19 shades of ski wax

Just for a second, I thought that Norway had its own April Fool’s Day in June.

I was briefly fooled by an article from the Dow Jones news service, which let us in on an open Norwegian secret: there is a huge demand in Norway for what can only be described as “dull TV.” Among the examples cited: a knitting channel, a clockmaking channel and a ferry boat channel. A channel following the track ahead from a camera at the front of a train sparked massive complaints, as the trip was deemed too short and the coverage too exciting.

What do the Norwegians have to say in their own defence? Obviously, one line is that Norwegians are dull people, but not afraid to laugh at their dullness, so therefore not dull when all is said and done. A second line is that we may find Norwegian TV dull, but the Norwegians don’t. And a third line is that Norwegians are no duller than anyone else: they’re just on to a good thing faster.

To hear an authoritative voice on the subject, we contacted Bjorn Bjoring, the director of the Institute of Norwegian Humour, in a tiny upstairs office tucked in the back of a seedy store selling bootleged ski-jumping videos, located in the heart of Oslo’s equally seedy fish processing district.

Bjoring’s initial response was to thank us profusely for contacting him. “You’re the third call I’ve had from North America this week,” he said. “It’s so exciting. It makes a nice break from trying to put together the Anthology of Norwegian Humour. It’s a labour of love: we just kind of wait for the material to trickle in. I suppose we could just download jokes from the Internet and change the punchlines, but that would be intellectually dishonest.”

And then he went on to deal with the lines of defence we had mapped out. “Norwegians really are a funny poeple,” he said. “It just takes a little time to appreciate how we laugh at ourselves.” Pressed for an example, he offered the followiing joke, excerpted from page 14 of his draft book:

Lars: Do you believe in heaven?

Olaf: No.

Lars: Why not.

Olaf: They say you can find anything you want there, forever.

Lars: What’s so bad about that?

Olaf: With my luck, they’ll run out of pickled herring!

And at the end of the punchline, Bjoring rather triumphantly asked if he might sign us up for an advance copy of the book, in order to spur completion of the work. We replied by asking whether all jokes in the book were of similar quality. He responded in turn that the size of Wellington Times expense acounts was common knowledge throughout Western Europe.

And then he was on to the second line of defence. “Who says our TV is dull?”, he wondered. “Have you ever watched a 175-km cross-country skiing loppet through the lens of a ski-cam? Do you know the average racer goes through 19 different layers of wax? To have that captured on video in real time is quite stunning.”

And then it was on to line three and the counterpunch. Rather scornfully, he asked if I knew what passed for reality TV in Sweden: Sweden, the home of the pathetic ABBA museum? Unedited film of the IKEA committee sitting around trying to decide which unpronouncable name to give their new wall storage units and dreaming up assembly diagrams only capable of being understood by ancient oriental philosophers. And, he cautioned, before we got too highly and mightily Canadian about how much more zippy and zingy than Scandinavians we were, wasn’t it true that we had a golf channel, and that at Christmas time we had a yule log channel—never mind that coverage of curling bonspiels appeared on prime time television?.

When I think about it, I tend to agree with Bjoring. If you change your perspective, it seems there’s just as much dull TV in Canada as there is in Norway. We just haven’t recognized that it appeals to us precisely because it is dull. Who knows, maybe our next specialty cable channel will be the municipal council meetings channel, a Golf Channel 2 focussing on miniature golf, or a tree growth channel. Bring them on, I say, and let’s toss the CBC out of the basic cable spectrum while we’re at it!

As we were wrapping up the interview, Bjoring was primed to tell me a second joke about the Englishman, the Irishman, the Norwegian and the tub of klister wax; but he was laughing so hard recalling the joke he had already told me, he couldn’t bring himself to continue the conversation. Come to think of it, neither could I.

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca