(No More) Ole and Lena

Why I Stopped Telling Ole and Lena Jokes

There is a genre of jokes that I recently stopped telling. These are the Ole and Lena jokes told across the Upper Midwest of the United States. They are a tradition in the U.S. states that experienced heavy settlement by Scandinavian immigrants in the 1800s. My paternal grandfather emigrated from his native Sweden in 1920 and settled in Detroit, Michigan, where I was born. He was the first one I heard telling jokes about Ole and Lena, a simple immigrant couple living in the rural plains states.

The genre tells of the daily foibles of simple-minded farmer folks, usually told in Swedish- (or Norwegian-) accented English. And I remember my grandfather delighting in telling these jokes at parties, all in his unmistakable Swedish accent. As I grew into adulthood, I realized that I had the ability to mimic voices and learned to tell a growing array of jokes involving Ole and Lena or Ole and his good friend Sven. The jokes were clever, my accent was pretty realistic, and people always laughed at the punchlines. Since these were “ethnic jokes” told on my own people, I thought it was a permissible kind of humor. 

However, as I began to think about it, I became more and more uncomfortable with the jokes. They made fun of a certain ethnicity, and even though I can speak elementary Swedish, it is an increasingly distant heritage: I think and vote and behave like a mainstream American. My native dialect is Midwestern American English. My Swedish accent is manufactured, and not my natural way of speaking. When outsiders put on the identity, language, or culture of another ethnicity for temporary amusement, we call this cultural appropriation. When the stories are meant to make a group of people look foolish, they become disrespectful. 

When I started to question the validity of these jokes, I made up a list of pros and cons about telling them. The list of pros was twice as long, but I realized that the reasons were all minimizing the effect of telling the jokes: to make immigrants from a certain background look simple or foolish.

Of course, I will miss telling my old standards at parties because joke-telling is a delightful form of social engagement. As I shift towards new forms of humor, I will need your help. Please share some new, non-discriminatory, jokes with me so I can begin to build up a new and more respectful repertoire.