The Humor Code (23 page)

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 can 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.

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.