If you’re unfamiliar with the aniconism of Islam, a cartoon contest where all entries have to depict the prophet Mohammed might sound like a fun activity at a local Koran school, like kids making drawings of Jesus in Sunday school. Instead, it was an event organized by political organizations in Garland, Texas seeking to combat (fundamentalist) Islam. The contest was attacked by two gunmen who, after wounding a security officer, were both shot and killed by the police. Cynics would say this outcome fulfilled the objectives of both the attackers and the organizers: the former achieved martyrdom, the latter can point to yet another example of the danger of Muslim fundamentalists. Both sides garnered huge media attention for their respective causes.

The topic of Mohammed cartoons is of special interest to me as a Dutch person — the Netherlands have a large Muslim population, and Geert Wilders, the keynote speaker at the Garland event, is from there — but also as an academic studying ancient religion. The ancient Greeks and Romans reconciled, with remarkable ease, laughing at their gods with worshiping them.

At first glance, the contrast between the playfulness of ancient religion and the apparent oversensitivity of Muslim traditions could not be larger. But the differences may be smaller than they appear: in both contexts, the success of humor depends on who is telling the joke. A comparison of two types of ancient jokes about the gods, from pagans and from Christians respectively, shows that the ‘inside’ nature of polytheistic humor played a large role in its acceptance. Distinguishing between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ jokes can also shed light on the contemporary debate about Mohammed cartoons.

Kurt Westergaard is the Danish cartoonist whose work caused the term Mohammed cartoons to be added to our vernacular: he drew the famous bomb-in-turban cartoon for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005. To mark the upcoming tenth anniversary of the publication of his drawing, Westergaard was recently invited to speak in Amsterdam at an event celebrating the freedom of the press.

Westergaard is an elderly, diminutive man with mischievous eyes, and it is hard to imagine that the ongoing cycle of offensive drawings followed by protests and violence started with him. In his speech in Amsterdam he appeared conciliatory and sympathetic: “When we satirize fellow, Muslim country men this is not an act of exclusion but an act of inclusion, because it is the way we treat fellow Danish people.” He added: “We only wanted to get the terrorists, not the normal, law-abiding Muslims.”

Westergaard, likeable though he may be, misrepresents what his cartoons do. He knows well that many ‘law-abiding’ Muslims feel anything but ‘included’ by his cartoons. In what has to be a feigned naiveté, he glosses over the complexity of multicultural societies. In a telling addition to his claim that attacking Danish Muslims in cartoons is fine because that’s just what Danish people do, he defines this ‘Danish tradition’ as “All those in power may be attacked or exposed in cartoons.” But in most Western European societies Muslims rarely occupy positions of power. Many grapple with unemployment, poverty, and discrimination. Even staunch defenders of free speech should be uncomfortable with cartoons that target already vulnerable minorities.

A three-way transaction

A more fundamental omission in Westergaard’s defense, and in the public debate about Mohammed cartoons more generally, is that little attention is paid to the social mechanism of humor. Freud’s very humorous 1905 account of jokes, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, is still insightful; he writes, “In addition to the one who makes the joke, there must be a second who is taken as the object of the hostile or sexual aggressiveness, and a third in whom the joke’s aim of producing pleasure is fulfilled” (p. 1696 in Strachey edition). A joke is a three-way transaction between joke-creator, joke-object, and joke-audience. When a joke is told in person ‘the object’ may or may not be present. In the case of the Mohammed cartoons published in the Internet era — particularly because they are images and not texts — ‘objects’ from all over the world can instantaneously witness the joke made about them.

The degree of aggression in a joke is determined primarily by the underlying relationships between the parties in the joke-transaction. It’s far easier to laugh along when a friend makes a joke about your outfit in front of another friend than when a nasty co-worker does so in front of another colleague. With publicly disseminated religious or ethnic humor, this scenario plays out on a much larger scale. How a joke about a religious, cultural, or racial group ‘lands’ depends on whether the joke-creator comes from inside the group or outside — and also whether their intended audience is inside or outside the group. Even if Westergaard claims otherwise, the real intended audience of Mohammed cartoons is not the ‘normal’ Muslim population but outsiders to that community — be they secular or belonging to other religious groups — who share the cartoonist’s unease about Islam.

