North Korea’s meta-satire

Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator is not the only political comedy to hit the screens recently. North Korean local TV has aired a "satire on the rat-like Lee Myung Bak for his high treason," according to an article last week from Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s state news agency. The article quotes from ...

Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator is not the only political comedy to hit the screens recently. North Korean local TV has aired a "satire on the rat-like Lee Myung Bak for his high treason," according to an article last week from Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea's state news agency.

Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator is not the only political comedy to hit the screens recently. North Korean local TV has aired a "satire on the rat-like Lee Myung Bak for his high treason," according to an article last week from Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), North Korea’s state news agency.

The article quotes from the show, which it calls a "comic chat," and which itself reads like a satire of North Korean satire:

Lee Myung Bak, a rat born in Osaka of Japan, left millions of people jobless, many of them killing themselves, and thus turning south Korea into a kingdom of suicide unfit for human beings… Traitor Lee Myung Bak and his military hooligans like Kim Kwan Jin and Jong Sung Jo have been deleted from the list of human beings.

If anyone has seen this show, please do let me know.

Isaac Stone Fish is a journalist and senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on U.S-China Relations. He was formerly the Asia editor at Foreign Policy Magazine. Twitter: @isaacstonefish

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