Spede: A Glimpse into the Late-Twentieth Century Finnish Monoculture, and a Word or Two on Language

This post got started with me pausing to think about these two curious, relatively new (probably originating in the 1990s) Finnish terms, the descriptive noun spede and the verb spedeillä. If you are a non-native who hasn’t lived in this country very long and do not have much knowledge of our cultural history, you may find these terms somewhat hard to grasp and, therefore, lose at least some of the nuances of their meanings when translating them. I mean, if you are in a hurry and want to keep it simple, you can probably get away with translating spede with the term “buffoon” (or, “fool,” “bozo,” “dumb-ass,” etc.), and spedeillä with something like “fool around,” but the translation will then not capture everything that someone who has lived in this country in the decades around the turn of the millennium will read into them. In particular, some of the humor of the terms will easily get lost in translation. For in order truly to understand a term you will need to know a little bit about the cultural and historical backdrop, and then learn as many uses of the term as possible, in a variety of sentences or systems of sentences, in different situations or practices (in what Wittgensteinians call language-games). In the case of spede and spedeillä you should know a bit of Finnish (popular) cultural history (of at least the last quarter of the 20^th century) in particular, and preferably also appreciate the fact that it was very much a monoculture back then.

Now, it is a platitude, and yet actually in many cases quite misleading, to say that what for long used to be a (common to all, relatively homogeneous) monoculture in some country has only now quite recently become fragmented because of globalization, secularization, diversifying of interests and genres and subcultures, in the technological context where improving communications, media and most recently the internet, have allowed us (here in the developed countries) to form our identities as sort of combinations or mixtures of many different cultural ingredients. There have been times when and places where this supposed fragmentation of supposed former monoculture has been more an actual fact than in other places and times. And I have lived just about long enough to know that, in my humble opinion at least, it was quite real here in Finland over the last quarter-century.

Consider the fact that, these days, a part of the identity of many people in my country might involve notions like that they are fans of some TV-show or a movie director (“I am a kind of person who likes Tarantino movies”; “I am someone who is a fan of (the HBO series) Game of Thrones” ...); or that they like certain stand-up comedians, or certain YouTube channels, or a particular ethnic cuisine or a special diet; or that they commit much of their time to some hobby – ultra-running, scuba diving, disc golf, parachuting, or some online computer game. Insofar as these cultural elements are indeed constitutive of their identities, and insofar as they have adopted them and possibly to some extent altered their personal manifestations of them because of some sort of interactions with others who share those interests or hobbies, we can say that they are, in a sense, members of a worldwide “community” whose members enjoy the same idols, or the same cuisine, or live by (and preach to others the health benefits of) the same special diet, or form much of the sense of who they are around the same sport, online game, or other recreational activity. As there are now such global communities whose members share this sort of interests – and, thus, contents of mind which constitute bits and pieces of their identity – with potentially millions of other people around the world, those fields of interest can be said to constitute a strand of global culture. And at the same time, the diet or the hobby, the stand-up comedian or the YouTube idol that unites the minds of those hordes of people globally, will often be totally unfamiliar to most people in one’s own neighborhood or country. I mean, choose any YouTube star or starlet who has a seven-figure number of fans around the world, and chances are that most people in your country have never heard of that person.

Things were different back in the day before the internet. For one thing, the teenage kids who now gain millions of viewers on YouTube with their jokes and tricks or by sharing their views on fashion, might once have been successful only as what we used to call the class clown, or perhaps become the most popular girl in school. The most famous or notorious of them might have been known throughout the school or perhaps even throughout a small town or neighborhood, by hundreds of people. But even the most successful class clown and admired prom queen could not have been reasonably described as a global or national level “cultural icon.” Instead, back in the 1980s we had in this country, and in many other countries, dozens of national cultural icons that almost everyone would know and have opinions about; we had, for example, Spede.

