This is hilarious.
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
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7 comments:
Is it, though? I mean, maybe I'm missing something. Do Koreans have a reputation for not stopping at red lights? Because here they stop at red lights just about as much as they do anywhere else. Also, it doesn't help that the original game has nothing to do with red lights.
I guess this one loses a lot in translation.
Ever been on a 5:30 a.m. bus in Seoul that just blows through red lights?
Ever been on a street in New York where taxis do the same thing? Or Main Street in Flushing where the red light might as well be a Christmas decoration? Point being that nobody obeys red lights if they a) don't think they have to and b) don't think they are being watched. I just fail to see how this is a uniquely Korean thing. And that's kind of necessary for the joke to work.
I guess I should've considered the New York angle. We've got our share of rude scofflaws in Virginia, but in general, Virginia traffic actually shows respect for lights, signs, and laws. Maybe Schultz is playing to that common denominator, i.e., to those who assume respect for the rule of law. Anyway, point taken, but I still think the joke is funny.
Side note: a lot of jokes, told in a torrent, don't hold up to scrutiny. In his 1980s standup at the Met, Robin Williams joked about marathoners who, according to him, suffer from endorphins, which he described as the body's way of saying, "If you keep this pain shit up, I'm gonna hurt you." The audience had a good laugh, but the joke is based on a factual error: endorphins increase your tolerance for pain. They don't cause discomfort—quite the opposite. This joke about runners came in the midst of an avalanche of other jokes, so what do you do in that situation? I guess you can overthink it and be like, "Hey, wait a minute!" (which is a legitimate reaction, of course)—or you can go with the flow of the humor. Sure, it's a feelings-over-facts thing to do, going with the flow, but I guess when it comes to comedy, that's usually the way I roll. (To be fair, though, this blog contains plenty of instances of me having the same "Hey, wait a minute!" reaction to attempted humor.)
As for the idea that Schultz was saying this was uniquely Korean behavior, well, I don't think he actually said that. Doubtless, he was playing into an American stereotype about Asian drivers. Maybe he should visit Flushing.
In fairness, Flushing is pretty much the Asian capital of New York... so maybe that has something to do with it.
Not sure why this one didn't land for me. For some reason none of the pieces clicked. I think it probably also helped (or didn't help, as the case may be) that I watched Squid Game in Korean, and there is no association with red lights at all.
I was going to make a crack about Flushing's Asian population, but I wasn't sure how far I should go.
You're right: the "Squid Game" scene doesn't contain any red lights, so Schultz is relying purely on the English term "red light, green light" for the joke to work. It works for English speakers (conceptually if not literally), but I can see how it wouldn't work for those focused on the Korean language.
And to be fair, I've been brought up short by American attempts at puns that rely on a mispronunciation of Korean. There's a parody account on Twitter called "Kim Jung Number Un," so for the joke to work, the "Un" has to rhyme with "fun" and "one," but anyone who knows even a little Korean knows the dictator's name is Kim Jeong-eun. So that Twitter handle was utterly unfunny to me and merely betrayed the account owner's ignorance.
All of which is to say that, on the one hand, I think you might be overthinking Schultz's joke, but on the other hand, I've had similar reactions myself, so I don't stand on any moral high ground.
Oh, yeah, I'm definitely overthinking it, but that's the result of the joke not landing for me, not the reason. Either you immediately find something funny or you don't, and only in the latter case do you start picking it apart.
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