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Korean Shamanist Ritual - Symbols and Dramas of Transformation - Daniel Kister

Frye says that [comedy theatre] presents "a movement from one kind of society to another" (1957:163).

At the beginning of a comedy, the original society is typically presented as under the control of older authority figures - in the mini-comedy of the "Schoolmaster" skit, the Confucian Schoolmaster. The controlling characters are "blocking characters" who obstruct society with irrational laws maintained obstinately in accord with their fixations (L957:165). The movement of comedy typically takes its thrust from the activity of a younger figure who is pitted against the blocking characters and their norms.

We often find a young man seeking marriage. Here we have the students. Initially blocked by the arbitrary laws, social standards, and whims of society's elders, the youthful comic hero, like the students in the present skit, challenges the traditional order.

The students do so in the guise of the "trickster," the comic figure whose bold, cheeky schemes bring the original social order and the blocking figures into temporary chaos. In the end, however, a new, free society, founded on a reversal of the standards of the original blocking society, crystallizes around the hero as the blocking forces are won over to the values of the new social order (1957:163- 174).

In the present [example], a society based on Confucian standards of reasoned order gives way to a society of free imaginative play as the students point the movement of the skit toward values of individual intuition, instinct, and playful freedom. In fact, they easily win over the Schoolmaster, who in the end gives up his job as teacher and sets out in the following kori to use his own inventive wit to wrest from fortune a better life.