The attack comes out of the blue. First we hear the yelling, an eruption of deranged Danish that shatters Copenhagen’s wintry early morning tranquility. We spot a hulking woman across the street from us, eyes blazing as she hollers in our direction. But she’s not just yelling. She’s on the move, head down and legs pumping in bulky black snow pants. And she’s charging at us.
Maybe she believes that Pete, who’s been taking pictures of eighteenth-century brick façades and colorful Danish graffiti, snapped a shot of her. Maybe she doesn’t like the look of us. All we know is that she’s enraged, and we’re the cause.
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.
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?
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.
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 open-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.
“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 third, 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.