Seoul Songpa Police Station on Tuesday booked Kim Jin-cheol (25), a popular comedian on KBS 2TV's "Gag Concert", on charges of assaulting several colleagues. Police have applied for an arrest warrant for the entertainer they say beat 29-year-old K, a comedian who joined KBS two years after Kim, with a mop handle in the KBS broadcasting station's dressing room early last month.

A group of 14 comedians with SBS' "People Searching for Laughter" including Yun Taek and Kim Hyeong-in hold a press conference on Wednesday morning to complain about their contracts with management firm Smile Mania./Yonhap

On May 4, Kim allegedly called 14 junior colleagues including K to the roof of the KBS building and administered a boot camp-style hazing in which the participants were forced to bend over and place their heads and hands on the ground and their behinds in the air while Kim took a crowbar to K's thighs and buttocks, leaving welts that would take six weeks to heal. K remains hospitalized in Ilsan as a result of the beating. KBS said it decided to take Kim off the air for the time being.

Meanwhile, another 14 comedians with the popular SBS program "People Searching for Laughter" including Yun Taek and Kim Hyeong-in have asked their management firm, Smile Mania, to release from contracts they say are grossly unfair. "The contract we signed with Smile Mania last fall is an unfair one for 10 to 15 years and with almost no signing bonus,” they said in a statement. “The contract is disadvantageous to the comedians in many ways such as substituting our signing bonuses for theater rents and meal costs." Smile Mania president Park Seung-dae said the contract was for those who only wanted to be stand-up comics. “But since the situation of the actors has changed, we can now discuss the content of the contract."

Insiders explain that by nature of their work comedians are more team-oriented than singers or other entertainers, and as in other exclusive organizations in Korea, junior-senior relationships tend to be rigid and sometimes ritually expressed.

Voices in the profession are calling for reflection. Some want a better management system, saying contracts need to be based on the fair and transparent distribution of profits.

"You can't have violence like this in the comedy industry,” one industry insider said. “I hope the industry uses these incidents as an opportunity to rethink the entire way it operates."

(englishnews@chosun.com )