Here is a short sketch from the TV show "Gag Concert (๊ฐ๊ทธ ์ฝ์ํธ)," which, unlike most Korean TV shows, takes the form of live stand-up comedy. It is the longest-running comedy program of Korea, having started in 1999, and it is still ongoing, although its popularity is not what it used to be.
The comedians would prepare a recurring theme, and broadcast a short skit loosely fitting this theme for weeks or months, based on the reception from the audience. So although the sketches were new every week, you could make an educated guess about how the skit would go.
One such theme, which was very popular and ran for years, was called "๋ฌ์ธ (world expert)." The rough idea is that an MC of an imaginary show called "๋ฌ์ธ์ ๋ง๋๋ค" would introduce a guest (in reality, same comedian every time) who is the world expert at some random thing (the guest always appears with his top apprentice, called "์์ ์" in Korean), because he practiced it for several years. When they put him to the test, however, he fails miserably, and he ends up being booted from the show.
So the title of this sketch series (it's called "์ฝ๋" or "corner" in Koreanized English) shows irony -- the letter "๋ฌ" means "to be an expert at, or to have transcendental expertise." This letter is most used in "ํต๋ฌํ๋ค" (to know everything). The letter "์ธ" means "a person," as in "์ธ๋ถ" (workman) or "๋ถ์ธ" (wife). So "๋ฌ์ธ" actually means something more than just a "world expert" -- it's "someone who is so good that it feels like he transcends this world."
Anyway, here is the clip: see how much you can understand! (Warning: the dialogue is fast, so it is normal to not understand a word!)
And the transcript follows: B for the guy in black on right, and W for the guy in the middle wearing white (the guy wearing blue doesn't say anything.) To facilitate your understanding, proper nouns are placed in quotation marks! The explanation of the clip follows the transcript.
B: ๋ค ์ฌ๋ฌ๋ถ ์๋ ํ์ญ๋๊น! "๋ฌ์ธ์ ๋ง๋๋ค"์ "๋ฅ๋ด"์ ๋๋ค. ์ค๋ ์ด์๊ฐ์๋ 16๋ ๋์ ์๊ฐ์ ์์คํจ์...
W: ์~ ๋น , ๋น , ๋น , ๋น , ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ์๊ธฐํด. ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ์๊ธฐํด. ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ!
B: ์๊ฐ์ ์์คํจ์ ๊นจ๋ซ๊ณ ๊ธํ ์ฑ๊ฒฉ์ผ๋ก ์ด์์ค์ ๊ธํ ์ฑ๊ฒฉ์ ๋ฌ์ธ, "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง" ์ ์๋์ ๋ชจ์ จ์ต๋๋ค.
W: ์ ๊ฑฐ๊ฑฐ, ๋ญ ์ข, "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง"์ด์์, "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง." ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ์๊ธฐํด์ผ์ง ๋ญ ๊ทธ๋ ๊ฒ...
B: ์ด์ฐ, ์ง์ง ์ฑ๊ฒฉ ๊ธํ์๋ค!
W: ๊ทธ ์๊ธฐ ํ๋๋ฐ ๊ธธ์ด์? ์๊ฐ์์ด ์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋๋ฐ?
B: ๋ค ์๊ฒ ์ต๋๋ค... ์ ์๋๊ป์ ์ผ๋ง์ ์...
W: ์ผ๋ง์ ์ ๋ญ, ๋ญ?
B: ๋ค, ์ผ๋ง์ ์...
W: ์, ๋ฌด์จ ์๊ธฐ ํ๋ ค๊ณ ํ๋๋ฐ, ์ง๊ธ? ์, ๋ฌด์จ ์๊ธฐ ํ๋ ค๊ณ , ์ง๊ธ?
B: ์, ์๋, ๋ค, ์ผ๋ง์ ์ ๊ทธ ์ฑ ์ ์ฐ์ จ๋ค๊ณ ...
W: ์ ์ฑ ๋์ด, ์ฑ ๋์ด์!
