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

The joke I’m translating today is short and simple, but it’s interesting for the way it uses humor to parody and attack Western racism and arrogance. Although the joke was included in a Korean humor collection, the two figures here are identified only as a Westerner and a man from China's Qing Dynasty. (Qing was the last Chinese dynasty and ended in 1911, five years before “Kkalkkal Useum” was published.) Since the joke features a Chinese rather than a Korean protagonist, it’s a reasonable guess that the editor took this joke from an earlier Chinese source. This choice of protagonists makes this joke stand out from most Korean humor of the era, which more often deals with family relationships.

This joke opens with the Westerner making fun of the Chinese man using an established racist trope: that Europeans are cleaner and more hygienic than other races, an idea which was intended to provide a pseudoscientific justification for their racial supremacy. This was part of a broader racist ideology that justified Western efforts toward colonialism and economic exploitation in East Asia and elsewhere. The Westerner here isn’t introduced or described, and no explanation is offered for his behavior, which implies that a Westerner behaving this way would have been unsurprising enough to the contemporary audience that no explanation was needed.

The Chinese man starts out by playing along with the Westerner’s mockery, which creates a dramatic irony. The Westerner thinks that his counterpart is listening to him with respectful interest, admiring his virtue and insight. But as readers, we’re able to see that the Chinese man is subtly mocking him, until his final comment undercuts what the Westerner has been saying. It does so in part by showing that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and also perhaps by creating a ridiculous image of him parading around without any clothes on.

“Do You Wash Your Face in the Nude?”

A Westerner mocked a man from Qing by saying, “I’ve heard that people from your country don’t wash their faces when they wake up in the morning. Is that so?”

The man from Qing replied, “Do people from your country wash their faces as soon as they wake up?”

The Westerner said, “Well, of course! In my country, absolutely everyone washes their face as soon as they wake up.”

The man from Qing said, “Your countrymen sure are crazy about face washing! How peculiar and bizarre. When the people of my country wake up in the morning, no matter what, the first thing they do is always to put clothes on. Only then do they wash their faces.”

He landed a blow on the Westerner.

*G.S. Hand is a graduate of the Translation Academy at LTI Korea and winner of the Fiction Grand Prize of the 53rd Modern Korean Literature Translation Awards, and has a master’s degree in Modern Korean Literature from Korea University. He will give a lecture for Royal Asiatic Society Korea on early 20th-century Korean humor on Sept. 8. Visit raskb.com for more information. *