The Humor Code

by Peter McGraw

  “We met your counterparts in Denmark,” Pete mentions to a member of the security team whose face resembles weather-beaten granite. “We know,” he replies, before clearing us to enter the house.

  An older man with tousled gray hair, thick plastic-rimmed glasses, and a bulky, fraying sweater, welcomes us out of the cold. Vilks gestures for us to take a seat in his small living room. It’s hard to know where to do so. Drawings and art tomes and old notebooks are strewn across every surface. On a coffee table, between empty tomato cans sprouting paintbrushes and paper plates smeared with hues of paint, Vilks has been hard at work re-creating Rembrandt’s iconic self-portrait on a sheet of card stock, but with an added element: the Mohammad dog image is nestled under Rembrandt’s chin.

  Vilks explains he’s been working on a series in which his notorious Prophet image crops up in all manner of celebrated artwork: Mohammad appearing as the face of one of the cheetahs in Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne. Mohammad being worn like a pendant of a necklace in Mary Cassatt’s Lydia at the Theatre. Mohammad substituted for the central seal in Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup can. While some might consider it tacky, if not blasphemous, it’s the way Vilks operates. As a conceptual artist and theorist, he’s not one to play by the rules. One time, he submitted his car to an art exhibit. For another show, he turned in himself. For Vilks, it’s all about how people interpret and react to what he creates. The more agitated the reaction, the better.

  “Risk is very important in art,” Vilks tells us, lounging in an arm chair. He sports a perpetual look of surprised bemusement, as if life is one long, unexpected joke. “Most critics say this or that artist is taking risks, but it is mostly just rhetoric.”

  Vilks decided to take a real risk in July 2007, when a small gallery in a town up north asked him to submit something for its exhibition on “the dog in art.” It was the sort of cutesy exhibit where visitors were encouraged to bring their pets, explains Vilks. “I suppose they invited me because they thought I could put a bit of salt in the exhibition,” says Vilks. They got what they were asking for.

  Echoing the rationale of Jyllands-Posten’s editors, Vilks says the three Mohammad-dog drawings he submitted were all about freedom of expression, about proving that “freedom to insult religious symbols should not be a problem.” He insists he didn’t believe his statement would go any further than the exhibit, but it’s hard to believe he wasn’t expecting what happened next. The gallery decided not to show his drawings. Then the media got involved. Soon enough, word of a scandalous Scandinavian Mohammad drawing was once again spreading internationally.

  But this time, the cartoon didn’t shake the world. Maybe officials had learned a thing or two from the Denmark quagmire; maybe Sweden wasn’t as entangled in anti-Muslim attitudes. Or maybe everyone was burned out from the first time around. In Sweden, the prime minister met with Muslim ambassadors and emphasized the importance of respecting Islam. Politicians in the Middle East were prudent, and even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the antagonistic president of Iran, waved Vilks’s drawing off as some sort of vague Zionist plot. Yes, a flag or two went up in flames, but all things considered, part two of the Mohammad cartoon controversy was far milder than part one.

  That is, except for the guy who started it. An Iraqi insurgency group put a $100,000 bounty on Vilks’s head, with a bonus of $50,000 if he was “slaughtered like a lamb.” In the years that followed, multiple groups of people have tried to take a shot at the reward. That includes Colleen Renee LaRose, an American caught planning an attack. She became known as “Jihad Jane.”

  The closest anyone came to succeeding was in May 2010. While Vilks was giving a lecture on free speech at a Swedish university, protestors stormed the stage. Security guards pulled Vilks out of the fracas, with shattered glasses but otherwise unharmed. A few days later, assassins tried to burn his house down. He wasn’t home, and the attackers succeeded only in briefly lighting themselves on fire. When the bumbling arsonists retreated, they left behind a driver’s license for the benefit of the police.

  Vilks recounts it all with a heavy dose of droll humor. Of everyone we’ve talked to, he’s the only who’s willing to laugh about the cartoon controversies. “You have to look at it in an absurd way,” he says. Like all good conceptual artists, he’s determined to accept wherever his incendiary art leads him. “There will probably be more chapters in this story,” he says, speaking more quietly, suggesting that those chapters might not have a happy ending. Still, he adds, “You have to accept the story.”

