Cower in place 12: Norsk

ccasionally Kathleen gets to worrying a bit about how this whole virus thing is going to affect us, or our kids, or our retirement, and has trouble sleeping. But last night she slept well. She sometimes asks me to wake her up in the morning—a sort of “pay it forward” for Archie waking me up to go on pre-dawn walkies—but this morning I just couldn’t, she was snoring so peacefully.

I told Kathleen about this after she woke up, and she was curious. “How do I snore?” You can’t be married for 41 years without picking up a few tricks, so I told her, “like an angel.”

She observed that I snore in all sorts of different ways—“like a rainbow”, she says. Sometimes I snore like the three stooges.

(For those of you too young to remember or care, the Three Stooges snored like this: “SNOO‑OO‑OORT wee‑be‑be‑be-be‑be‑be‑be‑beep”. The Three Stooges were an afternoon TV staple when I was young, mostly enjoyed because they were STRICTLY FORBIDDEN by Mom, who rarely forbade anything. She banned them because their humor consisted chiefly of hitting and otherwise damaging each other, which she was afraid would give us kids ideas.)

Other times, Kathleen says, I snore like a Norwegian pig. She is referring to this joke, which we learned from brother-in-law Chris, who attributes it to Garrison Keillor.

Ole goes into town of a Saturday night. Much later he stumbles home, completely lit. In the dark, he misses his own house and wanders into his neighbor’s pig pen, where he finds his neighbor’s prize pig lying peacefully asleep. It’s a cold night, so Ole snuggles up next to him, and listens happily to his contented snoring. After a while, it occurs to Ole that it sounds like the pig is snoring in Swedish. The longer he listens, the more he becomes convinced that that pig is really talking, in Swedish, in his sleep. Finally his curiosity can stand it no longer and he jabs him in the belly and demands, “Är du svensk?”. The pig rolls over and grunts sleepily, “NOOOOOORSSSK!”

The Norwegian pig joke constitutes a rich branch of Scandinavian literature. Here’s another, from my ex-boss Leon:

Danish guy went to visit his Norwegian cousin who was a farmer.  The cousin was showing him around the farm and the Dane was amazed at how healthy and plump all the pigs looked. The Dane asked what his secret was and the cousin said he’d show him. He took him and one of the pigs out to his apple orchard, picked up the pig and held it up to where it could reach the apples, which it ate happily. Wow, said the Dane, I understand now, but doesn’t that take a lot of time? Sure, said his cousin, but what’s time to a pig?

I am a firm believer in the Liebniz’s principle of online plenitude, which states that everything that can exist, must exist on the internet. Armed with this faith, I set out to find the website of Norwegian pig jokes. Oddly enough, I could not. There was a page devoted to pig jokes, and plenty of pages for Norwegian jokes, but none dedicated specifically to jokes that combined these two principles of humor. This only shows, I believe, how far our search engines have to evolve before they can reveal to us All Knowledge. The truth is out there!

All of the many Norwegian joke pages, it seemed, included a version of the same pig joke, which indicates to me that this joke is perhaps the archetype of all N/p jokes. (Please note: I am a proud descendant of Norwegians, and am therefore legally entitled to make jokes like these):

A Norwegian, a Swede and a Dane made a bet about who could stay the longest in a stinky pig barn. They all went in at the same time. After only two minutes the Dane came running out. Five minutes later the Swede stumbled out the door. After ten minutes, all the pigs ran out.

I feel like I had best quit now. Thanks for reading,
Dorn
3/27/2020