“Radio Free Sweden”: Satire, National Identity, and the Un-PC (Geo)Politics of Jonatan Spang

ABSTRACT

Focusing on Danish comedian Jonatan Spang’s spoof of the Nordic drama The Bridge via his news parody series Close to the Truth, this article examines how satire simultaneously embodies and performs geopolitics. Through a close reading of Spang’s send-up of contemporary Swedish culture as “pc-totalitarianism”, we interrogate the comedian’s satirical intervention in bilateral cultural relations between Denmark and Sweden. Our approach begins with a critical assessment of Danish national identity vis-à-vis the Swedish “other”, followed by a brief history of Danish political satire, before shifting to an empirical analysis of Spang’s controversial Draman skit across four spatio-cultural scales of engagement. In the concluding section, we integrate the various flows of satirical stereotyping, national identity production (and contestation), and geopolitics embedded in Spang’s “humoristic Marshall Plan” for Sweden. Here, our goal is to provide a multi-tiered assessment of how comedy informs everyday understandings of International Relations (IR) between culturally-proximate nations.

KEYWORDS:

• Satire
• Denmark
• Sweden
• national identity
• immigration
• Nordic noir

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Aarhus University Research Foundation and the Institute for Urban Research (IUR) at Malmö University, which funded a portion of Saunders’ research activities for this essay. We would like to express our gratitude to Jonatan Spang and Annette Wigandt for their support of the project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The particular and particularly “imaginative” ways in which satire is brought to bear on national identity construction serves as fil rouge of this argument, girding our approach to acts of everyday IR that sculpt geopolitical imaginaries.

2 The title is a jape directed the existence of a functioning Scandinavian interlingua.

3 While Swift dealt with matters of life and death in his satire, particularly A Modest Proposal (1729), Spang’s satirical forays are more playful. Nonetheless, we identify a commonality in the ways in which various fabrications and falsehoods about the “other” inform our dealings with them, despite objective truths to the contrary.

4 The Emil satire relies on generationally-specific cultural knowledge to examine Swedish-Danish disparities, trading in nuances that are likely to be lost on non-Danish viewers. By way of explanation, Emil is a good-hearted prankster whose enterprises violate the norms of Swedish peasant society in the early 1900s. Like other examples of Lindgren’s work, the novels celebrate the child as an individual, while underscoring the need for socio-political change. In the Close to the Truth skits, Emil (Spang) is an outlandish version of the contemporary politically-correct person constantly correcting his thoroughly early 20th-century father (played by Lars Mikkelsen). Spang thus plays with the xeno-stereotype of the radically-progressive “Swede”, cast against Mikkelsen who performs the auto-stereotype of the retrograde “Dane”.

5 In its playful affinity, we suggest that the joking relationship between the Swedes and the Danes differs significantly different from more traditional stereotypes that characterise comedic insults between nations (see examples in Davies 1990).

6 Literally “flagging up” Sweden’s lack of banal nationalism (see Billig 1995), the blogger Aron Flam (2018) notes of his nation’s relationship with patriotism in the context of Draman controversy: “If you see anybody waving flags it’s probably a confused immigrant who hasn’t quite grasped that in Sweden we deny our nationality in absurdum out of fear that someone will remember its real roots”.

7 Social Democratic rule in Sweden ran uninterrupted for much of the twentieth century, allowing the development of a robust welfare state that came to be emulated across northern Europe. Concurrently, Stockholm charted a so-called “middle way” between the US and USSR during the Cold War, resulting in its freedom from foreign influence. Taken together, these traits – alongside its larger population, rich cultural patrimony, and historical influence in Norway and Finland – has resulted in the country being the “silent reference point for what is considered Nordic or Scandinavian” (Andersson and Hilson 2009, 223).

8 Empirical analyses of Scandinavian literature demonstrate that Swedish works tend to present a “mostly positive” or “neutral” view of Denmark, whereas Danish writings have been “mostly negative” or “neutral” (see Gundelach 2000).

9 The country’s two PSBs – DR and TV 2 – dominate the market, with a combined audience share of around 76 percent. DR is 100 percent funded by a tax, while TV 2 is commercially-funded; both companies are owned by the Danish state.

10 Her family name plays on Stieg Larsson’s character Lisbeth Salander, who featured in the Nordic noir Millennium book/film series. Her given name jokingly alludes to Eurovision-winner Carola Häggkvist.

11 This binary adds a component on class difference, establishing a tension between Malmö’s hardscrabble immigrant suburbs and the posh strip of coastal towns that connect Copenhagen to Elsinore, where life is “so good”, people drink whiskey (rather than beer).

12 DR2’s Facebook feed features the skits with Danish and Swedish subtitling, with font distinctions to clue in the non-native speaker of which language is being used in their verbal exchanges.

13 This “joke” is fraught with historical meaning, given that Skåne (including the city of Malmö) was once Danish territory.

14 Janteloven is an invention by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose in order to describe social norms in the village of Jante in his 1933 novel En flygtning krydser sit spor (“A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks”). The law consists of ten unwritten “rules”, and in colloquial language references to Janteloven engage the negative attitude in Scandinavia towards individual success and personal ambition, as well as intolerance of elitism, economic disparities, and people that “stick out”.

15 This article is co-written by a (male) American academic, who has lived in and regularly visits Denmark, and a (female) Danish academic. The impetus for this article came from the former’s discussions with the latter over the disconnect between the everyday, lived realities of feminism in Denmark versus the US counterpoised against the discursive politics of Danish anti-feminism versus Swedish “pc culture”.

16 Drawing on Astrid Lindgren’s fiction, the effects of the welfare state, and other sources, their provocative title of their book translates as “Is the Swede Human?”

17 Close to the Truth originally approached Game of Thrones veteran Pilou Asbæk to play the role, but he declined viewing the content as “too controversial” (Spang 2020).

18 Spang (2020) argues that Swedes will laugh at certain things that are in “bad taste” because they come from a “hillbilly” Dane, whereas the same joke from a Swedish comedian would not be tolerated (“he or she should know better”).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert A. Saunders

Robert A. Saunders is a Professor in the Department of History, Politics, and Geography at Farmingdale State College, a campus of the State University of New York (SUNY). His research has appeared in Political Geography, Politics, Geopolitics, Millennium, Social & Cultural Geography, Nations and Nationalism, Slavic Review, and Europe-Asia Studies, among other journals. He is the author of five books, including Popular Geopolitics and Nation Branding in the Post-Soviet Realm (Routledge, 2017) and Geopolitics, Northern Europe, and Nordic Noir (Routledge, 2021).

Hanne Bruun

Hanne Bruun, MA & Ph.D., professor in media studies, Aarhus University, Denmark. She is the founder and head of Centre for Media Industries and Production Studies (2017+), and the author of five books, including Re-Scheduling Television in the Digital Era (2020). Bruun is the co-editor of four books and has contributed to several books and journals e.g. Nordic Journal of Media Studies 1(1) 2019, and Critical Studies in Television 13(2) 2018.