  It’s similar to how he’s accepted the strange story that’s emerged from his other famous artistic escapade: Nimis, a driftwood sculpture he started building in a local nature preserve in 1980. When the local council caught wind of the creation, they ordered it dismantled. But Vilks, never one to duck a fight, refused to do so, launching years of bureaucratic hand-wringing and bizarre legal battles.

  In 1996, in an effort to protect the monument, Vilks and his supporters proclaimed the one square kilometer surrounding the sculpture to be the independent micronation of Ladonia. While it’s not recognized by the local council, Ladonia now has its own flag (a blank green rectangle), a national anthem (“Ladonia for Thee I Fling”), and a citizenry of more than 15,000, courtesy of www.ladonia.net, where people from all over the world apply to become Ladonians free of charge. Before her arrest, Jihad Jane was welcomed as a Ladonian citizen, something that caused the CIA agents tracking her no end of confusion, says Vilks.

  Ladonia has become the area’s biggest tourist attraction. Each year, 40,000 people visit the sculpture, says Vilks, entering the odd little micronation from a path not too far from here.

  Pete and I look at each other. It’s time for a trek into Ladonia.

  We’re soon tramping through the snowy woods, our breath freezing in front of our faces as we stumble across muddy streambeds and down slippery cliff sides. We’ve been following a series of yellow “N”s painted on tree trunks, supposedly pointing the way to Nimis. But we’ve gone too long without any sign of the monumental sculpture, and the late-afternoon sky is growing dark. At any moment now it seems an assassin is going to step out from behind a tree, raise a pistol, and put us out of our misery.

  Vilks had offered to show us to the path to Ladonia, so we followed behind him in our rental car as his handlers drove him to an out-of-the-way assortment of thatched-roof farm buildings. Here’s where the trail starts, Vilks told us, pointing out a muddy pathway leading into the woods.

  We headed down the trail, then turned back to wave good-bye. That was when we saw one of Vilks’s security team sprinting off into the forest in the opposite direction. What was he doing? Had nature called? Did Vilks ask him to shadow us, to make sure we didn’t go tumbling off a precipice? Or had these Scandinavians decided to rid themselves of our meddling once and for all, thanks to a backwoods assassination?

  We round a bend and find a strange freestanding gateway bridging the path, a spindly arch fashioned out of twisted planks and branches. Stepping through it, we come upon Nimis, larger and grander and stranger than anything we’ve imagined. Passageways and bridges and towers spill down the cliffside like a tree house on acid, a riot of driftwood and wood scraps that stretches all the way down to where the Baltic laps against a rocky shore.

  We’re silent as we scramble through the maze of corridors and tunnels, awestruck at what one solitary, obstinate man has constructed. Scrambling up a boulder near the shore to get a better look, Pete shakes his head in wonder. “This is really something,” he says. “Why the hell does the local council give a hoot about this?”

  As Vilks would be the first to tell us, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While one person might see a stunning sculpture, another might see a bureaucratic headache and a willful flaunting of local laws. It’s the same with the Mohammad cartoons. To one person, the controversy was a great big misunderstanding. To another, the images presented the perfect opportunity to launch some politically expedient turmoil. To a t
hird, the cartoons were visual cruelty, racism writ large. And to a fourth, the hullaballoo was a wondrously strange, artistic experiment, a global performance art piece built from dog exhibitions and angry headlines and bloody fatwas.

  And here’s the thing about creating humor: just like, as Vilks believes, the best art comes with risk, so, too, does the best comedy. We laugh loudest at the most arousing humor attempts, the stuff that’s laced with a bit of danger. To come up with the best comedy, we have to skirt ever closer to the realm of tragedy, hurt, and pain. For some people, the result will hit that perfect, hilarious sweet spot. For others, it goes over the line.

  Humor, we’ve learned, is malleable. Comedy can mask infinite aggressions, but it can also hold infinite opportunities for healthy camaraderie and innocent amusement. A joke’s intentions, good and bad, don’t lie within the joke itself. They come from the people who tell it, and the people who hear it. That way, even the most innocent joke can have a hint of darkness in it, just like the darkest, most troubling joke can have a spark of light, too.

