Review of "Red Stangland’s Ole & Lena Jokes 4"

Review of

Red Stangland’s Ole & Lena Jokes 4 ISBN 0961327480


Four out of five stars

 I live in Iowa and there are many people of Scandinavian descent in northeast Iowa, southeastern Minnesota, and southwestern Wisconsin. I was once told by an elderly person in Wisconsin that the solution to any problem starts with, “First you must cuss it in Norwegian.” Therefore, some of these jokes about the Scandinavian personality were not new to me.

 Most are of the type where a person of a specific ethnic extraction makes fun of comrades in descent. Many of the jokes are of the cookie cutter variety, where you can simply replace the names and some of the wording and it can be applied to any ethnic group. For example, on page 24 there is the joke:

“Ole and Lars were talking politics. Said Ole: ‘Yah, dat President Bush . . .  he’s doing da work of five men. Da tree Stooges . . . and Abbot and Costello.’”

 Like all collections of ethnic jokes, this book must be read with a suspension of the outrage feature. Overall, it is meant to be a joke and I have heard far nastier jokes told by Norwegians about their fellow Norwegians. No one likes a Norwegian joke more than a Norwegian.