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Title: Joyful Nordic Humor: A Family Album by Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret, Joan-Zug Bourret Liffring ISBN: 1-57216-051-9 Publisher: Penfield Books Pub. Date: 01 August, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.50

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: Nordic Heritage, Celebrations, Humor and Folk Art
Comment: Joan points to a photo of a Viking festival vendor with waffles on his horns: "Isn't this wild?! Don't you just love it?! " Through her decades of putting together books about Scandinavian and Finnish Americans, photographer and Penfield Press publisher Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret has attended numerous Nordic American festivals, as well as sites in Northern Europe. She has collected stories, met unique celebrants of Nordic heritage, and taken scores of pictures of Swedes, Norwegians, Finns and Danes at their fun. "No one has as much fun as the Nordic Americans. Few other ethnic groups tell jokes about themselves." Whether it's the antics of "weekend Vikings," the assiduous preparations of church basement women, the parodic invention of Finn America's Saint Urho, or the ritual consumption of lye-soaked lutefisk-like lemmings to the sea-Nordic Americans go "all out."

Joyful Nordic Humor, a collection of essays, stories, photos, cartoons and folk art, reflects this hilarity with spirited thoroughness. Joyful Nordic can serve as a "family album" for those involved in the festivities or as a sourcebook for those interested in their Nordic roots. A recent morning television series introducing the public to "Euro"-ethnic eccentricity in America proved very popular. Joyful Nordic is a "best of." It might even serve anthropologists seeking new frontiers of study! In all, the self-portrait of Nordic Americans (Liffring-Zug Bourret is part Norwegian) is done with warmth and sincere appreciation.

Topics include "the dilemma of the horns," about the persistence of Viking helmet horns despite archeological evidence; the disastrous "St. Lucia" visitation made to a hung-over Nobel-winning Sinclair Lewis; the Norwegian bachelors of Herman, Minnesota; Swedish gasoline (coffee); the fictional "Finn Who Would Not Take a Sauna" (by Garrison Keillor); the ministry of humorist Rev. Jonna Jensen; the shocking truth about oatmeal lefse; Julebukk (Norwegian Christmas holiday rituals); the story of Urho, who saved Finland's nonexistent grape crop from grasshoppers; and much more. Sixteen pages of color photos include Viking reenactments, Nordic folk art, a flattened Dala horse, and "the tattooed man." Illustrations include black-and-white photos from several sources, drawings by Theodore Kittelson, Norway's first artist to use humor, and cartoons by David Fitzsimmons.

Fitzsimmons also provided illustrations for Bernhard Hillila's Finnfun, another humor book published by Penfield Press this year. Hillila combines a penchant for puns with a storehouse of anecdotal material in his impeccably charming book. Penfield has never had so many laughs. 1997 is our joyful year.