The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  Dundes saw these jokes, especially the upsetting ones, as a code that he could use to understand humanity’s secrets. Take the dead-baby joke cycle of the 1960s and ’70s, when Americans shared quips like “What’s red and sits in a corner? A baby chewing razor blades.” According to Dundes, the zingers were born from a fusion of trauma over the Vietnam War, fear of newfangled conveniences, and modern-day ambivalences about pregnancy.14 Then there were the homophobic AIDS one-liners of the late 1980s, truly sick stuff like, “Do you know what ‘gay’ means? ‘Got AIDS yet?’ ” Dundes saw them as a way for the public to distance themselves from—as well as express their fears of—HIV and homosexuality.15 He spent so long mining mean-spirited comedy that he even claimed to have discovered the missing link between one cruel joke cycle and another. According to his research, Polish jokes had been in vogue for a while when somebody in the 1960s or ’70s came up with this one: “How many Polacks does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Five: One to hold the bulb and four to turn the chair.” That, according to Dundes, was the genesis of the lightbulb joke.16

  So what might Westergaard and the others’ Mohammad cartoons say about the secret side of Denmark? Maybe shattering taboos is a Danish pastime. Denmark, one of the least religious places in the world, was the first country to legalize pornography and, later, same-sex marriage. One of the country’s biggest cultural hits is Klovn, Danish for “Clown,” a popular TV comedy show that spawned a hit film that grafted sodomy, murder, and child endangerment onto a family canoe trip. Everywhere we go in the country, we run into racy posters advertising a show called Paradise Island, each featuring two bikini-clad, surgically enhanced women. Compared to past public images that have gone up around the country, these pictures are tame. Before the cartoon controversy broke in 2005, the big news in Denmark was how saboteurs had posted around Copenhagen explicit pictures of mayoral candidate Louise Frevert made up like a porn star. The photos weren’t doctored. Frevert made it no secret that she’d formerly starred in hardcore films using the name “Miss Lulu.”17

  So Westergaard was doing his duty as a Danish cartoonist: slaughtering a couple more sacred cows. In return, he’s nearly been slaughtered himself. He’s been the target of many of the death threats triggered by the cartoons, and in 2008, after authorities uncovered a murder plot targeting him, police began escorting him to and from work. The worst came on New Year’s Day 2010, in an incident that caused him to be placed under 24-hour security, likely for the rest of his life. Westergaard was home alone with a five-year-old girl, the daughter of an Albanian woman he’d taken under his wing, when a man smashed through his back door with an ax.

  Westergaard ran into his bathroom, which had been retrofitted as a panic room with a steel door and bulletproof glass on the windows. That left the little girl, who happened to have a broken leg, out in the open with the man with the ax. Fortunately, the man seemed to have no interest in harming the girl, and five minutes later, with Westergaard still hiding in the bathroom, police arrived and shot the intruder.

  “It was good that I did as I did,” says Westergaard, looking down at the dining room table and tracing one of his wrinkled hands along its grain. He’s 77 years old, he explains. If he’d tried to confront the intruder, the little girl would have witnessed his grisly demise, if not suffered a worse fate. “I was able to think very rationally, and do the right thing,” he says. It seems like he’s trying to convince himself, not us.

  Despite the threats and attacks and never-ending police surveillance, Westergaard has also received benefits from his notoriety. He’s found success selling copies of his Mohammad cartoon. Folks have even tried to buy the original. One $5,000 offer came from Martin J. McNally, a former American sailor who spent several decades in prison for hijacking a Boeing 727 in 1972. A more lucrative bid of about $150,000 came from a man in Texas, but at the last minute the guy backed out, explaining to Westergaard that the purchase might not be politically expedient for him, considering he worked at the Danish consulate.

  So for now, the cartoon that launched a jihad sits in a vault somewhere. For the right price, Westergaard might give it up. “As my very practical wife puts it,” he says with a grin, “ ‘first there was Mohammad the Prophet. Now there is Mohammad the profit.’ ”

  We think we’ve found the solution to the great Mohammad cartoon conundrum. It was one part mischievous cartoonists, one part attention-hungry journalists, one part manipulative politicians, and one part global misunderstanding. If there’s a victim in the whole ordeal, it’s likely poor little put-upon Denmark. Mystery solved, case closed.