๊ทธ... "๊ฐ๋ ๋ง์ด ๋นจ๋ผ์ผ ์ค๋ ๋ง์ด ๋น ๋ฅด๋ค."
B: "๊ฐ๋ ๋ง์ด ๋นจ๋ผ์ผ ์ค๋๋ง์ด ๋น ๋ฅด๋ค."
W: ๋ค ๊ทธ์ฑ ๋์ด์. ์์ฐ, ๋ ๋ชฉํ์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋ค. ๊ฐ์ ๋ฌผ ์ข ๋ ์, ์ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๋ฌผ ์ข ๋ ์! ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๊ฐ์... ๊ทธ ํ๋, ๋, ์ , ๋๋ฌ! ์๋ง ์๋จน์ด ์๋จน์ด ์๋จน์ด ๋ฆ์์ด,๋ฆ์์ด ์๊ฐ์์ด์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋๋ฐ ๊ทธ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ... ์ ... ๊ฐ๋ง์์ด๋ด.
์ด ์๊ฐ์จ ๋ง์์ ๋๋๋ฐ ์ด? ๋๋ ์ฌ๊ฒจ! ์ด? ์ซ์ด? ์ด? ์ ์ ๋๊น์ง ์๊ธฐํด.
ํ๋, ๋, ์ , ๋๋ฌ! ๋ฆ์์ด ๋ฆ์์ด ๋ฆ์์ด! ๋ด๊ฐ๋จผ์ ์ฐฌ๊ฑฐ์ผ, ๋ด๊ฐ๋จผ์ ์ฐผ์ด!
B: ๋จผ์ ์ฐผ๋ค๊ณ ์?
W: ๋ฆ์์ด ๋ฆ์์ด! ์ด, ๋ด๊ฐ๋จผ์ ์ฐผ์ด.
๋นจ๋ฆฌ๋นจ๋ฆฌ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ์๊ธฐํด, ์๊ฐ ์์ด ์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋ค!
B: ์, ์๊ฒ ์ต๋๋ค. ์ค๋ ์ ํฌ๊ฐ ์ค๋นํ...
W: ์๊ฐ ์์ด ์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋ค, ์์ด ์ฐธ!
B: ์ง๋ฌธ์ด ํ 30๊ฐ์ง๊ฐ ๋ฉ๋๋ค.
W: ๋ฌด์จ 30๊ฐ์ง์ผ! ํผ์ "๊ฐ๊ทธ์ฝ์ํธ" ๋ค ํ ๊ฑฐ์ผ? ๊ฐ๋ง์์ด๋ด.
์๊ฒ ์๋๊ณ , ์๊ฒ ์๋๊ณ , ์ ์๊ฒ๋งํด. ๋งจ ๋์๊ฑฐ.
B: ๋งจ ๋์๊ฒ๋ง ํ๋ผ๊ณ ์?
W: ์ ๋งจ๋์๊ฒ๋ง ํ๊ธฐ ์ซ์ด? ์, ํ๋, ๋, ์ !
B: ๋๊ฐ!
B: ์ผ ์์ ์! ์ผ~ ๋ ๋๊ธํ๋ค! ์ด? ์ปคํผ๋ ํ๋จน๊ณ .
This transcript is hard to understand for a couple of reason. First of all, the character in white, called "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง," speaks very, very quickly (I also had to listen to certain parts a few times before understanding him!) Also, the characters constantly interrupt each other!
First, an explanation of the name "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง." Back in the days of Joseon Dynasty or older, many learned people (์ ๋น) used to give themselves another name. It's not so different from how the anglophones give themselves nickname, such as John "the Dude" Doe, except the tone is a lot more serious. As an example, ์ดํฉ (Hwang Lee), the guy on your 1,000 won bills, gave himself the nickname of "ํด๊ณ," meaning "leaving this world." ("ํด" as in "ํด์ฅ" meaning "exit," and "๊ณ" meaning "the world" as in "์ธ๊ณ." He probably wanted to leave the messy world of politics and indulge in the nature and other spiritual things dictated by Confucianism!) So now the Koreans often call him "ํด๊ณ ์ดํฉ."
