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
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