The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  But why did the cartoons shake the world? Nowhere in the Koran, for example, does it prohibit depicting the Prophet. Yes, supplemental religious texts do ban the practice to discourage idolatry, but still, Muslim culture is full of pictures of Mohammad, from thirteenth-century Persian manuscripts to colorful postcards sold today in the markets of Tehran and Istanbul.10 In 2000, the chairman of the Fiqh Council of North America, a Muslim association that interprets Islamic law, pronounced the 60-year-old image of Mohammad inside the U.S. Supreme Court building perfectly fine.

  The firestorm surprised Refn, since he hadn’t even drawn the Prophet. He wasn’t the only one. Of the twelve cartoons published by the newspaper, two didn’t portray Mohammad at all, and in three others the depictions are ambiguous at best. Nor did most of the cartoons make fun of Islam. Two of them knocked the children’s book author who started the whole mess, suggesting the whole thing was a PR stunt. In a third, the cartoonist satirized himself, scribbling away at a Mohammad stick figure with his blinds drawn and nervous sweat pouring down his brow. And then there’s the cartoon that’s unintelligible. In a Harper’s Magazine critique, American cartoonist Art Spiegelman said as best he could tell, it’s of five Pac-Men eating stars and crescents.11 (Despite the cartoons’ taboo nature—Klausen’s publisher refused to include them in The Cartoons that Shook the World, even though the book was all about them—they’re easy to find online.)

  Part of the problem was that in the parts of the world most incensed over the images, many people never saw the cartoons, just heard bad things about them. A 2006 Pew Research Center survey of thirteen countries around the world found that a staggering 80 percent of respondents had heard about them. But when a Palestinian research organization drilled down into those numbers, it found that while 99.7 percent of Palestinians were aware of the cartoons, only 31 percent had seen them.12

  And those around the world who did see the cartoons weren’t all that likely to understand them. How could a Syrian reader comprehend Refn’s drawing of a young boy in an obscure soccer uniform? Or how could anyone, for that matter, figure out what those gobbling Pac-Men meant? And since Refn and most of the other cartoonists followed the Danish police’s recommendation not to talk to the press, the artists never had a chance to explain the context of their work.

  And comedy, as we learned in Japan, depends on context. Creating humor is a delicate operation built on layers of shared knowledge, assumptions, and innuendo. Remove one piece, and it all falls apart. Maybe a key part of a joke’s set-up is forgotten; maybe the delivery is botched, or the wrong tone is used. Whatever the reason, it’s easier to fail with humor than succeed. As Pete is demonstrating in HuRL, anything can be made more or less funny depending on what information is provided. In a study he conducted with Caleb Warren and University of Colorado professor Lawrence Williams, he found that a simple violation—having your fly down—was judged by participants in all sorts of different ways depending on the additional information provided. One version of the story was deemed boring (a stranger having his fly down while home alone), a second was funny (a friend having his fly down when talking to a co-worker), and a third was downright upsetting (the study participant having his or her fly down during a big job interview).13

  It used to be that comedic failures weren’t a big deal. Comedy used to be finite and intimate. Folks told jokes to their friends and neighbors, a comedian’s routine would reach only as far as the back row of the club, newspaper cartoons would disappear forever once the next issue of the paper hit the stands. Mistakes at this level were small-time, short-lived, contained. But now, thanks to the internet, viral video, and global media conglomerates, comedy can go international with ease. And so when a joke fails, it can fail big.

  Refn nods knowingly. He’s sick of telling his story, of explaining how his cartoon failed. “If you make a joke and have to explain it, it is not funny,” he says flatly. If the cartoonist could do it all again, he would do it differently. “If I had known a billion people would see this,” he says with a smile, “I would have made a better drawing.”

  Refn believes his cartoon bombed. Is he right? Were the Mohammad cartoons a failure—or were they a raging success? It all depends on how you define “failure,” and in comedy that’s not easy. While a joke has only one shot at being funny, it can fail in one of two ways—it can be too benign, and therefore boring, or it can be too much of a violation, and therefore offensive. But how do you determine whether a joke bores or offends?