So ๊น๋ณ๋ง, the comedian in white, gave himself the nickname of "์กฐํด" meaning "early dismissal," often used in schools when you leave school early for sickness or other reasons. Somehow this word is not nearly as serious in tone as the other nicknames that the Koreans of the olden days used, so it is already pretty funny! And true to his nickname, he is in a hurry for no reason, speaking very quickly and cutting the man in black (his name is ๋ฅ๋ด, as he says in the transcript) off all the time.
In this sketch, ๊น๋ณ๋ง is the world expert of being in a hurry ("๊ธํ ์ฑ๊ฒฉ" meaning hurried personality.) He hurries things up so much that he transcends everyone in hurrying up.
While the MC ๋ฅ๋ด is trying to interview him, ์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง is constantly distracted and annoyed at the slow pace of the MC. When the MC is trying to mention the book that he's written, named "๊ฐ๋ ๋ง์ด ๋นจ๋ผ์ผ ์ค๋ ๋ง๋ ๋น ๋ฅด๋ค," ๊น๋ณ๋ง tries to complete the MC's sentence. (By the way, the title of the book is a play on the Korean proverb, "๊ฐ๋ ๋ง์ด ๊ณ ์์ผ ์ค๋ ๋ง๋ ๊ณฑ๋ค," or "Only when you speak nicely to others, will the others speak nicely to you." He replaces "nice" by "quickly.")
He then wants a glass of water, but when his apprentice is too slow, he gives up. He then spots a cute girl in the audience and asks her out, but when she is not quick enough to respond (until he counts to three), he gives up and claims that he dumped her. Finally, the MC tries to go through the list of 30 questions that they prepared, and ๊น๋ณ๋ง says that he has no time for this, and that he will only do the last question. MC has enough of it and kicks him off.
Then his top apprentice, who seemed like he was not so much in a hurry (because he fiddles with a coffee mix, presumably to mix it with hot water and make a cup of coffee for himself), just swallows the coffee mix instead of actually making a cup of coffee.
The comedians would prepare a recurring theme, and broadcast a short skit loosely fitting this theme for weeks or months, based on the reception from the audience. So although the sketches were new every week, you could make an educated guess about how the skit would go.
One such theme, which was very popular and ran for years, was called "๋ฌ์ธ (world expert)." The rough idea is that an MC of an imaginary show called "๋ฌ์ธ์ ๋ง๋๋ค" would introduce a guest (in reality, same comedian every time) who is the world expert at some random thing (the guest always appears with his top apprentice, called "์์ ์" in Korean), because he practiced it for several years. When they put him to the test, however, he fails miserably, and he ends up being booted from the show.
So the title of this sketch series (it's called "์ฝ๋" or "corner" in Koreanized English) shows irony -- the letter "๋ฌ" means "to be an expert at, or to have transcendental expertise." This letter is most used in "ํต๋ฌํ๋ค" (to know everything). The letter "์ธ" means "a person," as in "์ธ๋ถ" (workman) or "๋ถ์ธ" (wife). So "๋ฌ์ธ" actually means something more than just a "world expert" -- it's "someone who is so good that it feels like he transcends this world."
Anyway, here is the clip: see how much you can understand! (Warning: the dialogue is fast, so it is normal to not understand a word!)
And the transcript follows: B for the guy in black on right, and W for the guy in the middle wearing white (the guy wearing blue doesn't say anything.) To facilitate your understanding, proper nouns are placed in quotation marks! The explanation of the clip follows the transcript.
B: ๋ค ์ฌ๋ฌ๋ถ ์๋ ํ์ญ๋๊น! "๋ฌ์ธ์ ๋ง๋๋ค"์ "๋ฅ๋ด"์ ๋๋ค. ์ค๋ ์ด์๊ฐ์๋ 16๋ ๋์ ์๊ฐ์ ์์คํจ์...
W: ์~ ๋น , ๋น , ๋น , ๋น , ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ์๊ธฐํด. ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ์๊ธฐํด. ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ!
