The Popular Nobel Prize Award Banquet: Distanced Participation of an Interacting TV-Audience

When chemist, inventor, and businessman Alfred Nobel died in 1896 he left a will establishing the Nobel Prize. Over the years, the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony, and the following Nobel Prize Award Banquet, developed into a spectacular and well-known event that was sometimes broadcast on radio. Then, in the year 1950, it was shown on Swedish television for the first time. In the decades that followed television became part of almost each and every household, and the viewing audience could now follow the festivities as they occurred, almost as if they had been invited themselves. A playful attitude towards the event developed, consisting of banter but also of distanced participation in which people dressed up and staged their own Nobel Prize Award “banquets” in front of their television-sets. In later years this phenomenon has developed, simultaneously becoming both more elaborate and more common, and today there is a variety of privately arranged Nobel Prize Award “banquets” to be found throughout Sweden, some even including their own Nobel Prize Award Ceremonies and attending royalty. In my paper, I will present this public parallel to the highly exclusive Nobel Prize Award Banquet and touch on international counterparts to it and the humorous language that surrounds these events.