But what would such ‘insider’ humor look like? Self-deprecating ethnic or racial humor is something most of us are very familiar with. Freud himself already comments at length on Jewish humor: “I do not know whether there are many other instances of a people making fun to such a degree of its own character” (p. 1705 in Strachey edition). Humor specifically about religion, though, is another matter, and this is where I turn, finally, to Lucian — and to some jokes.

Zeus in love

Lucian was born in the first half of the second century CE in a city called Samosata, now Samsat in modern Turkey (though the old city was flooded behind the Atatürk Dam in 1989). Like many of his contemporaries, Lucian traveled around the Roman Empire and gave rhetorical performances. Unlike his contemporaries, most of his pieces are humorous in content. Strikingly, the objects of his jokes are frequently myths, the gods (old and new), and the religious customs of his time. In the second century CE the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire venerated an elective subset of the large, ever-evolving polytheistic family of gods — (incarnations of) Aphrodite, Heracles, Isis, Zeus, Mithras, or countless others. Christianity was still a small, somewhat puzzling phenomenon in Lucian’s time.

Many of Lucian’s pieces take the form of short dialogues. He most likely performed these by himself, inflecting his voice to distinguish between the different characters. In one piece, Eros and Zeus talk to each other:

Zeus: “You have never made a woman fall in love actually with me. (…) They love the bull or the swan, but if they see me they are frightened to death.”
Eros: “Well of course, women who are only mortal cannot bear the sight of you. (…) If you want them to fall for you should not shake your shield like that or carry your thunderbolt around, but make yourself as attractive as you can, like Bacchus with curly hair, a purple robe, and golden slippers. You will have more women running after you than all his Bacchants together.”
Zeus: “Get out. If I have to look like that I do not even want them to love me.”
Eros: “Well, then just give up on love, that is easy enough.”
Zeus: “Oh no! I want my women, but I do not want it to be so much trouble.”

Lucian depicts Zeus, the father of the gods, as a lazy but insecure lover — to an audience for whom Zeus was a divinity who needed placating through regular offerings. Failing to perform ritual for the gods could have horrific consequences. Because he hides behind the characters in his dialogues, Lucian’s private views on religion are difficult to determine. Most scholars, however, now assume that he would have participated in the basic ritual calendar of the community. Even if this were not the case, Lucian still was an insider to the religious culture of ancient paganism. From this insider position he was able to caricature Zeus in his dialogues. He playfully elaborated on existing mythical narratives in a way that did not offend his religiously active audience: it amused them.

Lucian was by no means the first Greek to depict the gods humorously. Aristophanes’ Dionysus is a dirty, sex-obsessed coward in the comedy Frogs. Vase painters were happy to paint caricatures of Zeus or Heracles, but also of Athena, Hera or Aphrodite. Even Homer himself describes a scene, with relish, in which the gods are overcome with laughter at the spectacle of the adulterous gods Ares and Aphrodite caught in the net of Aphrodite’s jealous husband Hephaestus. Hermes makes them double up with laughter again when he jokes that he would endure ‘twice as many shackles’ if only he could lie with her too. Roman wall painting, dance, and literature continue this Greek tradition of laughing at the gods, often using the same narrative motifs.

Laughing at your gods

Scholars have struggled with the idea that the ancients could find amusement in their gods. Lucian’s humor has often been connected (for instance by Macleod or Coenen) to the alleged decline of paganism in the second century CE, but such a decline is now almost universally rejected. Aristophanes’ comedy has been set aside as a special case because of the ritual, festival context in which it was performed — an example is a recent article by Martin Revermann. Up until the end of the previous century, Homer’s more scandalous sections were simply branded spurious by scholars (for an overview of this debate see Hunzinger’s 1997 article). The idea that religion has to be serious business is a powerful one.

A more sophisticated way of engaging the problem is to separate the gods of myth — the ones who can be made fun of in art and literature — from the gods of worship. The argument is that the ancients engaged with (different versions) of their gods in different spheres. Depending on the context — a philosophical argument or a religious celebration — they adopted different attitudes to the gods. This phenomenon was evocatively termed brain-Balkanization by the French scholar Paul Veyne. While it is possible and perhaps even likely that the ancients felt differently about their gods in different situations, separating these iterations of the gods from each other entirely seems to go too far. Zeus the god of oaths invoked in a prayer was, I think, still imagined on some level to also be Zeus the adulterer from myth.

