The Oslo Freedom Forum is not all murder and torture and imprisonment — man’s inhumanity to man. There is comic relief. So it is with my “Oslo Journal.” In today’s installment, I speak of a comedian, who performed at the forum:

His name is Wonho Chung, and he has an unusual background: He is the son of a South Korean father and a Vietnamese mother. He was born in Jeddah, and grew up in Jordan. Thus, his native language is Arabic.
And that constitutes much of his act, as far as I can tell: His jokes are based on the unlikelihood of his being a native Arabic speaker. Some of the jokes are very funny. Some of them are — well, Chung milks his theme, which I can’t really blame him for. It’s a damn good theme.
I’ll relate a funny joke: A guy comes up to Chung at a wedding reception, drunk. He says to Chung, incredulously, “You speak Arabic?” Chung responds with a flurry of Arabic. Wide-eyed, the man exclaims, “Oh, my goodness! When I’m drunk, I can understand Korean!”

This has reminded me of a once-famous joke, which I’ll tell here on the Corner, for the benefit of those under 80. I don’t think this joke has been told for a long while. But it used to be pretty much standard on our fair shores.

A man visits a restaurant on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The waiters are all Chinese immigrants, speaking fluent Yiddish. The visitor exclaims to the owner, “It’s amazing! How did you get them to speak Yiddish?” The owner says, “Shhhh: They think it’s English.”