The Humor Code (21 page)

She charges at Pete, arms swinging at his head. At the last moment, she stumbles, pitching forward onto the sidewalk. She lies there, moaning, while we gape. Is she all right? Should we help her? Before we can decide, she pulls herself up, apparently unscathed. We move away, putting some distance between us as she turns her animosity toward whatever else dares cross her—other pedestrians, bicyclists, a passing car or two.

We're stunned. This welcome is not what we've come to expect in Denmark. We're here to explore the dark side of humor, how comedy can divide and degrade. We've learned that humor does all sorts of good, like sell comedy movies and magazines and build lasting bonds and bridge international divides. But comedy isn't all fun and games, insists Pete. Take all the racist, sexist, and homophobic jokes out
there, he says. Or how there was something so threatening about the routines of Lenny Bruce and Mae West that those in power censored their jokes. To him, the conclusion is obvious: “Humor comes from a dark place.”

To help prove it, Pete ran an experiment with HuRL undergraduate Robert Merrifield Collins that involved one of those newfangled bladeless fans, the kind that seem magically to blow air through an empty ring. When Pete and Merrifield had test subjects place their hands inside the ring while the fan was running, most subjects laughed and found it amusing. On the surface, this reaction doesn't make sense; feeling air running past your fingers isn't funny. But the exercise was humorous to people, believes Pete, because of all those times we were warned growing up of the gory things that would happen if we stuck our stubby little fingers in fan blades. And here they were,
with their hands inside a fan
, under the direction of a paid scientist. It's dark, twisted stuff—and that's where the comedy comes from.

We've been told that Denmark is the perfect place to dissect the dark and twisted side of humor. But so far, we seem to be in the wrong place to do so. Yesterday, when our plane dipped below the ashen cloud cover that stretched from horizon to horizon like a blanket, we gazed down upon picturesque vistas of the Danish countryside: wide expanses of deep-green farmland dotted with quaint, slate-roofed farmhouses. And what we've seen of Copenhagen, the Danish capital, is a model of European elegance, with its stately skyline of church steeples and palace towers, twisting cobblestone alleyways, and bustling pedestrian squares echoing with street performers. Numerous studies have concluded that Denmark is one of the happiest places in the world. Nothing suggests this is the sort of place where you need to be on the lookout for kamikaze hobos.

But then again, people around here have reason to be hostile toward outsiders. Since 2005, hundreds of thousands of people around the world have protested the small, seemingly inconsequential country that pokes into the Baltic Sea north of Germany. Riotous crowds have chanted, “We want Danish blood!” and “Bomb, bomb, bomb Denmark!” Key Danish export markets have collapsed under trade
boycotts. Danish newspaper offices have been turned into military bunkers, and private homes have been put under 24-hour armed surveillance in response to death threats and assassination attempts.

Last night, after dropping our luggage at our hotel, we'd gone on the prowl, hoping to take the pulse of the community. We failed. We ended up dining on New York–style slices of pizza, throwing back a pint at an English-style pub full of British ex-pats, and then grabbing late-night snacks from a 7-Eleven.

At the pub, the foreigners admitted that Denmark felt like a damaged shell of its former self. “It used to be a fairy tale here,” said a British businessman at the bar, evoking a place of Viking myths, dairy cows, and Hans Christian Andersen tales. “But now,” he added, “they screwed up the fairy tale.” It's been worse than the hell of World Wars I and II, says another patron. To find any catastrophe that compares, you have to look back to 1864, when Denmark lost a third of its land to Prussia and Austria.

What caused this modern-day disaster? A dozen cartoons.

I thought Pete's
academic exploits were weird. Then I learned about Gershon Legman.