  Take what seems the most obvious indicator of failed humor: if a joke bombs, people don’t laugh at it. But as we discovered in Tanzania, laughter and humor don’t always go hand in hand. In 2009, an applied linguist at Washington State University named Nancy Bell subjected nearly 200 people to the blandest, most inoffensive joke she could come up with: “What did the big chimney say to the little chimney? Nothing. Chimneys can’t talk.” She found that nearly 40 percent of people laughed at the joke, even though it’s hard to imagine that all those people found it funny. It seems the social obligation of the joke, the need for people to play the accepted roles of joke teller and joke listener, was too strong for people to groan about it.

  Here’s another problem with trying to figure out whether a given joke bombed: even successful attempts to be funny can sometimes have dire consequences. Such is the strange case of Alex Mitchell. On March 24, 1975, the 50-year-old British bricklayer found an episode of the sketch-comedy show The Goodies so hilarious that he laughed for 25 minutes straight, until he slumped dead onto his sofa, his heart having given out from the strain. His widow took the development with a characteristically British stiff upper lip. She sent The Goodies a thank-you note for making her husband’s final earthly moments so entertaining.

  Now let’s take the Mohammad cartoons. At first glance, they seem to fail according to both of Pete’s criteria. Everyone agrees that the images in question insulted many, many people. At the same time, it’s hard to find anyone who thinks the cartoons were funny. But then again, were these images ever meant to be funny? When Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons, the newspaper framed them in a serious, almost confrontational manner. According to an essay that accompanied the images penned by Flemming Rose, the editor who’d commissioned them, the effort was all about freedom of speech and self-censorship.

  It’s hard to know for sure what Jyllands-Posten meant by publishing the cartoons. For a paper that’s all about free speech, no one from the operation is eager to talk to us. Neither the paper’s editor in chief nor its press liaison responded to repeated e-mails and phone messages. Before we left for Denmark, I’d been able to reach Rose, the guy who’d collected the cartoons, but he was less than thrilled by the prospect of meeting with us. “I’ve tried to move on,” he told me.

  Anders Jerichow, head of the Danish writers union, is less reluctant to talk. He tells us to meet him at the Copenhagen offices of his employer—Politiken, the country’s second-biggest newspaper and Jyllands-Posten’s chief rival. The offices also house the Copenhagen branch of Jyllands-Posten. The same company owns the two competing periodicals.

  The offices stand at one corner of Copenhagen’s sprawling City Hall Square. Since Pete is a few minutes behind me, I wait out front and pass the time by taking photos. I snap shots of neon advertising sprouting from redbrick buildings, yellow double-decker buses cruising by, the monumental city hall that stands at one end of the plaza, the electronic security gates and surveillance cameras installed in front of the newspaper building. An armed security guard is soon at my side, asking what I am doing.

  It’s a good question. What am I doing standing out here in full public view, photographing the security measures of an organization besieged by death threats? Clearly, I am either a terrorist or an idiot. I stammer out an apologetic explanation, offering to delete the offending photo from my camera. When he’s satisfied, he thanks me for understanding. “Normally we’d have to take you to the police station for questioning,” he says befor
e returning to his post, “but I’ll let this go.”

  Pete shows up. “Did I miss anything?” he asks.

  Soon Jerichow arrives to escort us in. “To get to my office, I have to use my clearance card five times,” he tells us as, one at a time, we step into a closet-like body scanner, sliding glass doors locking us into place as unseen mechanisms scrutinize us for devious devices. It’s been this way ever since Jyllands-Posten began getting targeted with murder threats and assassination plots. Since the two papers share the same building, everyone at Politiken lives with the same sort of security lockdown, even though the publication had nothing to do with the cartoons.

