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The Swedish Chef is a Muppet who appeared in the long-running The Muppet Show and was operated by Jim Henson and Frank Oz simultaneously. more...

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Character

A parody of televised cooking shows, the Swedish Chef wears a toque blanche and has bushy eyebrows that completely obscure his eyes. He was one of the few Muppets to employ an actual puppeteer's hands, originally Oz's, in the designs—that is, they were visible to the audience through his sleeves and facilitated handling food and utensils.

Nearly all Swedish Chef sketches begin with him in a kitchen, waving some utensils while singing his signature song in a trademark mock Swedish; a semi-comprehensible gibberish which parodies the characteristic vowel sounds of Swedish. The opening song usually sounds possibly something like: "Yorn desh born, der ritt de gitt der gue, Orn desh, dee born desh, de umn børk! børk! børk!", but in fact changes subtly in every episode. The last line of the song is always "Børk! Børk! Børk!", and is punctuated by him throwing the utensils over his shoulder to crash into the crockery behind. (Although the letter "ø" does not exist in Swedish—it is a Danish/Norwegian letter whose Swedish equivalent is "ö"—the Chef's trademark word is nearly universally represented as "Børk". The vowel pronounced, however, is an "o", not ø/ö. The statement makes sense in Swedish if the final consonant is intrepreted as a T, rather than a K; "Bort bort bort" means "away away away", and is precisely what a real-life Swedish chef would say if he was getting rid of (for instance) useless kitchen utensils.)

After this introduction, the Chef continues speaking gibberish while preparing a particular recipe. His commentary is spiced with the occasional English word to clue the viewer in to what he is attempting. These clues are necessary as he frequently uses unorthodox culinary equipment (firearms, tennis racquets, etc.) to prepare his dishes. The sketch typically degenerates into a slapstick finale where the ingredients or equipment get the better of him.

In one sketch, a misaimed explosive charge slightly damaged the face of the puppet. The Chef's face remained scarred through the rest of the season.

The Chef's gibberish gained a life of its own with the creation of a Unix lex filter capable of converting standard English to "chefspeak" in 1992. The filter quickly became a staple of hacker culture and eventually spread to the mainstream with "Swedish Chef" translators on several websites; there is a popular add-on available for Mozilla Firefox called "Bork Bork Bork!", which allows the selective "translation" of text from web pages of the user's choice. In 2003 Opera Software published a special "Bork" version of its internet browser which turned the MSN website into "Swedish." Google offers "Bork, bork, bork" as one among its choices for user interface language and Meebo offers "Bork!" as one of its language preferences. There also appeared a plethora of USENET newsgroups starting with "alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork," after which the repeated ending degraded into groups like "alt.ensign-wesley.die.die.die" and "alt.fan.tonya-harding.whack.whack.whack." In addition, the popular MMORPG Guild Wars has a "Bork! Bork! Bork!" language option.

Read more at Wikipedia.org