Legend has it that Gershon Legman, a self-taught, itinerant scholar who's fabled in the field of folklore, launched author Anaïs Nin's erotica career. (It's true, says University of Illinois folklore professor Susan Davis, who's working on a biography of Legman.) He's also said to have invented the electric vibrator in the 1930s. (Not exactly true, says Davis—it was just some silly device he cooked up with his buddies at the New York Academy of Medicine that nobody used.) And he claimed to have coined the phrase “Make love, not war” at a university lecture in 1963. (Yes, says Davis, though his wording was more along the lines of, “We shouldn't be killing; we should be fucking.”)

Here's what is true about Legman: In 1968, after thirty years of work, he published
Rationale of the Dirty Joke
, a scholarly compendium of a thousand filthy zingers he'd spent more than three decades collecting. The subject index alone isn't for the faint of heart:

Sex in the Schoolroom—page 72.

The Fortunate Fart—page 185.

Loves of the Beasts—page 206.

Woman-as-Vagina—page 374.

Incest with the Mother-in-Law—page 471.

Rectal Motherhood—page 596.

And this book focused on the
clean
dirty jokes. Legman saved the
dirty
dirty jokes for his next book,
No Laughing Matter
, published via subscription several years later, as no self-respecting publisher would touch it.

These books weren't shock for shock's sake. For Legman, they were about exposing an uncomfortable but vital part of modern culture too long ignored. “He had this really, really driven quality to collect, print, and expose what no one else was exposing,” Davis tells me. As Legman notes at the beginning of
Rationale of the Dirty Joke
, “Under the mark of humor, our society allows infinite aggressions, by everyone and against everyone.”

Legman never quit on his mission to catalogue those aggressions. When the obscene research materials he was receiving from all parts of the world raised the hackles of the U.S. Postal Service, he moved to the more laissez-faire French countryside. He went on to produce several anthologies of limericks, dirty and otherwise, edited two volumes on bawdy folk songs titled
Roll Me in Your Arms and Blow the Candle Out
, and worked on his autobiography,
The Peregrine Penis
.

In 1999, before
The Peregrine Penis
could be unleashed on the world, Legman passed away in relative obscurity. His dirty-joke compendiums have been relegated to quirky footnotes, outshone by Norman Cousins's
Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient
, the 1979 book that launched the positive-humor movement.

Legman's work likely would have fared much better had he been born a few centuries earlier. For much of recorded history, folks in the know agreed with his belief that jokes were dark and dirty. Plato, in some of the earliest known musings on the subject, argued that people laugh out of malice, delighting in others' pain and misfortune. His “Superiority Theory” proved durable, cornering the market on humor
theories for millennia. Church leaders in Christian Europe shared a similar perspective. Displays of hilarity were considered only slightly less repugnant than witchcraft. Of the 29 references to laughter in the Old Testament, only two aren't associated with scorn, mockery, or disdain.
¹

When Lord Chesterfield, the fastidious champion of eighteenth-century manners, noted to his son in one of his famous letters that “there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter,” he was speaking for centuries of thinkers and philosophers. “The threat of anarchy and power structures being undermined is a big reason why comedy has always been seen with a suspicious eye,” says John Morreall, College of William and Mary professor and International Society for Humor Studies co-founder. Morreall has spent decades studying humor in history and religion—and how for the most part, the powerful and educated wanted nothing to do with it. “Nobody knows what is going to happen with comedy,” he tells me. “It's dangerous stuff.”

Humor remained dangerous up until the dawn of the Enlightenment and the rise of benevolent concepts such as democracy and reason. Then philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson began positing that humor wasn't as simple and cruel as just laughing at other people's problems, but was instead born from something as innocuous as noticing incongruities.
²

Perspectives on humor have changed so thoroughly that these days only one big Superiority Theory holdout remains, a grumpy polar bear on a tiny melting iceberg in a sea of good humor and happy thoughts. His name is Charles Gruner. “Humor is a game,” insisted Gruner, a communications professor at the University of Georgia, when I called him. “It is a contest of some sort, and there is always a winner and a loser.” That none of his colleagues agree means little to him. “If they accepted it, that means everything is solved,” he said. “It makes all other research on humor superfluous.”