  Jerichow, a silver-haired guy in a gray sweater, with the look of a kindly professor, has the dubious distinction of being the first to see the problems coming. He tells us this over a lunch of lasagna and pickled herring in the sleek cafeteria the two newspapers share, with abstract artwork on the walls and trendy light fixtures dangling from the ceiling. During a radio interview the day Jyllands-Posten published the cartoons, Jerichow predicted the issue might spiral into an international controversy. He knew what he was talking about. He’s written, edited, or contributed to nearly two dozen books on human rights and international relations in the Middle East.

  From his perspective, Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons were little more than a publicity stunt. “To me it had the smell of childish manifestation,” he tells us. “It had the smell of someone trying to show how big he was by being willing to use forbidden words.”

  Still, insists Jerichow, the paper can’t bear full blame for what happened. “Just as we can call on cartoonists and editors to accept a certain responsibility, you can call on readers to show a responsibility in how they react to it and abstain from violence,” he says. In Denmark, Muslims by and large demonstrated that responsibility. Only a small fraction of the country’s 200,000-plus Muslims expressed public displeasure at the cartoons, and they did so through petitions and peaceful protests.

  The reaction was far different in places such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. Jerichow, for one, believes there were political reasons behind it. For four months after they were published, there was little outcry over the cartoons. Only after diplomatic channels collapsed did the Middle East erupt. And in Syria, was it really possible that thousands were able to organize, publicize, and pull off a demonstration that culminated in the razing of the Danish embassy without attracting the attention of the country’s pervasive intelligence operations?

  In Jerichow’s opinion, politicians and insurgents in Syria and several other Middle Eastern countries encouraged the anti-Danish protests for their own gain. It was a way to distract people from their own internal problems, a way to exert their authority on an international stage, a way to prove that they were the true defenders of Islam.

  It helped that picking on Denmark was like bullying the smallest kid on the playground, says Jerichow: “Denmark is a small country; it has no international weight, no profile in the Middle East. Denmark is not important to them, but it is a wonderful tool for them.”

  And in the middle of it all lay a bunch of cartoons that lots of people hadn’t seen and those who did likely didn’t completely understand? All the better.

  Maybe, then, the cartoons weren’t a failure after all. Maybe the folks who came up with the assignment knew what they were doing all along: stoking controversy for publicity purposes. Just as those in power half a world away were more than happy to play along for political gain. They wanted the cartoons’ humor to fail—and they succeeded beyond all expectations.

  The two serious-looking men with weather-beaten faces and translucent transmitters in their ears are expecting us. “Come,” they demand, taking us around the back of a building where their colleagues, a couple of Danish police officers, are waiting. “We have to check your passports and do a quick frisk,” one of them says. A bomb-sniffing dog noses through our bags, slobber flying. “I am mentally prepared for this,” Pete quips, stepping forward and raising his arms in anticipation of a pat down. The guy doesn’t crack a smile.

  We’re in Aarhus, Denmark’s second-largest city, located halfway up Jutland, the long, curving peninsula that comprises the western half of the country. We’d spent the morning driving here from Copenhagen, through muddy, rolling farmland, and hopscotching from one island to the next via thin suspension bridges arcing over the Baltic Sea. An endless, dreary cloud cover blotted out the sky, as it had since the moment we arrived in Denmark. We’ve taken to coming up with names for the different flavors of gray overhead: “dawn gray,” “midday gray,” “dusk gray,” “gravy gray,” “grey gray,” “soul-crushing gray.”

  We’re not that surprised by the hard, serious men who’ve greeted us at our destination in Aarhus, a single-level, middle-class bungalow in the city’s suburban outskirts. After all, we’re here to meet with Kurt Westergaard, the most famous and reviled of the twelve Mohammad cartoonists. He’s someone many people would like to see dead.

  Of the Mohammad cartoons published by Jyllands-Posten, Westergaard’s is the most iconic, not to mention the most incendiary. For the assignment, he drew a bushy-browed, bearded Mohammad wearing a sizzling bomb for a turban. That likely would have been enough to make him a target, but Westergaard, who was on staff at Jyllands-Posten, made matters worse by continuing to talk to the press when the other cartoonists decided to keep mum, stirring up more trouble even as threats to his life—and those of others—began to mount.