B: ์๊ฐ์ ์์คํจ์ ๊นจ๋ซ๊ณ ๊ธํ ์ฑ๊ฒฉ์ผ๋ก ์ด์์ค์ ๊ธํ ์ฑ๊ฒฉ์ ๋ฌ์ธ, "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง" ์ ์๋์ ๋ชจ์ จ์ต๋๋ค.
W: ์ ๊ฑฐ๊ฑฐ, ๋ญ ์ข, "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง"์ด์์, "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง." ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ์๊ธฐํด์ผ์ง ๋ญ ๊ทธ๋ ๊ฒ...
B: ์ด์ฐ, ์ง์ง ์ฑ๊ฒฉ ๊ธํ์๋ค!
W: ๊ทธ ์๊ธฐ ํ๋๋ฐ ๊ธธ์ด์? ์๊ฐ์์ด ์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋๋ฐ?
B: ๋ค ์๊ฒ ์ต๋๋ค... ์ ์๋๊ป์ ์ผ๋ง์ ์...
W: ์ผ๋ง์ ์ ๋ญ, ๋ญ?
B: ๋ค, ์ผ๋ง์ ์...
W: ์, ๋ฌด์จ ์๊ธฐ ํ๋ ค๊ณ ํ๋๋ฐ, ์ง๊ธ? ์, ๋ฌด์จ ์๊ธฐ ํ๋ ค๊ณ , ์ง๊ธ?
B: ์, ์๋, ๋ค, ์ผ๋ง์ ์ ๊ทธ ์ฑ ์ ์ฐ์ จ๋ค๊ณ ...
W: ์ ์ฑ ๋์ด, ์ฑ ๋์ด์!
๊ทธ... "๊ฐ๋ ๋ง์ด ๋นจ๋ผ์ผ ์ค๋ ๋ง์ด ๋น ๋ฅด๋ค."
B: "๊ฐ๋ ๋ง์ด ๋นจ๋ผ์ผ ์ค๋๋ง์ด ๋น ๋ฅด๋ค."
W: ๋ค ๊ทธ์ฑ ๋์ด์. ์์ฐ, ๋ ๋ชฉํ์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋ค. ๊ฐ์ ๋ฌผ ์ข ๋ ์, ์ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๋ฌผ ์ข ๋ ์! ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ๊ฐ์... ๊ทธ ํ๋, ๋, ์ , ๋๋ฌ! ์๋ง ์๋จน์ด ์๋จน์ด ์๋จน์ด ๋ฆ์์ด,๋ฆ์์ด ์๊ฐ์์ด์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋๋ฐ ๊ทธ ๋นจ๋ฆฌ... ์ ... ๊ฐ๋ง์์ด๋ด.
์ด ์๊ฐ์จ ๋ง์์ ๋๋๋ฐ ์ด? ๋๋ ์ฌ๊ฒจ! ์ด? ์ซ์ด? ์ด? ์ ์ ๋๊น์ง ์๊ธฐํด.
ํ๋, ๋, ์ , ๋๋ฌ! ๋ฆ์์ด ๋ฆ์์ด ๋ฆ์์ด! ๋ด๊ฐ๋จผ์ ์ฐฌ๊ฑฐ์ผ, ๋ด๊ฐ๋จผ์ ์ฐผ์ด!
B: ๋จผ์ ์ฐผ๋ค๊ณ ์?
W: ๋ฆ์์ด ๋ฆ์์ด! ์ด, ๋ด๊ฐ๋จผ์ ์ฐผ์ด.
๋นจ๋ฆฌ๋นจ๋ฆฌ๋นจ๋ฆฌ ์๊ธฐํด, ์๊ฐ ์์ด ์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋ค!
B: ์, ์๊ฒ ์ต๋๋ค. ์ค๋ ์ ํฌ๊ฐ ์ค๋นํ...
W: ์๊ฐ ์์ด ์ฃฝ๊ฒ ๋ค, ์์ด ์ฐธ!
