KOREAN CULTURE REPORT - HUMORI was the “funny guy” in my high school clique. Ever since I learned to read English, I have enjoyed reading and collecting joke books. I've exhausted all the joke books in the town's small community library. Riddles, jokes about animals and wildlife, reasons why I didn't do my homework, lawyer jokes and, later, ethnic jokes. I knew they were funny, but I wanted more. Perhaps it was my lack of physical performance 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 learned by heart. It is the country in which I have always rooted my identity and my pride. I wasn't ready for the shock. I was wrong about Korea. Worse still, I was wrong about myself: I wasn't funny! I was unhappy and alone, my social compass was spinning, and I was desperate to adapt to a more “acceptable” form of myself. It took five, maybe eight years, to come full circle and ensure a good mastery of the culture of my “homeland”. 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 best I could muster was slapstick and self-deprecation. Begging for a laugh was clearly the only option left. At the same time, hearing my ethnic Korean peers make jokes that to me were completely unfunny, and generally not being able to participate in the joy of Korean TV shows and dramas, was also very discouraging. I often felt excluded and incomplete as a Korean trying to reintegrate. I was not alone in this experience, as many of my third-culture peers shared such failures in delivering punchlines to middle of paper. ....ridiculing them just enough to make us feel better. Studies have shown that cultures that score well on uncertainty avoidance prefer jokes that are explicit and simple. Insecure avoidance was very high in Korea, and this is evident in Korean television in general because it leaves so little to ruminate on or create secondary content. Anecdotally, I feel like this preference for easy-to-consume humor has manifested itself in the form of repeats 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 it at that. Much, if not all, of the logic and reasoning in this report is based solely on anecdotal evidence collected by me over the past twelve years. I hope this helps others understand Korean humor better, and maybe even enjoy laughing.