“This fall James Franco and Seth Rogen will attempt to assassinate Kim Jong-un.”

So begins the trailer for The Interview, an upcoming comedy that didn’t get many laughs in North Korea a few days ago when an unnamed official declared the film “absolutely intolerable,” “undisguised terrorism” and a “war action.”

This from a country that stands about 320 kilometres from the birthplace of PSY and the weapon of mass destruction that was “Gangnam Style.”

The weird thing is, by now you’d think Kim Jong-un would realize North Korea’s spot inside Hollywood’s dream factory. Did he not watch Die Another Day and see how his comrades tortured James Bond? Did he miss the 2012 reboot of Red Dawn? Or the satirical Team America: World Police eight years earlier, which portrayed his late father Kim Jong-il as sadistic and vainglorious, a lonely enemy of freedom who is revealed to be an alien cockroach?

Over the past decade, the War on Terror has given the entertainment industry a blueprint upon which to sketch the good and bad guys. For Islamist extremists, the rules of engagement in film and TV shows such as 24, Sleeper Cell and Homeland are clear: the situation is grave. This is serious.

By contrast, North Korea continues to be a wild card in popular culture: you never know if it will be played for fear or comic relief.

The “character” of Kim Jong-il appeared in many sitcoms and sketch shows, including 30 Rock, MADtv and Saturday Night Live. During the cold war, it was difficult to spoof Soviet leaders like Nikita Khrushchev or Mikhail Gorbachev because the threat of nuclear war didn’t seem particularly funny.

With North Korea, the danger seems easy to dismiss.

How can we possibly be terrified by a man who wears his hair like Macklemore and whose father was partial to jumpsuits and platform shoes? The biographical ephemera to float across the Pacific Ocean — most of which sounds like it was invented by a screenwriter on hallucinogens — has also not helped inspire dread.

Kim Jong-il could allegedly control the weather with his mind. He wrote books about cinema, commissioned operas and adored Elizabeth Taylor. He was scared to fly and enjoyed eating lobster on long train rides. He was born under a double rainbow.

In other words, he seemed like an evil dictator who could be conquered by a noogie.

The Interview is to be released Oct. 10, which is four days before the 52nd anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis and 64.4 years since the start of the Korean War. Hopefully that’s just a coincidence.

While the Western reaction to the North Korean reaction was to chortle, imagine if this comedy about two celebrity journalists enlisted by the CIA to carry out a hit involved a different leader.

Do you think any studio executive with any self-interest would green light the project if the plot involved Franco and Rogen killing, say, Iran’s Hassan Rouhani or Syria’s Bashar Assad?

The U.S. would be under a Code Red terror alert right after the trailer hit YouTube. (See reaction to The Innocence of Muslims in 2012.)

But instead of running for cover from North Korea, Hollywood is more inclined to point and laugh. They do so because there is slim chance of blowback, financial or physical. This is probably more galling to the Kim family than the prospect of getting wacked by the cuddly stars of Pineapple Express.

Due to the lack of press freedom, North Korea has always been a hotbed of dubious stories and hoaxes, including the yarn about how local scientists discovered proof of unicorns or how every man was mandated to get a Kim Jong-un haircut, or the recent “propaganda video” exposing grim conditions in America that was actually the brainchild of a British satirist.

But in recent months, these unverified and fake stories have grown darker: Did Kim Jong-un have an affair with a Korean singer whom he then executed after she made pornography? Did he toss his naked uncle to a pack of ravenous dogs? Did he execute a traitorous rival with a flame-thrower?

It’s almost as if Kim, named “sexiest man alive” in 2012 by the rascals at The Onion, wants to be taken seriously as a psychopathic tyrant.

In response to The Interview, Pyongyang has vowed a “strong and merciless countermeasure.” In response to this, Hollywood giggled, including Rogen, who tweeted: “People don’t usually wanna kill me for one of my movies until after they’ve paid 12 bucks for it.”

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Lost in this cycle of outrage and mockery is the suffering inside North Korea, where poverty and oppression never gets the big-screen treatment, where torture and prison camps are scrubbed from the local multiplex.

Hollywood is in the business of making money, not making the world a better place. I get it. But sometimes, just sometimes, you have to wonder what might happen if we weren’t so busy laughing.

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