  In Copenhagen, Refn had turned pensive when we’d asked about Westergaard. “He is not very popular with our group of people, and he’s forced to live in a fortress. I almost feel sorry for him.”

  When Westergaard’s security detail escorts us to the cartoonist’s front door, we expect to come face-to-face with some media-hungry, xenophobic lunatic. Instead, we’re met by Santa Claus dressed for a leather convention.

  “Please excuse my pets,” says a smiling, jovial Westergaard, sporting a shaggy white beard, black leather vest, studded belt, and red pants. He’s referring to the officers of PET, Denmark’s intelligence service, the ones who’d patted us down and watch over him, day and night, on the government’s dime. “There are two things they are happy about,” he tells us. “One, that I am not a winter swimmer, and two, that I am not a nudist.” He ushers us into his dining room, where he’s prepared a spread of coffee, tea, and baked goods. “You should try my wife’s beer cake,” he says. “It is the PET’s favorite.”

  Westergaard doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to inspire rage all over the world. Since he retired from Jyllands-Posten a couple of years ago, he’s spent his days painting fantastical watercolors of mermaids and trolls and fishermen on toadstools. But when we wander about his house, the drawings that line his walls from his newspaper days tell a different story. Naked women getting ravaged. A concentration-camp inmate with barbed wire threaded through his ears. Jesus Christ in a business suit coming down off the cross, leaving behind a sign reading “Back on Sunday.”

  For Westergaard, incendiary imagery was all in a day’s work at Jyllands-Posten. It didn’t matter whether Westergaard, who considers himself socially liberal, agreed or not with a particular newspaper assignment. “I have to be loyal to the author of the story, to the editor, even if it’s not my opinion,” he says.

  That’s why, when he heard about the Mohammad assignment, he didn’t hesitate. For him, it wasn’t about drawing something funny; it was about making his point as evocatively as possible. He claims he wanted to evoke how Muslim terrorists have essentially taken Islam hostage; that’s why he stuck the bomb in Mohammad’s turban. He says he can’t imagine anyone interpreting his cartoon any other way—even though millions of outraged Muslims all over the world clearly had no problem doing so.

  “Is there anything you wouldn’t draw?” asks Pete, scrutinizing the evocative images on the walls.

  “No,” says Westergaard, “but if you satirize, there must be a reason. Satire is a way in which you c
an vent frustrations in ways that can be very vicious and very accurate.”

  Westergaard has a point. One of the most compelling explanations for the existence of sick jokes, comedy that seems designed to insult wide swaths of people, is that as despicable as they may be, they’re a way for folks to deal with forbidden frustrations and hang-ups. A society-wide version of Freud’s idea that jokes are our personal safety valve.

  No one was better at deconstructing these dirty one-liners to expose society’s deepest, darkest secrets than Alan Dundes, a Berkeley folklore professor who had two passions in life: elevating jokes to a serious discipline and courting controversy. He received death threats from football fans over a seminar he gave on the homoerotic undertones of the NFL called “Into the End Zone, Trying to Get a Touchdown.” When his cataloguing of jokes about Auschwitz victims for a 1983 issue of Western Folklore triggered an uproar, he set to work penning a follow-up, “More on Auschwitz Jokes.”

  “We are not reporting these jokes because we think they are amusing or funny,” wrote Dundes. “We are reporting them because we believe it is important to document all aspects of the human experience, even those aspects which most might agree reflect the darker side of humanity.” His efforts to document the human experience, dark side and all, led to the creation of the Folklore Archive at the University of California, Berkeley, a small, cluttered room in an out-of-the-way building that I spent a day exploring on a trip to San Francisco, rifling through filing cabinets filled with thousands of jokes and witticisms and superstitions and folktales and urban legends and myriad other examples of verbal folklore collected by Dundes and his students. There are American jokes about the French (“Why do the French smell? So blind people can hate them, too”) and French jokes about Americans (“What’s the difference between yogurt and Americans? Yogurt has culture”) and everything else in between.