More importantly, the laughter at and with the gods in ancient religion perhaps need not be explained away at all. Several rituals of both Greek and Roman religion honored the gods by means of scurrility and laughter — the procession from Athens to Eleusis and the Roman Saturnalia are just two examples. These practices were often connected to mythological stories in which the gods laughed, either at each other or at themselves. The comic element in ancient religion could be framed as an imitation or echo of this divine laughter, constructing a special moment of community between men and gods.

The special brand of anthropomorphism that characterized ancient religion in Greece and in the Roman Empire can be hard to comprehend. Their gods could be imagined as being incredibly close to humans — but in an instant their divinity and infinite distance from mortal existence could be reasserted. This ambiguity allows ancient religion to both create and absorb humor about the divine. Lucian’s status as an insider in the pagan community allowed his mini-comedies featuring the gods to be acceptable and even popular.

Outsider jokes

Comparing Lucian’s insider humor to examples of outsider humor about the gods, also from the second century CE, underscores just how consequential the distinction is. Tatian and Justin the Martyr, both Christian authors, are contemporaries of Lucian. Their jokes are similar in content: Justin jokes that Christians at least have a god “who is not goaded on by lust for Antiope or Ganymede,” while Tatian quips that “the swan is noble, because it was an adulterer.” In Lucian, Zeus is also overcome with desire for Ganymede and pleads incessantly for a kiss from the beautiful boy.

But these jokes land differently depending on who tells them. Zeus becomes inferior and despicable in Justin and Tatian, both of whom seek by ridiculing the gods of the Greeks to convince a (potentially) Christian audience of the superiority of their one and only God. Lucian, using the same mythological motifs in his comic scenes, portrays Zeus (and other gods) as all-too-human. Although these authors exploit the same elements for comic effect, their tones are radically different because of their respective agendas and audiences. Lucian pokes fun at the gods to amuse and entertain his largely pagan audience, and perhaps to get them to reflect on the complexities of ancient polytheism. His humor breathes and lives within the urban, pagan community shared by Lucian and his audience members.

Tatian and Justin ridicule the pagan gods as outsiders to elevate the Christian God. They seek to confirm and strengthen the devotion of their audience members through humor. While it is difficult to determine how ‘regular’ pagans would have responded to these Christian jokes, both authors engaged in polemics with pagan intellectuals who were far less likely to appreciate their raillery than Lucian’s. The commonality that allows humor to thrive is missing. (Justin was executed after being convicted by the Roman prefect Rusticus, not for ridiculing the pagan gods, though, but for failing to offer sacrifice to them.)

The humor about the pagan gods in the second century CE shows how much it matters who makes a joke. This perspective reveals the Mohammed cartoons in Charlie Hebdo, Jyllands-Posten, or at the Garland competition for what they really are: ridicule from without of what others hold sacred.

A personal relationship

Since this is such a sensitive issue, I want to state my position in precise terms: I support everyone’s right to express themselves freely, in words or cartoons; I greatly regret the fact that people like Kurt Westergaard have to live under constant protection, and I abhor the violence committed against the staff members of Charlie Hebdo. But je ne suis pas Charlie; I greatly dislike the particular way in which those who draw Mohammed cartoons elect to exercise their freedom of speech. It is misguided and patronizing to think (as Westergaard does) that attacking someone else’s religion as an outsider will promote inclusion and social cohesion.

Humor from inside, also in the case of Islam, is more likely to appeal than humor from outside, although surely not to everyone. Muslims around the world represent a panoply of views and attitudes, and it is clear that ‘insiders’ also run great risks if they are thought to have acted blasphemously in some way. Nevertheless, the problem with Mohammed cartoons is that they manage to antagonize and exclude even moderate, progressive Muslims by flaunting the tradition of aniconism within Islam.

In Lucian’s piece Zeus the Tragic Actor, the god dresses up as a philosopher to eavesdrop on the Epicureans, who think he has no care for humans or perhaps does not even exist. In Zeus Confused he enters into a theological debate about divine providence with a Cynic. The idea that Zeus confronts philosophers who doubt his existence or relevance in person — thereby rendering their arguments moot — is an absurd and highly comic way of recasting a serious, philosophical debate. Lucian likes to make fun of the philosophers more than anything, and it is tempting to think that for him giving Zeus that role is expressive of his relation with the god. Perhaps dressing up Mohammed (in words rather than images) is also best left to those who have a personal relationship with him.

Inger Kuin is working on a book on religion, humor, and anthropomorphism in Lucian. She is a post-doctoral researcher at Groningen University in the Netherlands, where she studies political innovation in Athens under Roman rule.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.