Kristy Beers Fägersten examines contemporary Swedish comic strips as fruitful sites of innovative language play and linguistic creativity. Identifying Swedish comic strips as their own recognizable genre possessing a ‘national characteristic’, she highlights the visual and verbal practices constituting language play in Swedish comics thus far unaccounted for and unobserved in comics scholarship (10). In this book, Beers Fägersten examines language play as a feature of multimodal talk-in-interaction. Analyzing seven popular Swedish comics, she explores multilingual language play and linguistic creativity constructing humor at all levels of language. She provides helpful information about Swedish culture and the history and structure of comic strips to well position the reader to engage with her analysis, regardless of their background.
Presenting a theoretical discussion of language play and humor in discourse, Beers Fägersten argues that language play commonly occurs in everyday conversation simultaneously as verbal art and performance. Throughout the book, she demonstrates that strategies of humor in Swedish comics primarily serve to implicitly make fun of Swedish characters (and by extension, everyday Swedes) who engage in mockery of others’ language varieties, highlighting their own stereotypical thinking and linguistic incompetencies. At the same time, the comics also employ humor to make fun of the explicitly mocked language varieties as well as their speakers, associated cultures, and/or nations.
The analysis first focuses on the relationship between comic language play and sociolinguistic variation among varieties of Swedish as well as foreign languages spoken in Sweden resulting from language contact. Beers Fägersten finds that dialect mimicry serves to construct linguistic and cultural stereotypes about speakers of non-standard varieties of Swedish, while code-mixing and strategies of deprecation construct stereotypes of speakers of foreign languages.
Beers Fägersten then examines the ubiquity of English in Swedish comics, illustrating the widespread use and influence of English in Sweden. She investigates Swedish-English code-switching (including English-language swearing) as a site of humor, representing English as a language of play, and highlighting the prominence of Anglophone media references in Swedish English. The book concludes with a discussion of English as a lingua franca and considers how Swedish comics represent the use of English outside Sweden, establishing a contrast between Swedes’ use of English as a second language at home and English as a foreign language internationally. Beers Fägersten pushes us to consider English as a lingua ludica (ludica derived from Latin ludo meaning ‘playful’), highlighting the use of English as an outlet for linguistic creativity. She argues that the use of English in language play by non-native speakers requires use and knowledge of their native languages to create humor, protecting against English as subtractive.
Early on, Beers Fägersten asks: Just how funny are Swedes? Readers will likely answer: Very! The book is an engaging exploration of multimodal strategies of humor across the comic art genre, demonstrating how the unique affordances of Swedish comics illustrate social, cultural, and economic relations established by language use. It serves as an accessible tool for conceptualizing linguistic variation, language change, language contact, and the growing significance of Global Englishes.
