The Stand Comedy Club Podcast · The Stand

Thor Stenhaug

·1 hr 17 min·4 clips

Thor says that at age 12 he spent three days trying to teach a dog to speak.

The Stand Comedy Club Podcast welcomes Thor Stenner with the usual missing-host chaos already in the room. Nice. The conversation starts with a Gaelic greeting and quickly drifts into language learning. Thor says he was learning Gaelic on Duolingo for about three months and found it useful for vocabulary, but not especially useful for building proper sentences. He links that to a wider sense of language identity. In Norway, he says, language has long felt politically and culturally important, especially with the history of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the way English keeps entering Norwegian. He likes seeing Irish language revival because it feels like that same protective instinct. The hosts keep things loose and the chat keeps sliding sideways. Someone brings up sheep near a road. Then the question becomes whether sheep are actually frightening at all. They probably are not, unless they have lambs or horns. That opens the door to a bigger joke about what is more alarming in an alleyway. A Glaswegian guy in a hoodie. Or a cow. The cow wins the absurdity test, because it is so unexpected that it breaks your sense of what belongs there. The fear gets compared to the old bear-versus-man question. Thor keeps it practical and funny rather than grand. A cow walking slowly is one thing. A cow running is another. The episode also circles back to a real memory from his childhood outside Bergen. He remembers a road queue caused by an escaped cow, with everyone acting as if the cow was another car on the road. That is the kind of detail the show likes best: ordinary life, then one out-of-place animal, then the whole town has to adapt. The conversation stays in that lane of small, comic escalation. People correct one another on sheep, rams, and horns. They laugh at the idea that a cow in an alleyway might somehow change the whole mood. Near the end the topic shifts again, this time to a tea cake and holiday dip. Thor explains how he eats the biscuit first and saves the marshmallow bit for last. He says it is something you do by yourself, not with friends. That lands because it is so specific and so casually strange. The hosts immediately know it is the kind of habit that only makes sense once somebody has actually said it out loud. The ending keeps the same easy backstage rhythm. Thanks are exchanged. People say they will stay in touch. Someone promises to send holiday nice. It finishes with the relaxed afterglow of comics chatting off the cuff and letting the funny details do the work.

As heard by us

A loose, funny chat that turns language and animals into riffs.

This episode leans on Thor's easy, digressive chat with the hosts, drifting from Gaelic and language identity to the odd satisfaction of trying to learn something difficult on Duolingo.

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Why you'd press play

You want a comic hang that starts with Gaelic and ends with marshmallow politics.

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