  The spark of light in the middle of the Mohammad cartoon controversy might be growing. The Muslim community in Denmark has become stronger and more unified because of the controversy, reports Hodzic: “I think if it happened today, we would handle it better than we did before.” The general Danish population might handle it better, too. Recent reports suggest Danes are becoming more tolerant of immigrants, despite the fiery rhetoric of some of their elected officials.

  The cartoonists have also learned a thing or two along the way. Refn and several of his colleagues used copyright money they earned from Mohammad cartoon reproductions to start their own cartoon website called caricature.dk. They have complete control over their distribution and positioning, and it won’t be so easy for folks to use them for their own devices. While Westergaard, ever the black sheep, has declined to be a part of it, he’s found other ways to be helpful, donating nearly $50,000 of what he’s earned to disaster relief in Haiti.

  As for Vilks? He’s likely to continue doing what he’s doing, building fairy castles and causing trouble, waiting to see what the next chapter of his story will bring.

  We hope the Swedish commando watching from the woods makes sure it has a happy ending.

  7

  PALESTINE

  Can you find humor where you least expect it?

  Everyone thought we were crazy. “You’re going where?” they asked incredulously.

  “To Palestine,” we’d reply. Our time in Denmark and Sweden put an idea in our heads. Lots of folks had taken the Mohammad cartoon controversy to mean that Islam isn’t funny. We think they’re wrong. To prove it, we were off to one of the most historically unstable regions on the planet, a place synonymous with violence and suffering, suicide bombers and grieving mothers, deep hatreds and lost hope. “We’re going to find humor there,” we’d explained to people. “Lots of it.”

  “Oh, sure,” they’d responded. “Palestine is going to be hilarious.”

  Now, as we’re speeding down an Israeli highway toward the West Bank, I’m starting to think everyone was right.

  Our problems began the day before, when we touched down at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport. Neither the Gaza Strip nor the West Bank, together known as the Palestinian territories, has a commercial airstrip. (It’s why typing “Palestine” into a flight search engine won’t get you anywhere. Trust me. I tried.) One of the few ways to get to Palestine is to fly into Israel, then head for one of the security checkpoints. But since Israelis consider both Gaza and the West Bank occupied territories, they decide who comes and goes. It’s why the Gaza Strip, the small patch of turmoil at the southwest tip of Israel, is pretty much off limits unless you are part of an NGO or are skilled at digging tunnels. And while Israel does allow folks into the West Bank, a more stable area the size of Delaware, the stern security guards at Israeli passport control weren’t too keen on letting us do so when we told them we were in search of what makes things funny.

  After the airport, things got worse. Our Tel Aviv cabdriver plowed into a parked car as he deposited us at our hotel. He took one look at the damage he’d caused, gestured for payment, and sped off. Apparently Jewish guilt doesn’t have the same oomph here as it does in the States.

  The kicker was in Pete’s inbox when he logged on at the hotel. Months earlier, Pete had discovered Palestine’s one and only televised comedy show, a satire called Watan ala Watar. The creators had invited us to visit them in the West Bank for a taping. It was to be the centerpiece of our trip to Palestine. But they’d just e-mailed to say they wouldn’t be taping during our visit after all.

  We’d just traveled 6,861 miles to have all of our careful arrangements fall apart. In a place like the West Bank, even the best-laid plans don’t typically end well.

  “It’s American. It’s the best,” says Leore, our Israeli cabdriver, distracting me from my worries as he points to the state-of-the-art police scanner mounted overhead. Leore is dressed in a tight black T-shirt and pants, accentuated by stylish black shades. Not the sort of outfit most folks would choose to wear to a heavily armed security barrier between two warring lands. “Are we going to a club?” Pete wonders.

  Leore scoffs as he turns up the volume on the video screen flashing Lady Gaga videos from his dashboard. And no need to worry about road mishaps; a blaring warning signal alerts Leore if he drifts off course. All that’s missing is an Israeli version of KITT, the Knight Rider computer, offering instructions in bossy Hebrew.

