::A Geek in Korea::

마빡이, or “Mabbaki” is a current popular skit on the show “Gag Concert”. There isn’t a translation of the video available, but seriously, this isn’t Shakespeare. Watch the video to see a guy slapping himself on the head for five minutes straight while being stupid. All the actors on the show have the characters they do each show, and they simply change the jokes from time to time. Imagine Saturday Night Live, but with recurring characters for nearly every skit each week.

This poor guy had to become popular by slapping himself in the head, so he’ll be doing that in every skit pretty much from this point onwards in his career. Gag Concert is nothing but a series of these kinds of skits, where people do the same dumb stuff over and over again.
I always wondered who watched these sorts of programs. While I was here during the rise of the shows popularity among school children. A few years ago you couldn’t go a single class without someone quoting a line from the show. Every skit that gets popular on the show is quickly run into the ground.

Remember everyone quoting “Wayne’s World” all the time? “Party on Wayne, Party on Garth!” “We’re Not Worthy!” (Bohemian Rhapsody is still cool) or quoting Beavis and Butthead’s stupid grunts (NSFW?) in High school? It used to be like that when a skit on Gag Concert got funny in my class.People quickly seize on the popularity and run the joke into the ground. After a point people looked back on it, and couldn’t remember why it was all that great to begin with. Like the Macarena.

Luckily I don’t even hear children talking about the show much any more. Some of my student do occasionally do the head slap thing, but it’s not nearly that bad. They tend to stop after a few seconds, unlike the poor fool that popularized the skit that has to do it for minutes at a time on each show. This is one of those things that sort of naturally weeds itself out. If you’re dumb enough to slap yourself on the head over and over again, eventually you forget enough things to ever remember the skit to begin with.

How did something this stupid get on television in the first place? Someone’s got to be watching this stuff to find it funny. Then I stumbled upon this video and it explained everything. The target audience is pre-vocal toddlers with parents that encourage them to hit themselves! It all makes sense now!

technorati tags:tv, Korea, Gag Concert, mabbaki, headslap