  So we think. Until we meet Rune Larsen.

  Anders Jerichow at Politiken had recommended we talk to Larsen, a fellow reporter who lives in Aarhus. On our last morning in the city, we arrange to meet him at a café along the city’s bustling river walk. We arrive a bit early and take in the atmosphere. While Aarhus has long been a victim of the “stupidity joke” phenomenon, with its residents the butt of many a Danish joke, we find the city and the people here pleasant. We’ve grown accustomed to the Danish method of doing things, the way folks on the street hurry about in a determined yet cheerful manner, the way they all drive in a courteous fashion in diminutive German cars, the way their cities intermingle half-timbered buildings with modern edifices of translucent glass and soaring steel. No wonder Denmark is the birthplace of LEGO bricks. Everything fits together tidily.

  The LEGO façade comes tumbling down when Larsen shows up, late and out of breath. He doesn’t waste time with pleasantries. Stumbling over his words, the boyish-faced journalist is desperate to get his story out. We don’t know the whole story of the Mohammad cartoon controversy, he insists, eyes blazing as his iced coffee sits untouched.

  The joke at the heart of the matter wasn’t the cartoons, says Larsen; it was the joke the Danish government played on the world. It was a “caricature of diplomacy,” as he calls it, carried out by the prime minister and his colleagues in the months leading up to the violent protests. As Larsen claims in his Danish book The Caricature Crisis, the situation might never have gotten so out of hand if only Prime Minister Rasmussen had met with the Muslim ambassadors when they first approached him. But he refused.

  The decision does seem a bit odd. Everyone we’ve talked to in this country has welcomed us warmly, happily sitting us down for a chat over coffee and pastries. To do otherwise seems downright un-Danish. So why would the prime minister decline to do so with high-ranking ambassadors, especially if it had a potential to defuse the growing controversy?

  Larsen believes it’s because of Denmark’s growing undercurrent of xenophobia. Until the 1960s, the country remained homogenous and culturally insular. That changed when workers started emigrating here from Turkey, Pakistan, and the former Yugoslavia. While today Muslims account for only about 4 percent of the country’s population, for many it was still a major demographic shift, and not a welcome one. In 1997, a Jyllands-Posten survey found that nearly half of all Danes saw Muslims as a threat to Danish culture.18

  It was fertile ground for the rise of the Danish People’s Party, a far-right, anti-immigrant group that burst onto the scene in the 1990s. By 2002, it had become the third-largest party in the Danish parliament. The DPP, as it’s known, takes a hard stance on Islam. Its chairperson has claimed parts of the country are being “populated by people who are at a lower stage of civilization.”19 While just a fraction of Danes support the DPP and its rhetoric, it’s still large enough to exert influence in Denmark’s multiparty system.

  “The only reason Rasmussen could govern was that he had the People’s Party’s backing,” Larsen tells us while catching his breath. “So when this controversy came along, it was right up the alley of the People’s Party, and he couldn’t do anything else but ignore the ambassadors.”

  Larsen doesn’t come off as a loony conspiracy theorist. Because everyone we’ve met has been so friendly, it’s been easy for us to overlook the moments when folks haven’t been as o
pen-minded as we’d expected. Take Westergaard. For all his claims of being socially liberal, the cartoonist had grown circumspect when we’d brought up immigration. “These people came to this country, and we welcomed them,’ ” he tells us. “So people might ask, ‘Why can they not show a little gratitude and respect for our culture, of our way of making satire and criticizing people or gods?’ ”

  To talk with these so-called ungrateful Danish Muslims, we head to Bazaar Vest, a shopping center on the outskirts of Aarhus that caters to the large Muslim community in the area. The bunker-like mall is surrounded by dreary, monolithic apartment buildings, and through its front doors, Arabic music filters from a sound system. Around here, the ubiquitous Paradise Island billboards have been painted over so the women’s bikini-clad chests are cloaked in red paint.

