<p>^ Well, it was a Dane who wrote the academic study I referenced: Peter Gundelach, “Joking Relationships and National Identity in Scandinavia,” Acta Sociologica, vol. 43, no. 2, 113-122 (2000). According to Gundelach, a sociologist at the University of Copenhagen, Danish jokes about Swedes typically portray the latter as drunkards, while Danish jokes about Norwegians rest on the stereotype that “Norway is considered a backward country, provincial, in the periphery not only from a Scandinavian perspective, but also in relation to Europe.” Gundelach gives examples of Danish jokes in which “the Norwegian people have not yet achieved a mature state of modernization, and the Danish jokes reflect a feeling of superiority on the part of the Danes toward the Norwegians.” Gundelach notes that while there is “some overlap,” in Danish jokes “there is a tendency for the jokes about Norwegians to be the type that point out a provincialism or stupidity, and the jokes about Swedes to concern differences in values” such as the Swedes’ “deviant attitudes and habits towards alcohol consumption,” or what the Danes perceive to be the Swedes’ “too energetic, healthy lifestyle” and their perceived overreliance on “a ‘Big Brother’ welfare state,” or the Swedes’ “rigid, boring, unhappy” nature in contrast to their own supposedly “pleasant, anarchistic, and hedonistic” character. All of this, of course, is meant to build up the group telling the ethnic-stereotyping jokes by depicting the rival group in an unflattering light.</p>
<p>That you didn’t hear Danes joke about Norwegians and Swedes while you were there doesn’t mean anything. These things go in cycles. Modern transportation, communication, and the advent of the EU probably mean that Danes have much more interaction with Finns now than in the past, when contacts with Norwegians and Swedes would have been much more common. So perhaps Danish jokes about Finns are now more in vogue; the Danes probably figure they had the Norwegians and Swedes pegged decades ago, and there’s probably only so much of the same tired old ethnic stereotypes you can take after a while. </p>
<p>But I still don’t think ethnic jokes should be taken as any kind of reliable guide to life among the group who are made the butt of the joke. And if, as Gundelach suggests, the Danes are more given to this kind of ethnic stereotyping/putdown joke than other cultures, perhaps it just tells us more about their own provincialism and mean-spiritedness than it does about the people they’re putting down.</p>