Pertti “Spede”Pasanen (1930–2001), a film- and TV-producer, screenwriter, director, and actor, as well as – less famously – an inventor, was a public personality if there ever was one in this country. He produced, scripted, sometimes directed, and almost always also starred himself in, dozens of movies and several TV-shows, mostly comedies, in an era when there were only two television channels in this country – aptly titled TV1 and TV2. (Both were owned and ran by Yleisradio, our national broadcasting company, although it did allot a few hours of daily screen time to the one commercial broadcasting company that we had – Mainostelevisio (literally translated: “Commercial Television”) – for which Spede would also produce his shows. That commercial company would later adopt the name MTV3 after purchasing and in 1993 merging itself with the third Finnish channel, which had started airing in December 1986 (then only to about half of the country – the other half would still only have two channels until well into the -90s).)

The fact that there were indeed only two television channels back in the 80s is worth stressing, I think, because television may have been an important factor in the production of – for a brief, proud(?) moment in the late-20^th century – a peak in the Finnish monoculture. You see, there probably wasn’t at the outset too much by way of common culture here before the very idea of (there being such a thing as) one Finnish people emerged, first in the 19^th century after these lands had been taken from the Swedish crown in the 1808–09 war by Russia and turned into the Grand Dutchy of Finland. (There probably weren’t too much of common culture in any average-size or bigger country, not before the emergence of national identities and and then real nation states with parliamentary democracy, the developments which took place over the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th centuries, hand in hand with the emergence of nation-wide media, the first key factor behind that having been the invention of the printing press.) Before nation-wide media, so I have gathered, cultures (language, customs, and traditions) differed so much between the many regions of this country that people from Western Finland would have had difficulties understanding people from Eastern Finland, and vice versa, and everybody would have had humongous difficulties understanding the Sami people (from Lapland). Finnish culture was probably more like a cluster of local, though of course variously overlapping, cultures, one in each major part of our present-day country. For although there would have been some common elements – based on similar agricultural practices, religion, and some laws set by the king in Stockholm (before 1809), or the czar (1809–1917) – I would imagine that a majority of the specifics of the “cultural software” running on the brains and practices of the people would have been noticeably different in many different parts of Finland. Only with national media there came to be more commonalities across this disparity. It began with newspapers, which, together with attendance-requiring national schooling systems (the first one of those was instituted only in the 1760s, in Frederick the Great’s Prussia) that were producing growing numbers of literacy throughout populace, started unifying culture, perhaps most distinctly language, throughout the country. Radio broadcasts offered more common experiences and national cultural icons by allowing the whole nation to share, in real time, in events like the speech of the president or one of our athletes winning Olympic gold. But television was in some ways the height of that development, allowing people to see visual images, including living expressions on the faces (which evolution has designed us – the kind of social, small-group animals that we are – to pay close attention to and care about) of would-be cultural icons. That allowed people to share in admiring (or hating), even becoming fans of, specific TV personalities that would be known to everybody.

That is why I think that, in some ways at least it was only with television that the unification of Finnish culture came to a head: with the introduction of television set to most households, allowing people to share in many contents with so many others across the country (and aware of the fact that it was a shared experience). Thus there emerged dozens and hundreds of new, shared contents for a peculiarly Finnish consciousness to marvel at: events and stories, concepts and phenomena, people and fates, all seasoned with so much visual imagery. In that sense, indeed, television unified much of the national culture; and this effect would last (only) as long as there were but two or three TV channels, because then basically everybody had to watch the same few programs every night. A face often seen on TV would be known by all throughout the country. That was the scene which Spede entered, in the 1960s.

It was early days of television entertainment in this country, and Spede was able to make a prominent position for himself in that niche, most likely because he was a very talented and energetic young man who could both come up with lots of ideas and scripts fast and to execute them rapidly too, and who also turned out capable of finding the right people to collaborate with.

