The Great Scandinavian Frolic of the Nobel Prize usually enlivens the fall season.

* The Great Scandinavian Frolic of the Nobel Prize usually enlivens the fall season. This year's Frolic is particularly rich in human comedy. Wangari Maathai, a lady from Kenya, wins the Peace Prize for starting a movement that is both green and feminist, getting women to plant 30 million trees in her country. Maathai and other women once stripped naked in downtown Nairobi as a protest. She also thinks that AIDS is a biological weapon developed in the West to kill black people. Oh, and she was best friends with Bella Abzug. "We have added a new dimension to the concept of peace," says the fellow handing out the swollen check. Yessir, but Maathai is a boringly sober citizen compared with Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the Literature Prize. She's Austrian, also a feminist, and was a Communist from 1974 to 1991. What a wonderful time span for membership! Her subject, according to one enthused report, is sex, "raw, depraved, sadomasochistic." What the Frolic committee particularly likes is the way she has abandoned "traditional dialogue for a kind of polyphonic monologues." She suffers, she tells us, from "social phobia." There isn't a satirist alive who could invent any of this.