“Show me a joke that doesn't fit my theory,” Gruner demanded. And whatever example you give him, Gruner will find a way to shoehorn it in. Puns to him are a game of wits where the punner proves to the listener his superlative mastery of words. And a cartoon of a
plumber plugging a leaky faucet with his finger as water shoots out of his ear isn't funny because it's ridiculous. It's funny because we take pleasure in someone getting brain damage.
³

Whether or not Gruner is right that
all
humor is a game, there is scientific proof that in many cases, as Jerry Lewis once put it, “Comedy is a man in trouble.” In 1983 psychologists ran a series of studies in which subjects rated a variety of cartoons on funniness and aggressiveness. The results revealed that people considered aggressive cartoons funnier than those that were non-hostile.
⁴
Even more disturbing was a later experiment that revealed that in such aggressive cartoons, it's not the hostility of the protagonist that scores the laughs. Rather, the more pain experienced by the butt of the joke, the funnier folks considered the cartoon until the pain levels involved became downright sadistic.
⁵

Some folks are so afraid of experiencing that type of pain that experts have determined it's pathological. In 2004, Willibald Ruch coined the term “gelotophobia” to refer to the fear of being laughed at.
⁶
There's no known cure for gelotophobes, but for a start, it's best to keep them separated from gelotophiles (those who enjoy being laughed at) and katagelasticists (fans of laughing at others).

So maybe Legman and all those out-of-favor superiority theorists were on to something. The biggest proof of all might be here in Denmark, site of one of the most troubling examples of humor in modern history: the September 30, 2005, publication of a dozen cartoons in the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
under the headline “The Face of Mohammad.” The images unleashed turmoil all over the world, possibly the only cartoons ever to be labeled a human rights violation by the United Nations. As luck would have it, less than a year later, the 2006 International Humor Conference took place in Copenhagen, allowing humor researchers there to deconstruct what's been declared as “the first transnational ‘humor scandal' ” and “the most powerful anti-joke response in human history.”
⁷

Despite all the ink spilled over the matter, there are still unanswered questions about Denmark's transnational humor scandal. Why were a bunch of cartoons to blame? Why was the outcry over these drawings so much greater than, say, over the photos of prisoner
torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq that had appeared not too long before? And most important, what is it about the things that make people laugh, stuff that's not supposed to be taken seriously, that can trigger so much pain and turmoil?

Still recovering from
our run-in with the street lady, we arrive at Zebra, an artist co-op on the top floor of an apartment building off a busy Copenhagen boulevard. Lars Refn, a guy who exudes well-aged coolness, greets us. His gray hair and beard are trimmed, stylish black glasses frame his smiling eyes, and his shirt sports the logo for Carhartt, the street-wear company popular with the hipster crowd thirty years his junior. Refn welcomes us into a wide-open space buzzing with artists hunched over drafting tables, fashion designers flipping through racks of half-finished clothing, and programmers tweaking HTML on jumbo-sized iMacs. We're a bit surprised by Refn's poise and warmth; from what we've heard, he has as much right as anyone to be irritated over what happened to him during the cartoon controversy.

It all started with a letter he received in September 2005, Refn tells us over coffee and Danishes in the studio's conference room. As a member of the Danish union of newspaper illustrators, he was one of 42 cartoonists contacted by the newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
with an unusual request. The paper had learned that a local author hadn't been able to obtain pictures for his children's book about Mohammad because illustrators were afraid of depicting the Prophet of Islam.
Jyllands-Posten
's editors didn't think much of that sort of self-censorship, so they solicited the union members to “Draw Mohammad as you see him.” The paper promised to publish all submissions.
⁸

Refn smelled a trap.
Jyllands-Posten
, Denmark's largest newspaper, was known for its right-wing views, and that included its prickly opinions about immigration and Muslims. “It felt like they were making an experiment with Muslims, trying to find a way to make them angry,” he tells us. And Refn, a self-described hippie, refused to play along.