2024, Vol., No.82

The Journal of Korean drama and theatre 2025 KCI Impact Factor : 0.96

pISSN : 1225-7729 / eISSN : 2713-8453
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kdrama

Song Yeong‘s “Self-Defense Martial Art” is considered a masterpiece of KAPF’s theory of art popularization. The satirical technique of capitalist's a satire of oneself was evaluated as an important achievement of the work. However, no one was interested in self-defense martial art, the core material of the work. Unlike ATBD(of Germany) and PROT(of Japan) which focused on agitprop theater, “Self-Defense Martial Art” is judged to be a work aimed at the effect of “a propaganda drama that can organize the subject of the struggle”, not “the agitation theater that can be put into the scene of the struggle”. The self-defense martial art, which was used as a central material, was a kind of bourgeois sport based on induction that the Japanese imperialism wanted to foster as a national sport. Therefore, the artist aims to change the audience’s perception by revealing the essence of bourgeois culture hidden in the words of health or mental cultivation by using self-defense martial art. Furthermore, it also suggests the direction of proletarian culture to respond to this bourgeois culture. Therefore, Song Yeong’s “Self-Defense Martial Art” was a work created in consideration of the specificity of colonial Joseon in the international trend of the proletarian art movement leading to RAPP, NAFP, and KAPF. In a situation where a quick revolution is impossible, the slow revolution caused by the penetration of consciousness and the method of cultural revolution such as the so-called Gramsci style “the war of position” were the revolutionary strategies of colonial Joseon taken by Song Yeong and KAPF in the popularization of art.

This study aims to examine the politics of ‘anti-communist’ comedy films in the 1950s and 1960s, which can be understood as the formative years of anti-communism, by examining specific works that frequently engaged with ‘anti-communist’ codes. Studies of comedy films from this period have tended to oscillate between ambivalent interpretations of conformity and resistance. However, comedy films that attracted ‘anti-communist’ audiences during this period show signs of both embodying anti-communist propaganda and enlightenment messages, as well as transforming them. This is especially evident in the sudden process of integration that the comedies of this period undergo at the end, when they transform their characters into wholesome subjects. The “anti-communist” comedies of the 1950s and 1960s can be broadly categorized according to their main content: 1) training camp films, 2) military films, 3) counter intelligence films, and 4) espionage films. Training camp films and military films, which depict men becoming soldiers in an anti-communist society, emphasize their militaristic masculinity through sudden achievements, while also illustrating the point at which becoming a soldier in an anti-communist society ends. In addition, the counterintelligence narrative of encountering and apprehending spies in everyday life transforms anti-communism as a ‘counter intelligence’ into an opportunity for capital acquisition, while also showing off the systemic logic of capitalism in contrast to the communist camp. In the case of espionage comedies, in which vulnerable men easily achieve ‘defeating communism’, the sense of crisis and seriousness of the ‘anti-communist’ movement is tarnished. In this way, the ‘anti-communist’ message of comedy films during this period, which gradually diluted its political power, shows signs of casting public desensitization and naturalizing anti-communism.

Comedy has been a particularly important genre in Korean films since 1990s. This is not only because many comedies have been produced and have won box office successes, but also because the comic mode has been established as a major cinematic custom. Considering this, this study aims to analyze comedy films in the 2000s, a period of comedy films flourishing, in relation to liberalist politics. To begin with, the methodology of comedy analysis and the psychological mechanisms of laughter are explored. Then, using the dynamics of deconstruction/reconstruction of laughter, the political implications of the laughter in “Public Enemy” (2002) are analyzed. The deconstructive/reconstructive laughter at the police has the effect of relativizing the liberalist state, which is also required by the logic of the narrative. This laughter of liberal politics was repeatedly adopted by a number of films in the 2000s. There are three main types of such films that address the problems of liberal politics and relativize them with laughter at the same time. First, police comedies, such as “Public Enemy”; second, films in which citizens become the performers of policing, such as “Break Out” (2002); and third, films in which the question of political representation is addressed, such as “Small Town Rivals” (2007). Each of these types of films centers on key issues of liberalist politics - citizens, police, and the state - and has in common a approval of the liberalist state, which is established to secure the private sphere, while relativizing them through laughter. On the other hand, the liberalist laughter of these films can be extended to Korean comedy films of the 2000s as a whole. The cinematic laughter of deconstruction and approval generated by various comedy films of this period can be explained in relation to the contradictory and dynamic liberalism in 2000s’ Korea. This provides a basis for explaining the comic mode, a major representational custom in Korean films of the contemporary era, in relation to its liberalist society.