Obviously no one could achieve much anything by oneself alone, and Spede too only achieved what he did by collaborating with a number of other people, for instance with such other grand old men of Finnish movie- and television-entertainment as Jukka Virtanen, Ere Kokkonen, Simo Salminen, and Vesa-Matti Loiri. Many of those men became something of cultural icons by their own right: everybody in this country would know who Jukka Virtanen, Simo Salminen, or Vesa-Matti Loiri was; everybody. (I should mention that they became known also from connections other than their collaborations with Spede – Jukka Virtanen, for instance, as a prolific scriptwriter, director, and for many years the host of the long-airing TV-show Levyraati (based on an older format used in American and British television, a show called Jukebox Jury), where a five-member panel graded songs with points from 1 to 10; and Vesa-Matti Loiri as an actor in many other productions besides Spede’s and also as a highly successful singer (here is a clip of him representing Finland in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980, where he performed the song Huilumies (“A Flute Man”)). To give but one vivid example of just how widely known many of those guys became in this country: there was this one Jukka Virtanen that I knew (both Jukka and Virtanen are very common names in Finland), and as I understand it he had at some point found it rather irritating to share his full name with the famous Jukka Virtanen, not least because the other kids at school had come up with the nickname Jukka “Jukka Virtanen” Virtanen for him – a joke that obviously wouldn’t have made much sense unless just about everybody had known that there was that one particular other Jukka Virtanen.

Spede and the people he collaborated with were tremendously productive. Basically year in, year out, starting from the mid-sixties and all through the seventies, eighties, and much of the nineties, Spede and a group of other usual suspects would crank up a new TV-series season, plus a movie or two – with a shoelace budget – that would be shown in movie theaters first and come on small screen a couple years later.

A word about the movies: first of all, most of those “Spede flicks” (as the movies produced and otherwise orchestrated by Pasanen became commonly referred to) would get pretty awesomely crushing critiques from most movie critics worth their salt, but would usually do very well at the box office. The general public loved them, or at least found them funny and watchable enough to buy the ticket. Many a year one of those Spede flicks would be the most watched Finnish movie; and there were years when they were the most watched movie in this country, full stop. The most successful of them, some instalments in the incredibly popular Uuno Turhapuro franchise, would be seen in movie theaters by about 600,000 viewers or more (from a population of ca. 5 million).

The Turhapuro franchise is probably the first thing that comes to mind when one is asked to say something about Spede flicks. I personally do not think that Turhapuros were the funniest of Spede’s movies, I enjoyed some of the older adventure-comedies better, but they were the most popular and do constitute a good illustration of Spede humor. Turhapuros were a series of films starring Vesa-Matti Loiri as Uuno Turhapuro, a habitual bum and loafer with uncombed hair, stubbled face, and half the front teeth missing, mostly dressed in saggy old grandpa pants, suspenders, a holey string vest, and occasionally a trench coat, who had managed to charm and marry a rich businessman’s daughter. The movies were more collections of sketches than constituting any truly unified storyline, although they did have some vague sort of a background plot, around perhaps someone scheming something and someone else having some other plans and those schemes and plans conflicting in some surprising ways. It was more like there was this unifying theme holding each movie and the franchise together: the theme that much of the humor would come from the rich father-in-law’s loathing of and despairing over his no-good son-in-law and oftentimes coming to suffer from Uuno’s actions, and then perhaps plotting to get rid of him, but Uuno always ending up victorious, either because of some curious stroke of luck or because of coming up with some clever countermeasures or other schemes with his two friends (whom he had promised a share of the inheritance when the father-in-law dies), all the while keeping busy loitering, lying on the couch, finding ways to avoid work, and perhaps drink beer or hit on some beautiful woman that had entered his field of vision (the latter activity could mean him transforming his appearance into this very specific “Charmer Uuno” -look real quick, basically just by combing his hair back with gel and putting on sunglasses).

