Kim Jong Il was a source of misery for North Korea's impoverished people and of fear for a world wary of his belligerent rhetoric -- but as an enduringly bizarre presence on the global stage, he was also an unexpected source of entertainment.
While the reputedly ruthless leader was revered by a population weaned on propaganda, outside the hermetic Asian country what were seen as grandiose attempts at myth-making were seized on by popular culture.
Online, Kim's death generated Twitter trends that referenced the movies or shows that caricatured him as a villainous clown trapped in the bathos of his own cruel isolation.
Kim did little to help his own international image. His eccentric appearances sporting bouffant hair, over-sized sunglasses and a succession of drab boiler suits were frequently viewed as comical counterpoints to the rights abuses of his regime.
Meanwhile, as his country's nuclear activities sparked diplomatic tensions, his media mouthpieces -- such as the Korean Central News Agency -- created their own unintentional humor as they swung wildly between angry invective and surreal flatteries of their "Dear Leader."
Kim's defining moment in recent popular culture appears to have been his portrayal in the 2004 film "Team America: World Police," a satire on U.S. President George W. Bush's foreign policy.
In an appearance on media satire "30 Rock," comedian Margaret Cho played Kim as a North Korean weatherman, delivering the disingenuously upbeat forecast: "North Korea, everything sunny all the time always, good time, beach party."
Fellow comic Bobby Lee plays the dictator as host of the "Kim Jong Il Show" on MADtv, shooting dead audience members who fail to cheer and delivering punchlines such as: "Don't cry because I kill your wife and enslave your children."
Post-death, there was renewed interest in websites that have sought to highlight the strange picture of North Korea created by its propaganda machine.
"Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things," is an online gallery of photographs showing the dictator staring at banal objects. The images draw unintentional bleak humor from their repeated and blatant misrepresentation of life under a dictatorship.
Among recent entries, Kim can be seen looking at a pink sweater, pointing at a persimmon tree in full fruit, glumly inspecting a statuette of knights on horseback and grinning at a supermarket shelf packed with sausages.
Another website has trawled news bulletins on the official Korean Central News Agency to create a "random insult generator" that neatly encapsulates the peculiar version of the English language favored by Kim's regime.
More information:
» CNN: Key Moments from North Korea History
» TodayIFoundOut: Korean Propaganda and Bonus Factoids
» Sabotage Times: Kim Jong-il In Numbers
» Google Earth: Kim Jong-il's Swimming Pool
» Tumblr: Kim Jong-il Looking At Things
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