Item (1): As a boy I thought Jim Henson’s Muppets were the tops. Naturally, I liked most of the major players, but even more than Kermit, Fozzie and the preposterous Miss Piggy, I dug the Swedish Chef. I liked the way the mustachioed singing Scandinavian could turn the art of cooking into a comedy of errors. Well, prepare yourself for feelings of despair after I tell you what I learned when I recently mentioned the Swede in conversation with a German theater director.
“Frank Wedekind blah, blah, blah … Lulu, blah, blah, blah … Pandora’s box …” said the director as he swirled a splash of Syrah around the inside of the glass he was holding.
“Yeah,” says I, stifling a yawn. “But what about the Swedish Chef?”
That’s when the director tugged at the collar of his black turtleneck, coughed a cloud of greenish cigarette smoke from the holes in his pointy nose and walked away. One of his acquaintances smiled gently at me and explained that, in Germany, the Swedish Chef is known as the “Danish cook.”
“Didn’t you know that?” she asked.
Think about it. The Swedish Chef=der dänische Koch. It’s akin to dubbing Martha Stewart’s voice over old Julia Child’s episodes and calling the show the Naked Chef! (Isn’t it?) Instead of chanting “Bork, Bork, Bork” the puppet sings a song, apparently in Danish, that goes, “Smørrebrød, Smørrebrod røm, pøm, pøm, pøm…” Aside from an appalling display of rapping and break dancing witnessed at a Christoph Winkler show at Sophensaele, this is perhaps the worst case of cultural misappropriation I’ve experienced in my three years in Berlin.
Why the makeover? I wish I knew. I have a feeling it has something to do with political correctness gone awry. You know, some German TV exec likely decided that taking the piss out of the Swedish people—who are so easily ridiculed what with their rugged good looks and smoothly run social system—is just not kosher. So, instead, TV viewers in Deutschland get a non-threatening Danish cook who speaks perfect German. It is a cruel world.
By the way, real Swedes don’t seem offended by Henson’s original chef, and whenever the Muppet show airs in Stockholm or Göteborg (where my mother’s family is from, fwiw), viewers apparently get the same goofy Swedish guy that I used to howl at from my living room floor in Oklahoma. At any rate, now I know that the next time I find myself at a party in Berlin talking about Frank Wedekind (it will happen), it’s best to avoid Muppet talk altogether. You should probably do the same.
Item (2) is somewhat blue, so if subjects like masturbation make you go green, you should click away now.
As I’ve mentioned before in this forum, my father was a lingerie salesman. By default this means he fancies that his sense of humor is prodigious. At his best, he makes me laugh, but at his worst, well, it’s not an exaggeration to say that in the early 1980s I heard him say the punch line, “But you can’t marry Walter Cronkite, darling. He’s a common tater!” more than 50 times. Mercifully, other jokes displaced his story about the conveniently named French Fry and her boyfriend Hash Brown, but there’s one line he’s used pretty much my entire life. He breaks it out every winter just after my mother comes down with her yearly cold. It never fails to send a shiver up my spine.
“Your mom’s a little stuffed up,” he told me recently over iChat.
“Better get her to the doctor.”
“Not before I rub Vicks all over her bare chest!” he said as he wagged his eyebrows and chuckled suggestively, apparently so caught up in his mentholated sexual fantasy that for a brief moment he had forgotten that he was speaking to his son.
For what are probably obvious reasons, I’ve never once laughed at this attempted bon mot. What’s worse is, my dad’s yearly crack recently took on a new, more horrifying dimension when I learned why Vicks products in Germany are called Wick without the ’s.’ It seems that the imperative form of the verb wichsen (”to masturbate”) is wichse. Vicks sounds pretty close wichse when spoken aloud (go on, try it) which means that when the pharmacist asks me “Which brand of rub would you like, sir?” and I answer, “Vicks, bitte,” it could easily sound to his or her ears as though I’m suggesting that he or she engage in an act that would be grossly inappropriate in the confines of an Apotheke (at least during business hours). Similarly, it was necessary to change the “v” in Vicks because, of course, the letter “v” is pronounced like an “f” in German, and most of you probably know why asking for a tub of fick ain’t no good. (If you don’t, friend, it’s cos the verb ficken means, delicately put, “to make love (without abandon)”).
As a result of this new information I’ve decided that while I live in Berlin I’ll stick with brands that have easy-to-say names like Bayer when shopping for medicine. Just in case. I’ve also decided that no matter how open minded I might think I am, I’ll never be comfortable knowing that my parents have any kind of sexual relationship. Especially when my mother has a cold and my father’s talking about Vicks.
