Day 103: A Date With David

It was Buddha's Birthday today - a national holiday - so no work for me today! I received a phone call from Brad in the morning informing me the gang was going to see David Copperfield that afternoon, and had an extra ticket for sale. Now I've never really been all that interested in magic shows, and Mr. Copperfield has brought his shows to Vancouver more than once while I lived there and I never paid attention, but a chance to see David Copperfield IN KOREA??? I'm so there!

The show was at 4pm so we all met up earlier before making our way into Sejong Centre to watch 'David Copperfield - An Intimate Evening of Grand Illusion!' as was advertised to us. Our tickets were the cheapest we could get (about $45 bucks CDN) and were WAY UP HIGH in the balcony in the second-to-back row - true nosebleeds! David's two hour show turned out to be alright - some of his illusions were in fact pretty darn cool - but like I said before I've never really been all that impressed with magic shows. Some of his tricks though, I must admit, really did make me go "How'd he do that!!??" He cut a woman in half and had her severed legs and torso pushed around the stage, made a 1950 Lincoln convertible appear on pedestals while completely surrounded by people (leaving me wondering exactly where it came from!) and rode off a mid-air platform on a motorcycle only to appear two seconds later at the opposite end of the theatre. Wow!

What was the most interesting part of the show, for me, was watching Mr. I'm-Too-Cool-I'm-The-Greatest-Magician-In-The-World-I've-Got-An-Ego-Ten-Times-The-Size-Of-That-Lincoln-Convertible attempt - and fail horribly - to make the Korean audience laugh, and in the process highly offend them with inappropriate humour. It's obviously a magic (or 'ILLUSION') oriented show, but David likes to mix it up with silly jokes and stories, all part of the constant 'build-up' he has before the pinnacle of every trick.

One important fact that either David wasn't aware of AT ALL, or just did't care, was that Koreans have a very different style of humour in comparison to North Americans'. Western humour tends to be based around sarcasm, teasing, and 'dirty' jokes, while Korean humour is much more subtle and 'gentle.' The sarcasm and the teasing and the dirty jokes went over like a lead bucket - David's jokes either crashed and burned because the Koreans didn't 'get it' (yes, a translator was part of the show who translated everything David spoke) or the result was the audience being offended or confused. Much of Western humour is just considered outright insulting here in Korea.

There were, in fact, times when all of us just hung our heads in near embarrassment for Mr. Copperfield. He's say things that we know are inappropriate for Korean audiences, and then look at each other like "did he just *really* say that???" Some of these things included singling out members of the audience to speak in front of everyone (Koreans are extremely shy to speak in public) and asking them completely inappropriate questions, such as what colour and type of underwear they were wearing, or when the last time they had sex was. (David used these facts and numbers as part of his tricks.) Also, everytime he brought someone up on stage he would ask their name, but would inevitable butcher the pronounciation. This is not unusual for a foreigner to do so, but he would then proceed to MAKE FUN OF THEIR NAME, as if it was a game to play to just a silly word that meant nothing. And this was to older members of the audience! In Korea you ALWAYS treat older people with the highest respect and integrity possible. You DO NOT tease them or make fun of their names which may sound strange to a foreigner's ears in front of 2000 people!

It was an interesting afternoon to say the least! Between the cool magic tricks and David making an ass out of himself and continually offending over 2000 Koreans, over and over throughout his show, it was quite the sight! My suggestion to Mr. Copperfield is that he does a little research into a culture before bringing his Western-humour-oriented shows into foreign countries! This will help to avoid embarrassment and awkwardness for all, and probably increase sales to his over-rated 'evenings of grand illusion!'