Sixteen Volts

Before YouTube dies, we'd better enjoy its fruits as long as we can! I learned today that you can watch skits of various Finnish comedy shows from the 80's and 90's, which are like some poor man's SNL. Man, do these ever bring back memories from my childhood years. Perhaps it would have actually been better to leave these as fond memories instead of seeing them now as the crap that they were, but some of these were actually funny funny. Since pretty much all these skits are in Finnish, the readers in the anglosphere don't really have much to enjoy there. But perhaps they might find "Sverige" amusing.

I am a bit disappointed that I could not find any "Aki and Turo" skits. In these classic skits from the 80's, Aki and Turo were two 1970's Finnish youth who had so many classic and back then so highly popular catchphrases that I believe that some school principals actually prohibited the kids from repeating them during school hours. The characters became very popular and they even put out a hit record. I understand that it was pretty funny how the two actors depicting Aki and Turo later tried to be serious actors in serious roles, one of them later going on to play a detective in the Finnish equivalent of "Law & Order".

Back in the day, it was still possible to make cruel humour about gypsies, as the "Pulttibois" skits "Mannet" vividly demonstrate. ("Manne" is the stereotypical male gypsy first name in Finland, and the suffix -t makes it plural.) Back in the day when Finland was still lily-white, the gypsy minority who I don't think anybody even remembers how they ever got there was pretty much in the same cultural position as some welfare ghetto negroes from Harlem or Compton in the American culture. The work habits of the gypsy minority left a lot to hope for since they mostly lived on welfare, bet money on the horse races and tended to steal things such as bicycles, occasionally getting violent with their knives that they always carried with them whenever there was a cultural clash with the mainstream population. (As one joke among thousands put it, "What is the gypsy triathlon? Walk to the swimming pool and come back riding a bicycle.")

"Lapinlahden linnut" (I believe this group was called "The Rumpole Birds" in some exported programs) was another comedy group of that era. In addition to your usual skit comedy, these guys were actually pretty good musicians. There is a whole bunch of their skits available in YouTube, although some classics that I fondly remember are sorely missing, such as the series "Hurjat" ("The Wild Ones") in which they rode around with mopeds as if they were a tough biker gang, and in each skit they stopped at some remote hicksville kiosk at which something funny then happened. Also none of the "X - the smartest people in the world" skits seem to be available. In each of these skits, the gang simply first imitated the mannerisms and language of the people of some particular nation (X = Americans, French, Italians etc.) and after a while, the text "X - the smartest people in the world" was superimposed on the screen. Hilarious in its simplicity.

Another series of skits that is missing from YouTube always first had some person being disappointed about something, for example, a man having filled up his car with expensive gas (hah, if only they had known back then how expensive it will later get), or an infertile woman longingly staring at a bunch of newborn babies behind the glass. The booming Voice of God suddenly started to talk to that person, asking what is wrong with him or her, and the discussion always concluded with the God's very own catchphrase "Oh... just take it." The person in question was then shown happily driving away without paying for the gas, stealing a baby etc.

But I do notice YouTube has one of their skits in which they play a group of Eastern Orthodox monks. In every skit, the monks engage in discussion of the current status of their lives, but this discussion is conducted using the traditional singing liturgy of the Greek Orthodox service. These skits were rip-roaringly funny because they didn't push too hard or make cheap mockery of the Eastern Orthodox faith, but almost deadpanned the humour and simply let the inherent absurdity of the situation make the audience laugh. Whereas the majority of Finns are Lutheran, the Eastern Orthodox believers comprise a couple of percent of the population, and it could be argued that these skits popularized the knowledge about the Eastern Orthodox church among Finns way more than anything else ever did. The one skit available in YouTube is one of the later ones, in which the monks have lost their monastery and its historical artifacts, and even the robes off their backs, and have been forced to take jobs as bus drivers in Helsinki.

One of the skits by Lapinlahden linnut parodied Hannu Karpo. Now, that particular man of the people is simply something whose work and cultural significance I cannot even begin to explain to anybody who is not a Finn, and I can't even begin to think of a American television personality whose style and position would come even close to what Hannu Karpo has been doing in Finland for over two decades now. The man simply defies explanation, so I will not even try. If any fellow Finn wants to take a shot at this task, I am more than curious to see how it could possibly be done. There is something in the Finnish Wikipedia... oh God, my Finnish readers, pretty please with sugar on top tell me that the show "Karpolla on asiaa" ("Karpo wants to have a talk") is not running even today. It just can't be. I flat-out refuse to believe that it is possible. That program belongs to the 80's, not to the present-day Finland.

I wrote earlier a post "Uuno is number one" about the Uuno Turhapuro movies that were quite popular in Finland. The actor who played Uuno was a polymath and even an athlete, and in addition to playing Uuno, he appeared in many serious movie and television roles and even recorded music. I remember one music appreciation class in high school when the teacher played a record of this guy singing some classical music, and while I was listening to it, I semi-expected him to suddenly break the song and enter the role of Uncle Nasse The Alcoholic Clown, and tell the kids that he is very, very angry about something. (Come to think of it, many things always seemed to make Uncle Nasse very angry.) Uncle Nasse was basically Krusty the Clown except a lot scarier because he really was an alcoholic and not in a good way, and there is a whole bunch of videos available. There is even one video where Uncle Nasse speaks English, for my anglosphere readers.

Uncle Nasse was one of the characters of Spede Show, the comedy show of Spede Pasanen, the well-known humorist behind many things including the Uuno movies. I had already forgotten the classic skit series "Female logic", in which Spede and his "wife" start an argument about something. For example, the wife argues that there is no need to build new nuclear power plants to Finland because nobody that she knows uses nuclear power, they all use electricity from the wall plugs. Or when Spede asks his wife why she has never taken her brand new expensive car to routine maintenance, she tells him that her driving school instructor had told the class that a new rookie driver should start with a cheap car, so she intentionally made her brand new car equivalent to an old one.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Tuesday, August 15, 2006 at 10:02 PM