I’m watching tv today, and a car commercial featuring a bunch of Muppets comes on. They’re all singing a song, and on comes The Swedish Chef, and he sings something like: Derp-de-derp-de-derp-de-durrr!
And I laughed, and then immediately thought: Holy Shit! If that character were Chinese or most other nationalities, I would have to be a racist piece of dog poop to laugh at it.
(ironically, my real life last name is Swedish…)
Will there come a day, say, 25 years from now, when kids look at me and say: I can’t believe you racist assholes used to laugh at that stuff?
There’s stereotyping, and then there’s the harm caused by stereotyping, and they aren’t the same thing. People like to roll it all up into one package and say “is this racist? Is this sexist? How dare you call me a racist?!” but not all -isms are created equal. It’s ethnic stereotyping to the extent that you’re laughing at the Swedish Chef because you’re thinking the Swedish are weird, if you are, but I’m not aware of any deeper wells of ethnic rancor that character is drawing on. 25 years from now kids will be mad at us for how we treat gays, but not because of SNL characters; because of the actual material prejudice against them which might make some of the “hilarious” stereotyping in poor taste.
If you watch a Marx Brothers movie today, you cringe!
Yikes.
Besides, the Swedish Chef isn’t really Swedish. He’s speaking Mock Swedish but his native tongue is Mock Japanese.
I am not sure that this is true. There is nothing about Swedes that are being mocked, here. He is not portrayed as stupid and nothing besides his voice pattern is recognizable as “Swedish” nor do his actions play on any stereotypes of Swedish behavior.
I suspect that we could find examples of people speaking with Chinese accents in which the video (or whatever) is not considered racist. Certainly, Hollywood still has a lot of fun showing white guys talking as if they were from the 'hood.
Mocking an Asian character for their pronunciation of R or L is going to come off as racist. Portraying a Japanese character as a war monger is going to be seen as racist. But simply displaying a false accent when no other denigrating stereotype is presented does not seem to come across as racist.
What are you laughing at? Just thtat it’s kinda silly?
I don’t know immediately…
I guess it would require an in depth analysis of the joke to know that. For sure, the suspension of disbelief is paramount, and then the notion that this character who can’t communicate…still communicates.
Hell, I don’t know, honestly. But I laughed at Edith Bunker and the Chef upthread, too.
Trivia note: In Sweden, he’s known as “The Norwegian Chef”. And many Swedes claim he sounds more Norwegian than Swedish.
It’s really making fun of how Swedes sound to the typical monolingual American. Plus it’s funny.
Bork! Bork! Bork!
Some of the worst ‘racial stereotyping’ is of the English by Hollywood- it seems we are all evil crooks and twisted psychopaths. 
The whiter and richer and less at risk of negative actions a people is, the greater the leeway in stereotyping.
Of course there is a compensation as once people work out that one is not a twisted mastermind, then one is assumed to be educated and mannered!
Or if they can pass for Americans (House, The Wire, Wag the Dog, Homeland etc.) then they are just Americans until their accents are heard on chat shows!
You forgot Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Adam Hills had a good bit about that.
If there is anything worse that idiots who are offended by things that are not meant to be offensive, it is idiots who worry about offending people by doing things that are not offensive.
Ye Gods, by the time we are finished ethnically cleansing our language, George Orwell will be rolling in his grave and calling us all ninny zealots!
No, he isn’t, even though it would have been hilarious if he had, before coming to these boards I had never even heard of the idea of referring to him as such.
25 years from now kids will look at us and say we were such boring prudes back then in the neo-Victorian age that we didn’t even laugh at funny Chinese jokes.
And then they’ll agree that it was a good thing Denmark annihilated Sweden in the Second Great Northern War of 2025.
Yeah, but we could probably try to excuse a lot of quite terrible things that way. I’ll leave the examples to your imagination, but try fitting that sentence to some other stereotypes…
Seems there was a bit of fuss recently about a “Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation…” or something? 
Whereas a Norwegian would say: Bjork! Bjork! Bjork!
Great, now I’m going to have El Hambo running through my head all day…