A man starves his own people and threatens to start a nuclear war, and Americans laugh. What a bizarre thing to do.

Meanwhile, we shirk in fear at the unhinged other leg of former President George W. Bush's "axis of evil" tripod: Iran. Unlike North Korea, we treat Iran as a legitimate threat. In Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's full-day confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, the word "Iran" was mentioned more than 170 times. "North Korea" was mentioned 10. During the foreign policy-focused debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney last October, Iran came up nearly 50 times, and was the subject of multiple questions. North Korea was mentioned just once, as part of a series of other challenges facing the U.S., in the same breath as the trade deficit with China.

It's not that Americans like the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or don't actively consider the hermit state a threat. It's actually the country's second least-favored , right after Iran, and equal numbers call North Korean and Iranian developments of nuclear weapons a "critical threat." Of course, North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn't. One might think that the country with a bomb - with whom we are still technically at war, no less -- would be more of a threat than the country without one, but at least judging by the way we talk about them, that's not the case. Why do we consider North Korea to be such a joke?

Partly it's the way they present themselves. North Korea is a relatively small nation with leaders who come across as stereotypically incompetent Bond villains: uniformly dressed, tasteless but expensive cliché obsessions, physically unintimidating, with every major attack blowing up in their face like Wile E. Coyote. The Kim family does not produce tall or physically gifted men, nor exceptionally handsome ones. They are also Asian, which connotes a whole set of racist stereotypes, none of them necessarily terror-inspiring. Iran, meanwhile, is a Muslim nation, and for obvious but unfortunate reasons it's easier to stoke public fears of Muslim fanaticism than Northeast Asian nationalism.

We also know less about the D.P.R.K. and Kim Jong Un. Basic details about his age (probably 30), marital status (he's been seen around with a pretty girl , probably his wife) and children (he may have just had a kid) have only recently become clear. His nuclear policy is even murkier. When the senior Kim died in late 2011, Korea-watchers were hopeful that the country might be entering a new age of governance, maybe under a coalition of leaders who would exert unseen pressure on Kim to open the country more. That didn't happen, obviously. Still, though, we don't quite know what to expect from Kim, who has at least inherited his father's inscrutability. "Nobody knows what he has planned, what he is thinking or contemplating doing or why the North Koreans are tripling down on their rhetoric," an unnamed senior administration official told CNN last month.