Nobel Peace Prize

The Nobel Peace Prize is decided in the Parliament building in Oslo, Norway.

“This is a natural, which I will fondly wear. Inside my undershirt, of course, as I don't believe in corny, staged media 'theater.'”

~ Barack Obama

The Nobel Peace Prize (Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish: Nobels fredspris) is a prize created by Alfred "Fredspris" Nobel. Fred was the original guilt-stricken white man, whose company created not only armaments and dynamite but also windfall profits. He imagined the Nobel Prize would be a way to "give back to society" all the grandstanding, controversy, and backbiting that he took from society by simply and quietly manufacturing the products they needed in order to kill one another.

Nobel "Laurantuno" U. Thant displays the discreet gold chain attached to the prize medal that has rewarded so much work against violence.

Since 1901, it has been awarded annually to those who have "done the most or the best work for...the holding and promotion of tedious peace congresses, parleys, negotiations, treaty work sessions, and other paper-pushing." However, in years in which the globe is tied up in World War, the Nobel Prize is tactfully not awarded, in order to avoid complete ridicule, as there is no Nobel Hypocrisy Prize.

The recipient is selected by a 5-member committee appointed by the Parliament of Norway, as though it knew anything apart from snow and benefits payments. Since 1990, the prize is awarded on 10 December in Oslo City Hall each year. The recipient, referred to as the Laurantuno, is notified by telephone and scrambles to find convenient flights to Norway and, in some cases, nervously tries to find it on a map.

The Laurantuno gets a garish medal but usually never wears it anywhere. He also gets a diploma, just in case he doesn't already have one, and a cash prize. Due to its political nature, the Prize is highly controversial, and each Laurantuno, after learning who some of the others were, rushes to try to complete some other achievement he can be known for instead. Usually, suicide fills the bill.

The Nobel Peace Prize illustrates the high degree to which commemorating individual activists and groups has turned the human race away from the pursuit of war.

List of prize-winners

The following tables list Nobel Prize Laurantunos for whom there is an Uncyclopedia article. The tables divide the Laurantunos into the various eras.

Pre-war era

The first Nobel Peace Prizes were nobel attempts to end war forever, which continued until it became obvious that this would require a war — to-wit, a war to end all wars.

Year	Individual or Organization	Reason
1902	Élie Ducommun (Switzerland) and Charles Albert Gobat (Candyland)	Helped get rid of the Permanent International Peace Bureau.
1903	William Randel Cremer (UK) and Frédéric Passy	Established the first organisation for international communication, famous for earning its members Peace Prizes relatively easily.
1904	Institute of International Law	According to the Nobel Prize Committee, "where there is law, there is peace."
1905	Bertha Felicitas Sophie Freifrau von Suttner (Austria-Hungary)	Accomplished in the category of having a long name.
1906	Theodore Roosevelt	U.S. President, liked Bull Moose and being a "rough rider." Disliked Malaria.
1907	Ernesto Teodoro Moneta (Italy)	Jumped on the "making a 'Peace Group'" bandwagon.
	Louis Renault	Professor emeritus of rabbits.
1908	Fredrik Bajer (Denmark)	An activist for an organisation that would receive a Peace Prize two years later.
1909	Auguste Beernaert (Belgium)	For being a UN activist long before UN was founded and made it fashionable.
	Paul-Henri-Benjamin d'Estournelles de Constant (France)	The same reason as above, but also the fact that he had a very long French name.
1910	Permanent International Peace Bureau	For being the world's oldest federation having the word "peace" in its name.
1912	Elvis Root	Established the "cat" rule in Tic-Tac-Toe, thereby eliminating all wars caused by its former absence.
1913	Henry the Fontaine (Belgium)	Closed the Permanent International Peace Bureau (temporarily).

Inter-war era

The war to end all wars was fought, everyone was all in, and a good time was had by all. A great time. It was a Great War. And the Nobel Peace Prizes just kept on coming.

Year	Individual or Organization	Reason
1914-1916		No prize awarded, world at war, wouldn't look right.
1917	International Committee of the Red Cross	For the word "international" in the title of the organisation.
1918		No prize awarded, world not at war, but it was simply easier not going to the bother during three of the last four years.
1919	Woodrow Wilson	U.S. President, founder of the League of Nations and writer of a Constitution for his marriage that his wife signed under only slight duress. Award given to test the theory that a U.S. President could be vain or corrupt enough to change U.S. foreign policy to win himself an award.
1920	Léon Bourgeois	For becoming the spiritual father of the League of Nations, founded that year but already failing.
1921	Hjalmar Brenting	Worked at the said League of Nations and accumulated the largest amount of accrued vacation leave.
	Christian Lange	For awarding all the previous Nobel Peace Prizes.
1922	Fridtjof Nansen (Norway)	The first peace activist to take some interest in Soviet Russia.
1923-1924		No prize awarded, no one came to mind; there were probably several deserving people.

