As everyone has heard by now, North Korea’s “dear leader” met his, pardon the pun, Il-fated demise over the weekend. Today the Wall Street Journal posted a piece by Margaret Cho on her 30 Rock parody of Kim Jong Il, in which she muses on the challenges of playing the Nationalistic Man of Mystery.

She explains that after scouring YouTube, ABC, BBC and TMZ and finding no recorded media of her object of ridicule, she simply “decided to base my portrayal of him on my mother.” The irony of basing her portrayal of a man who is ultimately responsible for tearing her family (and so many others’ families) apart on her mother is not lost on Cho. Here’s an excerpt (emphasis added):

North Korea is an unsolved mystery. I once had family there, and now the family ties, cut for so long because of the separation of the Koreas into north and south, have healed over into non-existence. Perhaps there is a scar there, an infinitesimal tear in some great grandmother’s conscience, but I don’t even know her. No one in my family remembers her name, so it’s like she never existed. We from the south and we from the north now are separate and at best, indifferent. At worst, hateful in the terrible way of civil war and the brutal animosity of a country divided is capable of. Do we despise ourselves more when we are ourselves?

If you haven’t seen the 30 Rock episode in which Cho portrays Kim (“Everything Sunny All the Time Always”), then Hulu/Netflix/YouTube that shit, already! Check out the clip below for a preview.

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