The Humor Code (22 page)

As requested, Refn drew a picture of Mohammad, but not Mohammad the Prophet. Instead he drew Mohammad, a seventh-grade boy from a local school district. To drive home his point, Refn dressed the boy in the red-and-blue jersey of a nearby soccer club known for its diversity and socialist leanings. “Mohammad” is pointing to a school blackboard, upon which is written in Persian, “The board of direction of
Jyllands-Posten
are a bunch of right-wing extremists.”

As promised,
Jyllands-Posten
published the cartoon, along with the eleven other submissions it received. Refn was thrilled, thinking he'd put one over on the publication, and prepared to put the episode behind him. “I thought that would be it,” he told us.

He was wrong.

It started with an ominous phone call from the police. Because he'd poked fun at
Jyllands-Posten
in his drawing, several media accounts of the cartoons focused on Refn. Upset about the images, a young Danish man apparently was planning to murder Refn and the president of the illustrator's union. While police sorted matters out, Refn took his family into hiding. “That is when I realized this is not a laughing matter,” the cartoonist tells us. It was just the beginning.

A month later, ambassadors from eleven predominantly Muslim countries requested a meeting with Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to discuss the cartoons and what they saw as anti-Muslim sentiment in the country. When the prime minister refused, Arab countries and organizations ratcheted up anti-Denmark rhetoric. A delegation of Danish Islamic clerics increased tensions by touring the Middle East with a dossier containing the offending cartoons and other inflammatory material. In January 2006, supermarkets across the Middle East began boycotting Danish goods, and on February 3, after dozens of European newspapers reprinted the cartoons in solidarity, a popular Egyptian preacher called for a “Day of Rage.”

The Day of Rage stretched into weeks. Around the world, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in protest. Demonstrators damaged and burned Danish embassies in Jakarta, Beirut, and Damascus. Radical Islamist leaders announced rewards for the heads of the editors and cartoonists involved, and police uncovered terrorist plots in Europe. In response, additional newspapers reprinted the
cartoons, triggering more turmoil. While no one was killed in Denmark or Europe, violent demonstrations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria left nearly 250 dead and 800 wounded.
⁹

“It was really the first international crisis we have had on an issue of culture, and all our conflict-resolution mechanisms failed to stop it,” says Jytte Klausen, a Danish-born political science professor at Brandeis University. The title of Klausen's book on the subject sums the crisis up nicely:
The Cartoons that Shook the World.

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 before 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?