Post-war era

Surprising no one more than the Nobel Prize Bureau, another war was required to end some of the problems caused by the war to end all wars. The only way to handle this dilemma was to bring on the Roman Numerals, and declare the new one World War II.

Year	Individual or Organization	Reason
1939-1943		No prize awarded, world at war again, wouldn't look right.
1944	Red Cross	Providing support for victims of demon possession. Known as "Red Crescent" in Arabia so as to have nothing to do with crosses, or peace.
1947	Friends Service Council	Providing a way for one person to "friend" another long before Facebook was invented.
1948	Mahatma Gandhi	As the Laurantuno was unavailable, it was accepted for him posthumously by Nathuram Godse.
1950	Ralph Bunche	Became an African American at the United Nations long before this was thought possible.
1954	The United Nations High Commission on Refugees	Nothing says it better than international activists giving awards and prize money to other international activists.
1955-1956		No prize awarded, no excuse such as world at war, only Dwight Eisenhower.
1957	Lester Pearson	Got the Union Jack off the flag of Canada, replaced by something abstract and red.
1961	Dag Hammarskjöld	Proved that the United Nations could have more than one Secretary-General, and also one who could die in office.
1962	Linus Pauling	Awarded by mistake, as the Nobel committee got him confused with the character from the Snoopy comic strip.
1963	The Red Cross, again	Because everyone approved, the last two times.
1964	Martin Luther King, Jr.	So as not to offend anyone, let's just say, "He was nice."
1965	UNICEF	This international children's campaign sought to give trick-or-treaters something new to do at Halloween that would not lead to tooth decay.

Cold War era

By now, the Military-Industrial Complex and the Peace Prize Industry were firmly entrenched and both in pursuit of the highest goal: to avoid killing the job. Both realized that the best way to both wage war and to conduct anti-war ceremonies would be if all subsequent wars were simply called something else.

Year	Individual or Organization	Reason
1966-1967		No prize awarded. World engaged in Indo-Chinese "conflict," on the heels of Korean "police action." Awards committee turned on, tuned in, dropped out.
1968	René Cassin	The first Frenchman to defy all the trite French stereotypes.
1969	Jack Wright	Bowled them over at Woodstock, though he could not get them to put their clothes back on.
1973	Henry Kissinger	His statement that "Peace is at Hant" made him a natural Laurantino, though his promised cease-fire in Vietnam was rendered moot by the American withdrawal.
1975	Andrei Sakharov	Father of the hydrogen bomb, although Richard Feynman published not only on that but on picking locks and picking up waitresses at casinos in Las Vegas.
1979	Mother Teresa	Although her work consisted of charity and not peace-keeping, the Nobel Prize Committee decided that five female winners in 78 years was not enough.
1990	Mikhail Gorbachev	For ending the Cold War, by running his state into a brick wall.
1991	Norman Schwarzkopf	For taking U.S. troops out for "a short drive," encircling the Iraqi army, and ending the Kuwait war without firing a shot. (No prize? Oh well.)
1993	Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk	For replacing an oppressive apartheid régime with a merely oppressive régime.

A whole new era, unlike any other

All nations finally agreed to peace, when a new war was started by something that wasn't a nation at all. George W. Bush would refer to this as a whole new war, unlike any other. Like, the others all eventually ended.

Year	Individual or Organization	Reason
2001	United Nations	Declared the best hope for world peace despite an anecdotal missile attack on Manhattan and the Pentagon that was surely the fault of rogue airline pilots.
2002	Jimmy Carter	The former U.S. President's four-year "national malaise" in 1977-1981 obviously improved chances for world peace, especially by ushering in Ronald Reagan. An added plus was snubbing the current President, long before the opposition got the gumption to do so.
2005	U.N. Atomic Energy agency	(Shared with Mohamed El-Baradei) Promised perpetual careers going to places like Iran, being led between centrifuges, and being gotten to declare there was no way they were making bombs.
2007	Al Gore	The Nobel Prize Committee learned of the founding of Uncyclopedia two years earlier and decided that there was more of a future for it if it stopped trying to "play it straight."
	Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change	While panelists were in the same mood: Co-awarded the Panel for their seminal 1968 book about the environment, Global Cooling. (Republished verbatim in 2007 as Global Warming.)
2009	Barack Obama	For all the things he was about to do such as lowering the ocean levels and the Summer of Recovery (now forecast for 2017).
2012	European Union	For loaning more money to basket-case nations provided they raised taxes and increased regulation, rendering them all incapable of either waging war or saying no to Germany.
2013	Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons	For really wishing chemical weapons would go away, and probably meaning it.
2014	Malala Yousafzai	Took several bullets to advance the cause of Pakistani marksmanship.
	Kevin Blaser	Got cup-holders added to the tailgate of the Ford F-150 pick-up truck.

See also

• Nobel Prize
• Pulitzer Prize
• Poo Lit Surprise
• Booby prize
• Consolation Prize