North Koreans Do Not Think 'The Interview' Is Funny

James Franco and Seth Rogen in The Interview

As it turns out, suffering under a brutal dictatorship doesn’t necessarily mean that one appreciates a movie that mocks that oppressive regime.

Seth Rogen and James Franco’s film The Interview drew the ire (and potentially, cyberterrorism) of North Korean dictator Kim Jung-un, who the film depicts as a petulant man-child and target of an American assassination plot. While a record number of Americans have ordered The Interview on demand this month, the actual North Koreans who have seen it haven’t been quite as enthusiastic.

“They were angry it depicted North Koreans as a bunch of idiots,” Chung Kwang-il, a North Korean defector living in South Korea who helped smuggle copies of the movie to residents still in the north, told the New York Times on Monday. “Now, these are not people worshiping Kim Jong-un; they are ones who wish he were gone.”

It is illegal and dangerous to watch the film in the isolated country, and those that have taken the risk, which is punishable by death, haven’t appreciated the comedy’s exaggerated depiction.

“People who were not used to American-style comedy would find it insulting,” another defector, Kim Heung-kwang, told the Times. ”But it’s largely fear of punishment, rather than such faults, that keeps people from watching the movie.”

Meanwhile, North Koreans who have defected from the country and are living safely abroad have also been less than amused.

"It didn’t give me much to laugh about as we North Koreans are not accustomed to comedy,” Lee Han-byul, a defector who watched the film at a bar in South Korea, told the Agence France-Presse earlier this month. “There are no comedy films in North Korea, and we have [a] different sense of humor.”

Watch a clip from The Interview:

Superficially, Rogen and Franco’s brand of drunk butt jokes isn’t quite as popular in North Korea. (Although to be fair, it didn’t score too highly with critics in the United States this time around, either).

On a deeper level, the movie so tears apart the myth of the North Korean dictator, that even defectors who hate the regime could not stomach the humiliation.

“Every defector I know has seen the movie,” Kim Sung-min, who runs the anti-Pyongyang Free North Korea Radio station, told the AFP. “We’ve talked a lot about this flick over the past week, and we simply did not understand why it gives foreigners laughs.”

Just as American critics have been split on the film, North Korean defectors also seem to have mixed feelings about it. Speaking to The Guardian, three defectors said that they didn’t find it particularly funny or enlightening, but were glad that it was exposing the sins of the dictatorship to the world.

“The majority of Europeans are not familiar with North Korea. Through the film, however, many now know that such a dictator exists today, and I highly praise the film for this,” Joo Kwang-hyun, a defector living in Europe, said. ”Also, for me, it was a pleasure to ponder about how good it would be if the miracles of the film could come true in reality.”