Per Inge Torkelsen

Who is Per Inge Torkelsen?

Per Inge Torkelsen is a Norwegian comic, author, radio personality, and self declared clown. He is known for the Norwegian expression "Gi ungdommen en flaske brennevin før idretten tar dem". In 2007 he was elected into the city council in Stavanger for the Liberal Party of Norway. Between 2003 and 2007 he was the leader of the Eiganes og Våland borough council. He is listed as a clown in the telephone book.

Born in Stavanger, Torkelsen is a trained teacher of English, but is most well known as a comedian. He has worked as a postman, scrap dealer, illusionist, and was the Norwegian champion of magic. He has held talks for companies and has been involved in debates. He has also been the program leader on children's television in Norway and for a period played a permanent role in the long-running NRK program Norge Rundt. Starting in 1980, he was a member of the municipality council in his home city of Stavanger. Today he is the leader of the Eiganes og Våland city district council for the Liberal Party of Norway.

He was only 15 years old when he was first noticed in the national media. He fooled all of Norway's archaeologists by placing five Chinese coins from the 10th century in an excavation field in Stavanger. In the end of the 1960s, Stavanger prison and some other buildings in the market area of Stavanger were torn down, and at the same time archaeologists were excavating. Stavanger museum sent out press releases about the find, and soon the discovery was known around the world. But after some time, Torkelsen contacted regional newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad in order to tell the truth about the coins. Oddmund Møllerop, the director of the Stavanger archaeological museum at the time, has said that Torkelsen had planted the coins in the perfect spot. The coins happened to be planted in a location where the age of the land that the archaeologists were excavating was precisely the same age as the coins. Had the coins been placed anywhere else in the excavation site, the archaeologists would have been able to tell that they were planted there.