  Leore and his souped-up Mercedes sum up the audacity and industriousness we’ve witnessed in Israel, a country willed into being by the chutzpah of its people. Since our arrival, I’d been struck by how different this world is from the sort of Jews I grew up around. I’m the son of a New York–born Jewish mother; my people are a neurotic, shlubby bunch who play bridge and watch PBS fund drives and whose weapon of choice is a sharply worded “Oy vey.” Here, however, was an entire nation of Jews the likes of which I had never seen. Jews dining on tomato-and-cucumber salads at ritzy Jewish-owned cafes overlooking a tranquil harbor dotted with Jewish-helmed fishing boats. Jews rushing to work in Jewish-driven taxis to Jewish businesses in gleaming skyscrapers built and owned by Jews. Jews sunning their noticeably non-shlubby bodies along the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea. Young Jews marching about in army uniforms, brandishing large assault rifles. Oy vey.

  The Israelis have clearly moved on from the whole “suffering through millennia-long exodus” thing with determination and style. In 1948, they carved out a piece of Palestine roughly the size of New Jersey, and then, once they’d fended off the resulting incursion of Egyptian, Syrian, Transjordan, and Iraqi forces, moved forward with establishing an independent state. Since then, they’ve fended off attacks from one Arab neighbor after another and taken the land they’d claimed—a rugged backwater region that Mark Twain described as “desolate and unlovely”—and built one of the most developed countries in the world. As a side project, they took the ancient literary language of Hebrew, at the time not spoken by anybody, and turned it into the mother tongue of Israel’s 5.8 million Jews.

  There was just one problem in the Zionist plan to reclaim their ancient homeland: there were a lot of Arabs living there who weren’t keen on the arrangement. Hence the violent fracturing of the region into the Jewish-controlled state of Israel and the Palestinian territories.

  Although Israel has thrived, Palestine has not. Palestine’s per capita GDP is just $2,900, about the same as Ghana’s. Life expectancy is only 66 years, compared to 80 in Israel. In most financial and social benchmarks, Palestine falls far down the list of country-by-country rankings—that is, if Palestine were a country and not an amalgamation of occupied territories without a unified government, a standing army, or even an agreed-upon border.

  And right now it’s in the middle of summer, and Palestine and the rest of the Muslim world is in the midst of Ramadan, the holy month in which many Muslims refrain from ea
ting or drinking all day. It’s the sort of arrangement that would make anybody less than chipper, let alone someone living in a struggling, war-torn region in the midst of the sweltering Middle Eastern summer.

  Outside the taxi, an increasingly parched and hilly landscape rolls by. As we move farther inland, away from the Mediterranean, grass and trees give way to dusty knolls and valleys of scrub brush. Watchtowers top hilltops, and along one stretch of the highway, a shorn-off Israeli fighter jet wing is propped up like a macabre roadside attraction. I ask Leore how often he drives foreigners to the Qalandia checkpoint, which connects Jerusalem to the West Bank. It used to be fairly common, he says, but not so much since an Israeli tank gunned down an Italian journalist a few months back. I change the subject.

  Most cabbies refused to take us to the main checkpoint into the West Bank because of the rocks that sometimes come hurtling over the wall and do a number on their paint jobs. But Leore didn’t hesitate. He understands the Palestinian situation, he says, noting, “It’s like Bruce Springsteen, when he’s singing about the lowest of the low.”

  Encouraged, we broach the subject of Israeli settlements, the Jewish communities encroaching onto the West Bank to claim more land for Israel. The settlements have triggered protests and violence and have been condemned by the International Court of Justice and the United Nations. “What do you think of those settlers?” Pete asks Leore, his tone suggesting we should all be able to agree they’re a tad bit excessive.

  “Why does everyone call them settlers?” Leore snaps back. “It is our land!” We scrap our plan to usher in a peace plan to the strains of “Born to Run.” Leore elaborates: “I don’t hate Palestinians, but I don’t like them.”

  So there you have it: we’re about to enter a region scarred by decades of violence and suffering, a place controlled by cocksure and annoyed Israelis holding big guns and Palestinians going about in the sweltering heat with hunger headaches.