I’m sure this has been asked before, but I couldn’t find it.
A couple of clips on youtube.com suggest that some Swedes think he’s hilarious, though they wonder if they really sound like him. Some other Swedes (or people claiming to be so) think he’s offensive and even racist.
Oh, and while I’m here (posts cost a quarter, right?), what do other nationalities think of him? Does he sound Swedish to them too?
A Swedish foreign exchange student iin high school said he sounded Norwegian.
I have no idea why I find this hysterically funny, but I do.
I think I remember an episode of the Muppet Show where it was exposed that, not only is the Swedish Chef not speaking Swedish, but that he isn’t even Swedish himself.
Does anyone else have any memory of this?
On behalf of Norwegians everywhere, * . . .aHEM*
(Not true!)
Norwegians love to tell jokes about how Swedes are as dumb as a box of rocks (and Swedes tell essentially the same jokes about Norwegians). So although your average Norwegian doesn’t think the Swedish Chef sounds particularly Swedish, his enduring (and endearing) cluelessness makes him pretty popular 
Bork Bork Bork!
I’ve got a friend in Sweden, and the Swedish Chef is his favorite Muppet. Also, the Swedish software company that develops the Opera web browser released a “Swedish Chef” edition in response to Microsoft deliberately coding their web pages so that they “broke” Opera.
Racist? Oh my…
I don’t find him offensive at all, however, as a parody of Swedish people, he about as accurate as a talking fro…
And that’s the thing. It’s a variety show, nothing to be upset about. He doesn’t sound Swedish to me though, nor Norwegian.
I never miss an opportunity to post my default home page:
Back when my wife was working in a major Midtown (Manhattan) restaurant , her boss, the pastry chef, was from Sweden. Lovely man, but a bit challanged in the pop culture department. My wife would sneak up behind him a say “bork-bork-bork,” and he never had any idea what she was going on about. She says that getting him to repeat the phrase “chocolate mousse” was worth several good minutes of solid entertainment.
I don’t know that I’ve ever heard actual Swedish. Where can I hear a clip? Purely in the name of research, of course!
See, I don’t think the Swedish chef is any more clueless than any other Muppet. He has a penchant for painfully literal interpretation, but so does Gonzo. The Chef has to deal with bizarre and rebellious inanimate objects, but so does Kermit. It’s odd that adding an accent making us think “stupid” while without an accent, the character is just a straight man.
Hey and let’s not forget that in Muppets 3-D at Disney World, one of my favorite shows, it’s the Swedish Chef who destroys the theatre.
The best bit in the show is in the preview where Sam the Eagle declaims (paraphrased because of lack of brain cells) “And our grand finale is a salute to all the countries of the world, but mostly AMERICA!”
Got to love the muppets, the only kid show ever to present Joel Grey doing Cabaret. 
It was the episode with Jean Stapleton guesting, and she revealed that she could understand the Chef because she’d taken a correspondence course in Mock Swedish. Sam the Eagle insists that the Chef begin speaking honestly, so he speaks in his true native language…Mock Japanese!
Seerch Lungooege-a
Boolgereeun
Cetelun
Cheenese-a (Seempliffied)
Cheenese-a (Tredeeshunel)
Crueteeun
Czech
Dootch
Duneesh
Engleesh
Erebeec
Estuneeun
Feennish
French
Germun
Greek
Hebroo
Hoongereeun
Icelundeec
Induneseeun
Iteleeun
Jepunese-a
Kureun
Leethoouniun
Letfeeun
Nurvegeeun
Persian
Puleesh
Purtoogooese-a
Roosseeun
Rumuneeun
Serbeeun
Slufek
Slufeneeun
Spuneesh
Svedeesh
Toorkeesh
(Nute-a: Setteeng prefferences veell nut vurk iff yuoo hefe-a deesebled cuukeees in yuoor brooser. Hurty flurty schnipp schnipp!)
Even worse than Grey doing “Cabaret”, he was doing “Wilkommen”! They DID rewrite the lyrics, but for a second or two while watching the 1st season DVDs I was wondering why the hell I didn’t remember the parts about the girls taking their clothes off from when I was a kid…
because it really is. Even if for all the wrong reasons.
We asked a Swedish girl once what they thought of the “Swedish Chef” in Sweden; she said that when she watched the muppet show, he was* referred to* as the “Norwegian Chef”.
Nobody from Sweden’s said that yet though, so I wonder if she was having us on.
Totally OT thing: there’s a Norwegian girl who works with me, who has only been in Australia 10 years. Working with her has lead me to two conclusions:
[ol]
[li]The standard of teaching in Norway must be extraordinary, because she’s grammatically perfect and her accent is almost non-existent. There’s some vowel sounds that are shifted ever-so-slightly oddly, but when I heard it I’d assumed she’d spent some time in New Zealand. It would *never *have occurred to me to think English wasn’t her first language.[/li][li]Norwegian’s a very pretty language.[/li][/ol]
the russian roulette is referred to as “the american roulette” in Russia.