If it weren’t so tragic to the citizens living in NK, the political situation would be rife with comedy. A short dear leader with a really bad haircut and high heels. A massive hotel that nobody stays at. Heads-of-State who score 18 on an 18-hole golf course. Hogan’s Heroes had Nazis; could you make a sit-com set in NK?
As soon as I saw the title, my first thought was well heck, they made a sitcom about a German POW camp in World War II. Then I opened the thread and saw that you mentioned Hogan’s Heroes.
With a little luck they can find a lead actor who is into kinky sex and gets himself murdered under mysterious circumstances. That will help sell it.
The Dear Leader is coming over for dinner tonight and my wife burned the spoiled pig slop!
Team America World Police was funny enough. Kim Jong Il feeding Hans Blix to house cats…(or was Hans the one who got fed to aquarium fish?)…
30 Rock had a plot where Jack’s girlfriend Avery was kidnapped in NK and forced to broadcast propogandist news. Margaret Cho played Kim Jong-Il.
That’s what I thought, too. Give it to Matt and Trey to work on.
Back in the mid-80s there was a British sitcom called Comrade Dad, set in a future Britain that had been taken over by the Soviets. It starred George Cole (of Minder) and I have always assumed it was an attempt to cash in on the anticipated success of the Michael Radford 1984. I can remember watching the title sequence as a kid - it had a spinning star and took place in “Londonistan” - but I can’t remember anything more about it.
Nowadays it tends to be remembered as one of those “what on earth were they thinking?” shows. Apparently involved lots of jokes about only have beetroot for tea. So, er, you could try to make a sitcom set in North Korea. It would essentially be The Phil Silvers Show or The Army Game but every few episodes a couple of the cast just vanish and no-one would ever talk about them again.
Or The Office crossed with that Twilight Zone story where everybody had to be really, really nice to the psychic kid, or he would wish them into the cornfield. Could it work? Yes, but not for long.
They could give Bobby Lee’s North Korean Scientist character his own sitcom. (Maybe he gets a new job every week a la Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em…)
I was thinking this was an advantage of My So-Called North Korea. If a character got boring they could smirk at Our Dear Leader’s haircut and that would be the end of them. Of course, if the public outcry was too much they could come back without explanation, sort of like the current ex-girlfriend.
I have an old issue of Bizarre Sex Comix with a story about Kim Il-sung abducting Betty Page, because he’s a perv, and she agrees to indulge his sick fantasies on one condition: “I get to redecorate North Korea!” The next Five-Year Plan involves outfitting the whole population with leather undies . . .
Reminds me a little of the line from the original Arthur, about a European country so small " the prince ordered it recarpeted."
I certainly think you could make a comedy about life in NK. Absurd, cruel, nepotistic, dictatorial governments practically beg to be satirized.
Of course the humor would have to be pitch black and that would be extremely difficult to successfully sustain over the course of a full season and longer.
“No I am not Kim Jong Il…I am waiter! The best waiter the world has ever seen!”
And Kim Jong-Un, didn’t she?
Kim Jong-Il died between seasons, I believe. How dare he.
Right—wasn’t there a short-lived spinoff of that titled My Mother the Czar?
There was a short lived British sitcom entitled “Heil Honey I’m Home !” Purporting to depict the domestic life of Hitler living in a flat with a Jewish neighbour . Not surprisingly it was cancelled after one episode . If they could do that , North Korea is not a stretch.
You’d have to have a lot of short, skinny Asian actors.
Costuming, on the other hand, would be ludicrously easy.
(Rimshot).
But seriously, Comrade Dad was real. I would have mentioned Heil Hitler, I’m Home, but that took place in ordinary Britain, which is nothing like North Korea. Thinking about it, My Mother the Car sounds like something that might have happened in the aforementioned Twilight Zone episode, where they have to be nice to the kid etc cornfield etc.
Here’s a clip, and it has the spinning star, and a joke about beetroot in the first few seconds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytoSJadmlIg
You can tell it’s a joke because the audience laughs. I remember most of it taking place in a brown-looking set. The audience seem to be laughing at things that are not only not funny, they aren’t even obviously jokes.
I wonder if it was also an attempt to channel the kind of bleak social realism of Boys from the Blackstuff. Depending on your political allegiance there’s a strand of left-wing British dramas from the 1970s, 1980s that could, with a bit of rewriting, be reworked into satires of totalitarianism (GBH, Scum). Dennis Potter might have made something of the idea.
Isn’t Blackadder Goes Forth essentially a sitcom set in a genuinely dangerous military environment where instant brutal death is a real possibility? Something like that, crossed with The Thick of It, but where Malcolm Tucker has the power to have people taken away and strangled with a piece of wire and also their families.
Your memory is clearly failing you. Everyone knows the Supreme Leader scored 34 onhis first and only round at the Pyongyang Golf Complex. Although reports differ as to whether he struck five or eleven holes in one.
And when they make a spinoff movie about the runup to the Second Korean War, they can call it
In the Zone