There has been a sudden jolt in an otherwise slow-motion smashing together of Europe's cultural tectonic plates. It started with the publishing, then reprinting, of cartoons satirising Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Hotheads of every hue fanned the fire.
The media reduced the story to the cross-cultural equivalent of West Side Story meets Gunfight at the OK Corral: prissy, passive-aggressive free-speech hooligans, against the more obviously alarming, somewhat feral, religious nuts. Taking sides is more fun than thinking. The inconvenient truth, however, is that many Muslims backed the Danes' right to free speech while many non-Muslims considered the cartoons an irresponsible abuse of that right.
The Danish newspaper editor who first published the cartoons clearly had no idea what he was getting into. He would have gone into print with the irrefutable truth behind him that satire is a legitimate European way to express the otherwise inexpressible. Indeed, in line with Voltaire's assertion, 'I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it', satire is a liberty that represents an escape from dogmatic ignorance to tolerant enlightenment that is a definitive episode in European history.
Satire involves incongruity and makes you laugh at what might otherwise make you anxious - such as a lit fuse attached to the Prophet's bomb-shaped turban. It is a way of rebelling against harsh truths and allowing the repressed drives of life and death to escape harmlessly. Sigmund Freud called it a mutual willingness to forsake the 'reality principle' for the 'pleasure principle'.
One cartoon, in which martyrs ascending to heaven are told by the Prophet that virgins are running short, combines two standard devices. It makes fun of our fear of suicide bombers while giving us an excuse to think about sex, with all the permutations of titillation contained in the notion of having sex with a virgin while dead.
All humour tends to the subversive because it suddenly shoots us above the earnest and the grave. At the moment we laugh, nothing and nobody can touch us. However, satire goes beyond low-voltage rebellion. It is a spear-headed attack. A satirist's choice of target, itself, is seeking confrontation, tolerance of which varies across cultures. Chinese tend to find it pointless and distasteful. Here, we had an attack against a religious group that has fragile and highly combustible relations with virtually everyone, including themselves. Not, perhaps, the ideal time to tease them.