The Swedish Academy can't be wholly without a sense of humor, having given Al Gore a Nobel Prize for his slide show "An Inconvenient Truth," from which he has gone on to urge the nation's youths to engage in civil disobedience to block power plant construction. Or maybe overthrow the government. Something.

So we were looking for the punch line when The Associated Press asked Horace Engdahl, the Academy's permanent secretary, why so few Americans and so many Europeans, leavened by the occasional obscure Third World author, win the Nobel prize for literature.

We would have thought the answer was simple: The judges are Europeans. This is the same landmass that gave us Russian ice-skating judges. And there was the famous case in 1974 when Saul Bellow, Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov were passed over in favor of two Swedish authors, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, who — and surely this was simple coincidence — happened to be Nobel prize jurors themselves.

If you're like me, a well-thumbed copy of Johnson's "Har Har du Ditt Liv!" is always by your bedside.

No, the reason, according to Engdahl, is a little more complex than that. We're clods. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. The ignorance is restraining."

Moreover, our writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own culture," rather than, say, immersing themselves in the culture of urban Swedish goatherders.

AP reporters Malin Rising and Hillel Italie admirably resisted the temptation to apply an atomic wedgie to Engdahl but did note acidly in their account of the interview, "The academy often picks obscure writers and hardly ever selects best-selling authors," reflecting the European intellectual's prejudice that if people like something, it can't be any good. "It regularly faces accusations of snobbery, political bias and poor taste."

Last year's winner was Britain's Doris Lessing, whom Americans have heard of and even read. The year before that was Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, who, admittedly, serves a somewhat esoteric audience.

But we wonder if he would have gotten the prize if the Academy had known he teaches at Columbia University in New York. In 2005, it was Harold Pinter, ditto to Lessing.

In 2004, it was Elfriede Jelinek, described as an Austrian feminist playwright and novelist. Her selection caused one juror to resign in protest. The jury said that her works "with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."

I think we can all agree that can never be revealed too much or too often. To avoid absurdity and subjugation, pick up a copy of her "Wir Sind Lockvogel Baby!"

If Engdahl needs proof of our refined literary sensibilities, he need only check the current New York Times list of fiction- best sellers. There is the top selling "Dark Curse," the 19th in Christine Feehan's Dark novel series; "Devil Bones" (the 11th Temperance Brenna mystery) at No. 4; "The Gypsy Morph,"(something like the 22nd book in Terry Brooks' Shannara series) at No. 7; "Silks" (something like Dick Francis' 41st novel) at No. 8; and at 11th, "The Bourne Sanction," one of those novels that just keeps coming even though the original author has been dead seven years.

Eat your effete Swedish heart out, Horace. As for me, I have to resume penning my magisterial opus and sure Nobel prize winner, "Har Har du Lockvogel Baby!" Look for it at better bookstores everywhere.

— Dale McFeatters writes for Scripps Howard News Service.