5 Other Nobel Prize Controversies That Caused a Ruckus

The Swedish Academy took a daring step this year in awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature to Bob Dylan, and not just because he’s the only Nobel Laureate to write about a one-eyed midget that likes to drink milk (besides Samuel Beckett, probably). While some have praised the decision to reward the most iconic songwriter of his generation as inclusive, others believe rewarding lyrics is a slight to traditional writers--though they’re probably just mad at his indirect responsibility for The Wallflowers.

Bob Dylan is just the most recent example of the Nobel committee’s long history of controversial and outside-the-box selections. Here are some of the most infamous moments in the 115-year history of the prize:      

Fred Durst: Literature, 2008

Some forget that Bob Dylan is not the first titan of American music to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Swedish Academy awarded the Limp Bizkit frontman for “having created new poetic expressions in Nu Metal songwriting which capture the defiant voice of suburban boyhood in the late 1990s."

While few can deny the lyrical inventiveness of "Nookie" and "Break Stuff," the choice of Durst for the world's top literary honor nonetheless came as a surprise to many and was widely viewed as an expansion in the Academy's notions of art.

"Thanks largely to pioneers like Durst, the distinctions between high and low art are collapsing," said cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, at the time. "Who else but Fred Durst could title an album something so inventively regressive and blithely misogynist as Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water?"

George A. Olah: Chemistry, 1994

In what is easily the most controversial award in its history, the Nobel Committee gave George A. Olah the 1994 Prize for Chemistry for his contributions to carbocitation chemistry. The decision was met with unanimous worldwide outrage, as many felt Jens C. Skou’s discovery of sodium potassium-stimulated adenosine trophosphatase was more deserving.

The Danish medical doctor’s snubbing dominated the media airwaves for the next several weeks, with Rush Limbaugh notably leading a pressure campaign against the Nobel Committee.

"These fat cats in the Swedish Academy expect us to believe that Olah's discovery of protonated methane is as significant as Skou's identification of the most important of the ion-transporting enzymes?" said Limbaugh in a radio broadcast. "What a joke! It’s political correctness run amok!"

The Nobel Committee would eventually capitulate to Limbaugh and finally award Skou three years later.

Henry Kissinger: Peace, 1973

The Nobel Committee drew harsh criticism for awarding the Peace Prize to the U.S. Secretary of State, especially when Kissinger paused in the middle of his acceptance speech to order a bombing raid on the Cambodian village of Kampong Cham.

“All of a sudden his wristwatch alarm goes off, so Kissinger just stops mid-sentence and tells his aid, 'Tell them to drop the napalm now,’” recalled historian Irwin Abrams. “Not only did it go against the spirit of the award, it was rude!”

Besides interrupting himself, Henry Kissinger spent most of his speech promising to spend the prize money to buy more bombs, “Because they’re expensive and I won’t stop until they’re all dead!”

Albert Einstein: Physics, 1921

While his achievements in theoretical physics are beyond dispute, Einstein attracted controversy and public scrutiny for his conduct at various Nobel Prize ceremonies.

During the 1938 awards, Einstein interrupted Enrico Fermi’s acceptance speech by grabbing the microphone. Visibly drunk, he declared, “Yo, Enrico, I’m really happy for you and Imma let you finish, but Ernest Lawrence the greatest nuclear physicist of all-time!”

Other highly publicized outbursts by Einstein include his fist-fight with Niels Bohr at the 1924 ceremony and his 1934 off-the-cuff denunciation that Victor Francis Hess “doesn’t care about black holes.”        

Jenny McCarthy: Medicine, 2011

“Yeah...I don’t know what we were thinking,” said Nobel Committee Chairman Gunnar Jagland just moments after the famous anti-vaccination activist and former Playboy model accepted her prize. “We made a bad call, guys.”

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NED PETRIE (@NedPetrie) is a Toronto-based writer, actor, and 6-time Canadian Comedy Award nominee. He’s the co-creator of the animated series Erik The Pillager (Adult Swim Canada) and Murder House (Mondo Media). Ned is also a regular contributor to The Beaverton and CBC Comedy. If you follow him on Twitter, you get a Million Dollars!