  “This is what’s known as a ghetto in Denmark,” says Nihad Hodzic, political chairman for the Danish organization Muslims in Dialogue, who’s met us here for lunch. We’d expected Hodzic to be an older man, possibly an immigrant from Pakistan or Turkey. Instead, we’re soon eating shawarma with a light-skinned 21-year-old who’d blend right into the general Danish population if not for the neck beard curving under his chin. An Ethnic Bosnian, Hodzic admits he doesn’t fit into the narrow Danish stereotype of a backward Muslim. That’s his point: as demonstrated by the diversity of clothing shops and hair salons and restaurants here in the shopping center, Denmark’s Muslims are far from homogeneous. Bosnians, Serbs, Syrians, Somalis, Pakistanis, Turks . . . the list goes on. “Muslims in Denmark are actually very divided,” says Hodzic.

  The one thing they did agree on was that they didn’t like the Mohammad cartoons. While only a tiny fraction expressed public displeasure about them, a 2006 survey found that 81 percent of Danish Muslims found the images offensive. For most of them, the problem wasn’t Muslim prohibitions against depicting Mohammad, explains Hodzic. It was how cartoonists like Westergaard depicted him. “It would have had a totally different outcome if this had been a nice painting of Mohammad. I would not be angry,” he says. “But this was clearly something that was made to mock.” The image of Mohammad in the United States Supreme Court wasn’t divisive because it placed the Prophet in a place of honor. The cartoons, however, were about making fun of him.

  “If the point of these cartoons was to make people laugh, they failed,” concludes Hodzic. “If they were to mock people and offend people, they succeeded.”

  As we found in Tanzania, humor can be a powerful social adhesive, building bonds and increasing positive vibes. Even teasing, which gets a bad rap in classrooms and schoolyards, can be helpful in establishing group morals, testing relationships, and conveying provocative concepts. Just ask University of California, Berkeley, psychologist Dacher Keltner, who’s been studying teasing for years. In one experiment, Keltner and colleagues invited fraternity brothers and their pledges to their lab and had them tease one another. They found that while the frat brothers’ teasing of the pledges was at times quite pointed, everyone involved became better friends because of the playful back-and-forth. The more the target of the tease showed signs of embarrassment—blushing, averting his gaze, smiling nervously—the more the teasers ended up liking him.20

  But there’s a difference between lighthearted teasing, which gently guides behavior, and bullying, which imposes social distinctions. Take the concept of pranks, which most people consider fun and fairly harmless. In reality, pranks are all about social boundaries—not bridging them, but highlighting them. Moira Smith, an anthropology librarian at Indiana University, has spent several decades researching practical jokes. She’s tracked down historical pranks, such as the time in 1809 when Theodore Hook, a renowned British practical joker, sent thousands of fictitious letters to people all over London, convincing a small army—chimney sweeps, fishmongers, doctors, cake bakers, vicars, even the Duke of York and the Lord Mayor—to all appear at the same date and time at the Berners Street address of a baffled woman named Mrs. Tottenham.

  We laugh about such stories now, but think about all the consternation and confusion suffered by poor Mrs. Tottenham, said Smith when we spoke. “Pranks accentuate the difference between the jokers and those whom the joke is on,” she said. If you’re the victim of one, the joke is very much on you.

  And practical jokes aren’t the only type of humor that underscores differences between people. All too often jokes divide and conquer, separate the haves from the have-nots. Yes, humor creates in-groups, but also out-groups. Racist jokes, sexist jokes, homophobic jokes—they’re all about confirming stereotypes, and since they’re couched within the confines of comedy, they can be harsher and more insulting than would otherwise be allowed. After all, “it’s just a joke.”

  But for folks like Hodzic at Muslims in Dialogue, the Mohammad cartoons weren’t just a joke. They had a serious undertone, one possibly even more troubling than the Abu Ghraib photos: they hammered home that in Denmark and beyond, Muslims were still outsiders.