As to Spede himself, in the Turhapuro movies he would play the part of Uuno’s friend, Härski Hartikainen, an eccentric and (given his social status, surprisingly) arrogant, as well as in certain ways plain dirty –  in a sense to be defined shortly – car mechanic. Actually, here is a good opportunity for you to learn a delightfully multi-sided Finnish word. For whereas Hartikainen is a relatively common surname, Härski was a nickname, from the adjective härski, a term with which one could describe a food product gone bad, “rancid” or (in the case of a milk product) “sour,” but which is more interestingly applicable also as a characterization of personality – and of jokes, stories, pictures, or other acts of communication – in certain senses of “dirty,” the senses of “indecent” or “obscene,” but also carrying the meanings (more pertinent to the specific case of Härski Hartikainen) of “unscrupulous” and “shameless,” and often also transalatable as  “rude” or “disrespectful.”




Should you be a foreigner who has never seen any Spede humor, there might be no better quick clip to watch than this one (from a 70s black-and-white Turhapuro movie) where Härski inspects a car and makes an offer for it. In the sketch, an older man (played by Simo Salminen) comes to the Härski’s garage and offers to sell his car. Härski inspects the car and claims to find all sorts of faults with it. The customer asks, how much would Härski say the vehicle is worth? And Härski then takes his sweet time contemplating the matter, as if carefully considering every aspect. He lights a cigarette and all, thinking about the value of the car. Finally he answers: “Seven marks.” But at that moment his friend and associate, engineer Sörsselsön (also played by Simo Salminen) comes in and greets the older man: “Hi, dad!” Härski is stunned – clearly he did not know that the customer was his friend’s father. The father says: “This man is a härski one, offered me seven marks for this car!” But Härski saves the situation with some quick thinking: “Seven ... seven marks, indeed; seven marks per kilogram. And as this sort of car weighs about 2,000 kg, it makes ... 14,000 marks; so would that be okay with you?”

That is one of the best Spede jokes ever, I think; it makes me laugh, at least. More generally, in the Turhapuro movies and elsewhere, I think it is fair to say that what became known as Spede humor was rather lowbrow or childish; it was direct rather than subtle; and it was certainly manly, if not downright chauvinistic sort of humor. A striking example of the latter: one reoccurring sketch in the TV’s Spede Show in the late-80s was called “Naisen logiikka” (“A Woman’s Logic”), in which Spede played the part of a husband whose wife (very credibly played by Hannele Lauri) would make some silly claims or perhaps ask her husband to explain something, like a car’s differential gear system; Spede would then try and explain/mansplain how it is, but the woman just would not get it and would keep on contradicting the husband with some outrageously stupid remarks, until the man, Spede would end up speechless and in despair. And that would be the joke: there was no surprise twist to it.

The times were different then, of course. In many ways the eighties were still some of the good old days for the patriarchate in this country, so it was nothing too extraordinary to slip in a few chauvinistic jokes. And a good part of Spede humor was still otherwise quite funny. The editing of the movies and much of the other cinematography-technical stuff are rather poor, amateurish, by present-day standards, to be sure (just watch that above clip of Härski offering seven marks for a car if you question my judgment), but much of the jokes and the rest of the humor were pretty OK per se. Many of the actors were good, too, with a great sense of timing, which, as we know, is the key to good humor; and Vesa-Matti Loiri in particular was very good in physical comedy too. So I don’t think that there is much shame in admitting that, especially in the 70s and 80s, Spede did make us laugh. I remember laughing so hard watching, for example, the parody western Hirttämättömät (“The Unhanged”) which Pasanen, Loiri, Salminen and a handful of other guys had shot at some gravel pit near the town of Hyvinkää.

