ABSTRACT
This dissertation, “South Korean Golden-Age Comedy Film: Industry, Genre, and
Popular Culture (1953 -1970),” examines the socio-cultural and political aspects of comedy films
made in South Korea in the 1950s and 1960s, the era in which the South Korean nation
mobilized in the name of “development” and “progress.” Comedy film enjoyed particular growth
and popularity during the post-war reconstruction movement (late 1950s) when the film industry
began to take shape; the democratic social atmosphere in the aftermath of the April Revolution
(1960) enveloped the whole society; and the government-centered film industry waned with the
dawn of Yushin, President Park Chung Hee’s drastic measures to control the society (1971).
While operating at a far remove from the depressing images of post-War devastation and the
propaganda images of the South Korean totalitarian regime, comedy film was both incredibly
popular, and can be appreciated as a politically maneuvered genre. I trace the socio-political and
industry origins of the production of the comedy film genre, and examine its cultural contexts
and effects through the Syngman Rhee regime (1948-1960) to the April Revolution, and into the
pre-Yushin Park Chung Hee era (1961-1970).
I argue that structural changes in the South Korean film industry, especially its highly
gendered and state-orchestrated consolidation, were critical to the image production, film
language, and frame and narrative structures of comedy films. On the other hand, the style of
comedy film -- distinguished by its remarkable generic hybridity and considerable transnational
circulation -- appealed to the Korean audience. The comedies combine colonial popular
performance (e.g., akkŭk, a Japanese-influenced, Korean style vaudeville), the visual techniques
and mise-en-scène of Classical Hollywood film, and the star-power of comedians. Transnational