are chatting together.

    The Briton: “I feel happiest when I return home on a winter night, wear me woolens and sit in front of the fireplace .”

    Frenchman: “You Brits are too old fashioned. I feel happiest when I go on a Mediterranean vacation with a beautiful blonde and afterward we go our separate ways amicably.”

    North Korean: “The happiest moment for me was one time in the middle of the night when somebody knocked on my door and after I opened it he said “Kang Sung Mi, you are under arrest!” I said “You’ve got it wrong. Kang Sung Mi is next door!”

    I thought this one was funnier and it needs no revision:

    美术馆里有一幅描写亚当和夏娃的画。一个英国人看了，说：“他们一定是英国人，男士有好吃的东西就和女士分享。”一个法国人看了，说：“他们一定是法国人，情侣裸体散步。”一个朝鲜人看了，说：“他们一定是朝鲜人，他们没有衣服，吃得很少，却还以为自己在天堂！”

    At the museum, there is a painting in which Adam and Eve are holding an apple.
    A Briton says, “They are Britons. The gentleman is sharing a delicious apple with a lady.”
    A Frenchman says, “They must be French. They are walking around in the nude.”
    A North Korean says, “They are North Korean. They have no clothes and little food but think of themselves as living in paradise.”

    Hey Sonagi, did you see my post at Global Voices Online where I totally blast a Chinese fenqing commenter out of the water? For everybody else: A comparison was made by some Chinese netizens who considered Kim Jong-il the equivalent of Mao Zedong.
    I posted my own retort that Kim Il-sung is much closer to Mao then Kim Jong-il could ever be and that any Chinese who thinks otherwise has their head up their arse. Sonagi kindly pointed out through translation of more original comments that many other Chinese also disagree with the comparison.

    However there was one patriotic Chinese who chose this opportunity to call the US, Russia and even India “losers” by saying how China fought battles and even took territory from Russia (Zhenbao Island). In my specific reply to him, I invite him to join me in a Liaoning province birdwatching tour that discovers not all land near the northern shore of the Yalu belongs to China, and in fact some of it was conceded to none other than Kim Il Sung!

    Good stuff, here it is:

    http://globalvoicesonline.org/2009/07/08/china-and-north-korea-kim-is-like-chair-mao/comment-page-2/#comments

  4. I read the entire original People’s Daily forum post in the first link of the GV post. The writer used the Mao comparison to hook Chinese netizens into reading his piece praising Kim Jong-il and condemning the US, Japan, South Korea, and Lee Myung-bak. I think the writer is either a North Korean proficient in Chinese or China’s version of a South Korean leftist. The GV contributing blogger cherry-picked comments that agreed with the OP and completely ignored all the dissenting comments. He politely thanked me for taking the trouble to post and translate some opposing views. 🙂

  5. The six dialectical contradictions of socialism in the USSR:

    There is full employment — yet no one is working.
    No one is working — yet the factory quotas are fulfilled.
    The factory quotas are fulfilled — yet the stores have nothing to sell.
    The stores have nothing to sell — yet people got all the stuff at home.
    People got all the stuff at home — yet everyone is complaining.
    Everyone is complaining — yet the voting is always unanimous.

  6. Hey, NKeconWatch, just noticed something curious in that link you posted — the joke which you’ve titled ‘black and white’ was, albeit in a slightly different form, quite popular in East Germany before the fall of communism (it was about ‘red ink’ and a worker going to Siberia, etc.). Funny to think how the joke got from one place to the other. It was referenced in Slavoj Zizek’s 2002 book ‘welcome to the desert of the real’, and it’s from there that we got the name of our blog (explanation here.

  8. A joke popular in East Germany was:
    A lady walks into a store and asks, “Does this store have any fish?”
    The clerk replies, “No, this store doesn’t have any meat. That store there doesn’t have any fish.”