Of course, as I was a young child at the time, I suppose I was perfect audience even for childish jokes. (Though I should mention, in this connection, that there are people who would argue that Hirttämättömät is actually an objectively rather good movie and the humor apt for adults too; if you want, listen to this feature-length commentary by one Hannu Mäkinen, for example, and you can hear in his voice genuine enthusiasm about, as well as remarkably deep expertise on the topic (in Mr. Mäkinen’s enviably fluent English).) But now childhood, as we know, ends at some point. Also my relationship with the cultural icon called Spede Pasanen would inevitably change. Contributing to the change was the fact that, while I was growing up, becoming a teenager, in the late-80s and early-90s, Spede in turn, as the laws of nature would dictate, was getting older and more set in his ways. He now had some very recognizable mannerisms, which just about every imitator in this country would be having a field day on for years and years, even decades after Spede’s death; the humorist was becoming a topic of humor, the joker an object of jokes. (The most memorable of Spede’s mannerisms are how he would make this very grandiose, trademark face-palm, and say “Voe rähmä!” (“Ohh, lema!”); or how he would start explaining something, with a very distinctive tone of voice, by saying “Eh, nimittäin ...!” (“Ah; you see ...!”)) But even besides these I would say that Spede was becoming quite objectively speaking much less funny than before around the early 90s. In retrospect, too, I would say he was getting tired with sketches and jokes, was less into humor. He wouldn’t be making movies as often as before; he more or less stopped writing sketches for and appearing in TV comedy series; and most importantly, he would instead start appearing in this one particular gameshow that he had invented, the name of which changed over the years but finally became Speden Spelit (the first part being Spede in genitive and the latter a playful modification of the plural term pelit, “games,” a modification quite straightforwardly just making the two words alliterate, both now starting with Spe-).

In each episode of Speden Spelit (here is one episode in case you are interested) there would be four famous or, more often, semi-famous people competing in a set of events like jumping rope, bowling with (by kicking) a football attached to their ankle, guessing the color of a playing card, shooting with a light beam pistol, and rotating a hula hoop around the neck. At first there were a sketch or two per episode, too, and the show always started with the same, sort of comic title sequence (which you can watch by clicking the previous link), but over the years the actual show became more and more about the competition only. Spede himself would be hosting it, and I suppose he was trying to keep it light, mostly by just relying on his funny man habitus, but as he was getting older that habitus was arguably fading fast. Perhaps the funniest thing in Speden Spelit was when Spede, who would often challenge the winner of some event, promising to beat their result and offering to double or perhaps triple the prize money if he couldn’t do it, would actually get quite mad at himself and have a brief, genuine outburst of sorts if he failed the challenge. (That tells you something about Spede: he was a very competetive person, to put it mildly; and I should mention that he was very good at the events, even at the more physically demanding ones ... I mean, the man was in his sixties at the time but could jump rope like a f’ing Rocky Balboa, challenge people half or third his age and usually beat them.) But over the years even those fits after failed challenges lost much of their charm; they were getting pretty old, in my eyes, along with the rest of the show, and its host. 

By the late-90s by the latest, I would say, neither Speden Spelit nor Spede enjoyed much popularity amongst the teenagers or the twenty-somethings of this country. To us, Spede was now boring, predictable, dumb, very much an “old fart.” He and his show were all about the same ol’, same ol’ stunts and quips and mannerisms, over and over, dozens of times every year, year after year. He was now like the least funny guy ever, and yet one who you could expect to pop up on TV every week. (I am not  even exaggerating here: I just checked this from the (Finnish) Wikipedia page of the program, and it said there that, although at first there were some sort of summer breaks in the show, from November 1992 until Spede’s death in 2001 Speden Spelit was aired year round. That is, the damned thing would actually run non-stop, every single week. I had forgotten that that was so; but now it comes to me that one very special Christmas tradition in our country in those days was how Spede would be wearing a red-and-white Santa Claus hat in the episode of Speden Spelit aired nearest to Christmas.)