  There’s another problem with disparaging humor and practical jokes, one that helps explain why, once the cartoon crisis erupted, it was nearly impossible to resolve it. If you’re the butt of a joke, it’s difficult to respond without making the situation worse. The majority of Muslims offended by the Mohammad cartoons went on with their lives, quietly accepting the insult. It was the most conciliatory route to go, but also the most frustrating. By doing so, they signaled that their dignity is fair game. That’s why others refused to accept the slight sitting down, instead deciding to protest. But they ended up looking violent, uncivilized, and—most degrading of all—like they couldn’t take a joke.

  Maybe Charles Gruner, the last remaining superiority theorist, is right: maybe joking is a game, and in this particular contest, Muslims were bound to lose.

  It gets worse. Cartoons like these don’t just highlight social divisions; they have the potential to further the divide. Thomas Ford, a psychology professor at Western Carolina University, has developed the “prejudiced norm theory,” the idea that disparaging jokes can increase tolerance of discrimination. In one experiment, Ford asked undergraduate males to watch a variety of comedy videos. Then he gave them what they thought was a real assignment: cut funding for different student groups such as a study-abroad club, a Jewish organization, a black student union, and a women’s council. Not all that surprisingly, the students who’d previously scored high for hostile sexism were the most gung-ho about slashing the funding for the women’s group. But among all the men who rated high for hostile sexism, only those who’d first seen funny videos degrading women, such as a skit from the Man Show television program about sending annoying spouses to “wife school,” were willing to slight the women’s organization. The similarly sexist guys who had instead watched an innocuous clip, such as one of the E-Trade talking-baby commercials, were no more willing to downsize the women’s group than those who scored low for hostile sexism.21

  Ford explained that the limits of what society deems acceptable is like a rubber band. Derogatory jokes, by allowing people to goof around with taboo subjects in a non-critical manner, tend to stretch the band of acceptability into areas hitherto off limits—racism, homophobia, anti-Muslim sentiment. Once it’s stretched, it’s hard to go back.

  Perhaps Mohammad cartoons were so catastrophic because they threw the country’s racial divisions into stark relief, leaving those involved with little opportunity to find common ground. Plus they had the potential to make the divisions worse. At the time of the cartoons, Denmark was a powder keg of tense cultural relations. Maybe those little doodles of Mohammad were the spark that set it off. The aftershocks stretched far and wide in a post-9/11 world already anxious and fragmented.

  It’s hard to know for sure without a counterexample, another country where an incendiary Mohammad cartoon popped up that had the potential to trigger international controversy.

  We have one in mind.

  “Now I have to get used to a new language I don’t understand,
” cracks Pete as the GPS device on our dashboard announces that we’re entering a new country. We’re halfway across the Öresund Bridge, the five-mile span that connects the easternmost part of Denmark with the southern tip of Sweden. Powerful winds gusting off the Baltic send our rental car veering across the roadway. When we’re safely across, Sweden stretches out before us . . . and it looks just like Denmark. The same rolling green fields, same puffing smokestacks and churning windmills, same desolate, ashen sky.

  We’re here to see Lars Vilks, Sweden’s counterpart to Kurt Westergaard. In 2007, Lars drew an image every bit as provocative as the Danish cartoonist’s, a ragged sketch featuring the Prophet Mohammad’s head on the body of a dog, an animal considered unclean by many Muslims. But there was a difference: when Westergaard made his drawing, he had no idea of the mayhem he was about to unleash. When Vilks depicted the Prophet two years after the cartoon controversy had shocked the world, he knew what he was getting himself into. He did it anyway.

  Southern Sweden is a local vacation destination. In the summer it’s downright balmy around here, at least compared to up north, where the country stretches into the Arctic Circle. But now, in the grip of winter, the area is largely deserted. The roads are empty and the expensive shops and restaurants in the resort towns are boarded up. We’ve had no choice but to book a room at the only hotel we could find open, a romantic couples retreat that advertises special “love weekend” packages on its website.

  To get to Vilks’s house, the GPS device directs us to pull off the highway and crisscross a maze of country roads. As light drizzle patters the windshield, we pass rural hamlets and half-timbered barns. We pull up at a small yellow house surrounded by muddy fields. As we get out of the car, four muscle-bound men with gun bulges under their jackets emerge from a camper out back. Without a word, we hand over our passports and assume the position for pat-downs. We know the drill.