B: ์ง๋ฌธ์ด ํ 30๊ฐ์ง๊ฐ ๋ฉ๋๋ค.
W: ๋ฌด์จ 30๊ฐ์ง์ผ! ํผ์ "๊ฐ๊ทธ์ฝ์ํธ" ๋ค ํ ๊ฑฐ์ผ? ๊ฐ๋ง์์ด๋ด.
์๊ฒ ์๋๊ณ , ์๊ฒ ์๋๊ณ , ์ ์๊ฒ๋งํด. ๋งจ ๋์๊ฑฐ.
B: ๋งจ ๋์๊ฒ๋ง ํ๋ผ๊ณ ์?
W: ์ ๋งจ๋์๊ฒ๋ง ํ๊ธฐ ์ซ์ด? ์, ํ๋, ๋, ์ !
B: ๋๊ฐ!
B: ์ผ ์์ ์! ์ผ~ ๋ ๋๊ธํ๋ค! ์ด? ์ปคํผ๋ ํ๋จน๊ณ .
This transcript is hard to understand for a couple of reason. First of all, the character in white, called "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง," speaks very, very quickly (I also had to listen to certain parts a few times before understanding him!) Also, the characters constantly interrupt each other!
First, an explanation of the name "์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง." Back in the days of Joseon Dynasty or older, many learned people (์ ๋น) used to give themselves another name. It's not so different from how the anglophones give themselves nickname, such as John "the Dude" Doe, except the tone is a lot more serious. As an example, ์ดํฉ (Hwang Lee), the guy on your 1,000 won bills, gave himself the nickname of "ํด๊ณ," meaning "leaving this world." ("ํด" as in "ํด์ฅ" meaning "exit," and "๊ณ" meaning "the world" as in "์ธ๊ณ." He probably wanted to leave the messy world of politics and indulge in the nature and other spiritual things dictated by Confucianism!) So now the Koreans often call him "ํด๊ณ ์ดํฉ."
This guy. Hwang "Out of this World" Lee. |
So ๊น๋ณ๋ง, the comedian in white, gave himself the nickname of "์กฐํด" meaning "early dismissal," often used in schools when you leave school early for sickness or other reasons. Somehow this word is not nearly as serious in tone as the other nicknames that the Koreans of the olden days used, so it is already pretty funny! And true to his nickname, he is in a hurry for no reason, speaking very quickly and cutting the man in black (his name is ๋ฅ๋ด, as he says in the transcript) off all the time.
In this sketch, ๊น๋ณ๋ง is the world expert of being in a hurry ("๊ธํ ์ฑ๊ฒฉ" meaning hurried personality.) He hurries things up so much that he transcends everyone in hurrying up.
While the MC ๋ฅ๋ด is trying to interview him, ์กฐํด ๊น๋ณ๋ง is constantly distracted and annoyed at the slow pace of the MC. When the MC is trying to mention the book that he's written, named "๊ฐ๋ ๋ง์ด ๋นจ๋ผ์ผ ์ค๋ ๋ง๋ ๋น ๋ฅด๋ค," ๊น๋ณ๋ง tries to complete the MC's sentence. (By the way, the title of the book is a play on the Korean proverb, "๊ฐ๋ ๋ง์ด ๊ณ ์์ผ ์ค๋ ๋ง๋ ๊ณฑ๋ค," or "Only when you speak nicely to others, will the others speak nicely to you." He replaces "nice" by "quickly.")
He then wants a glass of water, but when his apprentice is too slow, he gives up. He then spots a cute girl in the audience and asks her out, but when she is not quick enough to respond (until he counts to three), he gives up and claims that he dumped her. Finally, the MC tries to go through the list of 30 questions that they prepared, and ๊น๋ณ๋ง says that he has no time for this, and that he will only do the last question. MC has enough of it and kicks him off.
Then his top apprentice, who seemed like he was not so much in a hurry (because he fiddles with a coffee mix, presumably to mix it with hot water and make a cup of coffee for himself), just swallows the coffee mix instead of actually making a cup of coffee.