The very appearance of Spede would then piss many people off. I myself may have been so fed up with Spede in those days that I could actually grunt with frustration when I turned on the TV and the first thing I saw was Spede making a face-palm or swinging hula hoop around his neck. Yes, perhaps that sounds like over-reaction now, in this era of dozens of TV channels and unlimited quantities of entertainment available online, but remember that at the time we still had but three TV channels in this country (well, the fourth channel started airing in 1997, and there had long been a couple free cable channels in bigger cities, but still), so there weren’t too much to choose from when you came home and fell onto the coach and started surfing the channels, all three of them. There was a good chance that you would have to watch Spede failing in fun; that freaking Neanderthal grandfather of Finnish comedy, who due to the deplorable state of our country’s television entertainment was still having all the screen time he wanted, week after week, every godsdamnest week. 

An interesting youth-cultural development then took place. You know how when someone tries to be funny but isn’t, and then repeats the same sort of not funny acts time and time again, it might at some point become unintentionally funny? For many of us teenagers of the early-90s, that was pretty much what happened with Spede: we would start finding him so stupid that he was ridiculous, which is to say that he was, after all, kind of funny again. But of course that meant that we had started laughing at this man whom we as children had laughed with.



And then we come to that fantastic little piece of linguistic evolution that so nicely testifies to this: the introduction of the terms I mentioned at the beginning of this post, the desriptive noun spede, which I think most often translates best with the term “buffoon” (or, “fool,” “bozo,” “dumb-ass,” etc.), except of course for the Finnish term’s connotation of that particular person that we knew as Spede; and (a little bit later, I believe) the absolutely wonderful verb derived from the noun, the verb spedeillä, which cannot be as conveniently translated with any single term (though “fool around” does come close) because it means, basically, “to behave like a spede.”


If I had to guess, I would say that the original linguistic innovators behind these terms had been some teenagers. The first time I personally came across the term spede was on the pages of a newspaper, probably Helsingin Sanomat, 1993 or 1994 if my memory serves me, in an article that revealed that many of the commercials targeting young consumers those days failed miserably in their attempts to address that target group with any credibility. To be more precise, the term was mentioned in the specific connection of an ice cream TV-commercial where, I believe, a young rock group was first shown performing or practicing, and then the lead singer (or was it a singer-guitarist?) took a bite of the ice cream bar that was being advertised (Kingis was the name of the product, I believe). The article said that the young people they had been interviewing for the piece had found the commercial lame; and one of the interviewees was quoted as having said (something like) “Toi jätkä on ihan spede” (That guy is all spede).




And so it begun. Since then, I have heard the term used roughly in the said senses several dozens if not hundreds of times. That does not make them the most used terms in Finnish, but widely used enough for them being parts of proper language, not just of some local language-game or sub-culture. They probably started out that way, but the term-uses then spread from the teenagers’ language-games and stuck with us when we got older. In any case, over the past twenty years I have heard countless many thirty- or forty-year-olds use the terms spede or spedeillä. They might use spede like:


“That guy over there, he is an utter spede.”
“Stop being such a spede, man!”
“Oh, f- me, what a f’n spede I’ve been!”


The verb spedeillä (which is conjugated in the present tense like this: I spedeilen, you spedeilet, he/she spedeilee, we spedeilemme, you (plural) spedeilette, they spedeilevät), on the other hand, might be used in sentences like:


“What the hell you guys spedeilette here? Get to work already!”
“We need to quit this f’n spedeily and start doing this right!”
“I thought she would make a decent CEO, but she just spedeilee something at every turn!”


Spedeily in particular is one of my favorite words. It proves how healthy our language is. A lot has been said about how much English is affecting Finnish terminology; how several (American) English terms are adopted to our language every year, usually in some slightly modified form; and of course Finnish has always soaked in influences from other languages, mostly from Swedish, some from Russian, and a bit from German. But we should be pleased to see that there is also linguistic evolution through such endogenous terminological innovations like spedeily. Of course, it remains to be seen whether these terms stick and are adopted by the generations who have never seen Spede Pasanen. But that is the thing with linguistic evolution, of course, or any Darwinian evolution. I for one would be very happy should I hear some teenagers in the year 2050 using the term spedeily, most likely blissfully unaware of its origins.