Comedian Jeong Cheol-gyu exposed his seniors' 'bullying culture.'
On the 26th, a video titled "Comedian bullying!! The reason I was hit with a seatbelt in the car?? Senior, you're mean: special recruit Blanca!" was uploaded to the Namumiki Detective Agency channel. In the video that day, comedian Jeong Cheol-gyu, who was beloved for his foreign worker character "Blanca" on Pokso Club, appeared and spoke.
Jeong Cheol-gyu debuted and worked as a KBS 19th class special-recruit comedian in 2004. In response, Miki Gwang-su asked, "While working as a special-recruit comedian, wouldn't the publicly recruited comedians have started feeling jealous?" and Jeong Cheol-gyu said, "Rather than jealousy, they probably resented me because I couldn't keep up with the work. Honestly, if I had been more mature, after the meeting I would have gone to share the hardship, run errands for the seniors and done those things. But I was young and didn't know that. So I also thought, 'They didn't even call me to the assembly anyway, so why should I go?'"
Miki Gwang-su explained, "I know what that feels like. From these friends' perspective, they show up at the studio early in the morning, attend to the seniors, make coffee, clean, and if they do something wrong they get scolded, they pack props, and on recording days they're running around asking 'bring this' and so on, living in a hectic way. They're the same rookies, but this guy would come, do his thing and leave, so he couldn't fit in."
Jeong Cheol-gyu said, "What made it even worse was that we couldn't see each other: the Gag Concert meeting room was in the research building and the Pokso Club meeting room was inside the broadcasting station, so we wouldn't meet anyway. They would simply think, 'Oh, he's in a comfortable meeting room with air conditioning.'"
Then Miki Gwang-su asked, "Even as a special-recruit comedian, were you ever dragged away by seniors and beaten?" and Jeong Cheol-gyu replied, "I wasn't beaten by the people you think; I was beaten by someone else," adding, "It's nothing to do with the Messi or Ronaldo you know. It's someone at the Eden Hazard, Iniesta level," which drew laughter.
Jeong Cheol-gyu recalled, "At that time I had made a contract that was half of my life. I had an unprecedented contract that was literally half. I was filming commercials and doing well, so the seniors around me kept saying, 'Why did you sign that contract? Even a company with no money would give you at least a 30 million won signing bonus; how could you sign without a signing bonus?' They said that so much. So I said, 'I like being here and I'm doing this; it's the place that reached out to me first, so I'll do it regardless of money. It's not important if other places would give 30 million won.' But that senior was in a meeting with a writer, and when I was standing in front of the cafe he told me to come out."
He said, "The point was this: 'Who told you they're going to give you 30 million won?' He told me to get in the car, had me sit in the passenger seat and then put on the seatbelt. When he buckled it I thought we were going somewhere. He buckled it, turned off the engine, and from then on started slapping me. Have you ever been slapped squarely on the cheek? He hit my cheek so hard that my nose and eye were hit together; my eyes watered and my nose turned red. Then 'whack, whack' I kept getting hit, and one side was being hit so much it hurt. He turned me around. When our eyes met he said, 'What are you glaring at, you xxxx,' and hit me again with his left hand," he said, shocking listeners.
When asked why he was hit, Jeong Cheol-gyu said, "They asked, 'Who told you they're going to give you 30 million won?' and the moment I said, 'That's not it,' they started hitting me. I didn't cry then. I thought there was no need to say more, so I said 'I'm sorry,' took the punches and then went back to the writer who was in the cafe meeting and they asked, 'Why does your face look like that?' A person cries then, right? I was crying bitterly and it ended up like that," he recalled.
Miki Gwang-su joked, "Did your nose get lifted after that?" and Jeong Cheol-gyu replied, "It was lifted before that, and while I was being hit I felt like some silicone might have shifted and wanted to lift it once more." Then Miki Gwang-su quipped, "Because it's Blanca, you got hit in the car," which drew laughter.
[Photo] Namumiki Detective Agency
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