Blæaaaargh!
Bluuuuuurg!
Whoooooo!
It happened almost immediately. Already when Ole Henry Snildalsli broke his way up the slippery hill in the first episode of “Easter Crime Games”, but managed to hold back the actual vomit until the exercise was finished, I realized that he had passed hummingbird eggs as this year’s Easter favourite.
I looked around the TV sofa. Man (43) laughed. Son (13) laughed. Son (8) laughed.
Everyone laughed.
Ole Henry’s vomiting had transcended age and humor preferences.
He had managed the impossible.
NO SHORTAGE OF EGGS: Fortunately, Ole Henry did not have the easiest Easter egg. Whew! Photo: NRK
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First: “Easter crime games”. This year’s Easter comedy effort on NRK, a sort of spin-off of the Christmas hit “24-star Christmas calendar”. Program leader Markus Neby himself refers to it as “competition-driven reality with a kind of Easter crime masquerade frame” and declares “I can’t get enough of seeing random celebrities in the same place”. There are ten participants, among them Kåre Magnus Bergh, Esben “The Dane” Selvig and Kristine Grændsen. Whoever loses the competition is killed in Easter bestial fashion.
But back to Ole Henry. Who is he guy? For those of us who haven’t seen more than one season of “Ikke lov å le på hytta”, he is a previously unknown ball welder. I contact an acquaintance in the humor industry. “Very upset not to know him, definitely a little-known comedian,” she says.
So let’s google: Ole Henry Snildalsli, 25 years old and from Trondheim. Won VGTV’s “People’s participant” and therefore got to take part in “Ikke lov å le på hytta” last autumn. There, at least according to him himself, it was an advantage to be an undescribed magazine: “The nice thing about being so young and fresh was that I didn’t take all the references to the others. So sometimes I didn’t laugh, just because I didn’t know what they were joking about,” he told the local newspaper.
But he was famous before that too, apparently. In middle school, he made a name for himself with over 100,000 followers on the video app Vine, but he lost them when the app was shut down. Sad.
Ole Henry has also worked in a hen house for three years. At least that’s what he said when he was introduced as a participant in the “Easter Crime Games” in episode one.
And then he chuckled. It sounded like a mix of chicken and duck.
LIVING DANGEROUS: The participants in the “Easter Crime Games” must be killed one by one. Photo: NRK
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Perhaps Conservative politician Henrik Asheim’s rap verse (!) in episode three can shed more light on the attractiveness of the unknown Trondheim humorist:
“Ole Henry has buns
He wears snake shoes, he fights up
on things that aren’t fun, but he thinks he’s cool
because he’s really weird.”
Here I actually think we are at the essence of Ole Henry’s appeal.
“He has something Jim Carrey-like about him,” says my contact in the humor industry. She is right. Maybe it’s because of the harshly horizontal bangs, which are (obviously?) stolen from Carrey’s character in “Dumb and Dumber.” But there may also be something in the humor approach itself, a kind of naive and angelic, yet cold-bloodedly calculated, desire to make us all laugh.
“And we laughed”, as Siv Anita in “Parterapi” usually says.
Now the whole thing sits the family and twists hands every time one of the participants is to be killed. Don’t let it be Ole Henry! Don’t let it be Ole Henry! We happily sacrifice Anette Trettebergstuen and Rikke Isaksen to see Ole Henry trudge around in the snow with his knitted strawberry hat, light a fire with a wig and make generally inappropriate comments to the others in the group.
It’s a hundred times better than Quick Lunch.
