KOREAN CULTURE REPORT - HUMORI was the “funny kid” in my high school clique of friends. Ever since I learned to read English, I have enjoyed reading and collecting joke books. I have exhausted every single joke book from the little community library in town. Riddles, jokes about animals and wildlife, reasons why I didn't do my homework, jokes about lawyers, and, later, ethnic jokes. I knew they were fun, but I wanted more. Perhaps it was my lack of physical accomplishments that made me obsessed with entertaining my peers. My return to Korea in the summer of 2001 was nothing short of a culture shock. I was in a country that I thought I had memorized. It has been the country from which I have always rooted my identity and pride. I wasn't ready for the shock. I was wrong about Korea. What's worse, I was wrong about myself: I wasn't funny! I was unhappy and alone, my social compass was spinning, and I was desperately trying to fit into a more “acceptable” form of myself. To close the circle and ensure an adequate grip on the culture of my "homeland", it took five, maybe eight years. But I still wasn't funny. At least not in Korean, anyway. I had to keep trying. How could I be funny in one language and culture and not be funny in another language and culture? The most I could muster was farce and self-deprecation. Asking for laughs was clearly the only option left. At the same time, hearing my native Korean peers make jokes that to me were terribly unfunny, and generally not being able to partake in the joy of Korean TV shows and dramas, was also very disheartening. I often felt left out and incomplete as a Korean trying to reintegrate. I wasn't alone in that experience, as many of my third culture peers shared such failures to deliver middle-of-the-paper punchlines... ....ridiculing them just enough to make us feel better. Studies have shown that cultures that score high on uncertainty avoidance prefer explicit and simple jokes. Uncertain avoidance was very high in Korea, and is evident in Korean television in general, as it leaves so little to reflect on or create secondary content. Anecdotally, I find this preference for easy-to-consume humor manifests itself in the form of repeat performances in comedy, and its continued success. My observations on Korean popular humor end here. I've tried to make more sense of what I can't fully understand, and I've tried to leave things as they are. Much, if not all, of the logic and reasoning contained in this report is based solely on anecdotal evidence I have collected over the past twelve years. I hope it helps others understand Korean humor better and maybe even enjoy it to laugh together.