A Treatise on Europe: Swedish Comedy

Sometimes you can’t predict what living in a rainforest will teach you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned that I miss out on living in North America, it is European national stereotypes. We’ve got our stereotype that Europeans as a whole are culture snobs with awkward-looking haircuts, but generally speaking most of us don’t know enough Europeans to have stereotypes about specific nationalities (the French being the exception, obviously). But in recent weeks I have become enlightened. It turns out that there is a whole plethora of hilarious national stereotyping going on that I wasn’t aware of. I don’t necessarily agree with all of these stereotypes, but the stated purpose of this blog is to educate the masses and as I do not support censorship I really have no choice but to pass this information on. I’ll start with what I’ve learned about Sweden.
The first thing I learned was that Swedish people are universally known for being unfunny. This came as a shock to me because the Swedish people I’ve seen all look so cool and Mats Sundin was a hero to me growing up. But then I realized that these two observations were completely unrelated to their sense of humor and might in fact prove the validity of this stereotype. In terms of how cool they look, I really only see “normal” Swedish people at the winter Olympics snowboarding events. The reason they look cool is that they’re always incredibly attractive (this is not meant to imply that people who are not incredibly attractive can’t look cool, because there’s lots of ugly people I would love to hang out with, i.e. the guy who played Gimli in Lord of the Rings) and are snowboarders, which in general is a good look. Now I’m going to speak in generalizations here, but the attractiveness that I associate with Swedes is probably an indicator of how unfunny they are. I mean, how many physically attractive comedians can you actually name? And honestly, can anybody actually name a Swedish comedian?
The British are obviously known for their comedy (although I think that Russell Brand guy is pretty lame). There aren’t that many French comedians I can name, but I remember the movie Bogus with Gerard Dipardieu having some funny moments. Also, I happen to think mimes are hysterical, so the French have that going for them. When I searched the term “German comedy” in Wikipedia it claimed there were 39 pages. I could only actually find one page, but somewhere out there are 38 more pages, which in my opinion is a lot of pages. But when I opened an article on Swedish humor in The Local, which is apparently an English language online Swedish News publication, this is what it had to say about Swedish comedy:

Swedes might often come across as a rather amusing lot. But as a rule, their idiosyncrasies raise a bigger smile than their comic timing.
When it comes to comedy, the Swedes are usually deemed a rather sober lot. But scratch the surface and you find a rich seam of ribaldry.

Now I’ve got no problem with rich seams of ribaldry, but this description doesn’t exactly make Sweden sound like a nation of Richard Pryors.
I should note that I think that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. Not everyone needs to be dropping wisecracks all over the place. By all means Sweden should keep doing what it’s doing and continue producing classy hockey players who will provide steady leadership to teams in troubled times (I’m referring to Mats Sundin here and not Daniel Alfredsson, who in my opinion is a bit of a prick). I’m just relieved that if I ever have to pick a European country to see a comedy festival I can cross Sweden off the list.
So there’s your first lesson in stereotypes that Europeans (not me, I’m just the messenger) have of each other. Sweden’s not that funny. I hope this information is useful to you.