The media and the irony of politically serious situations: consequences of the Muhammed cartoons in Finland

Abstract

This article discusses the connections between political conflicts and situational irony and their relationship to the media. The focus is on a continuum of ironic events that started from the crisis following the publication of the Muhammed cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which led to a satirical comic strip being published on the web pages of Kaltio, a small cultural journal produced in Oulu, Northern Finland, and ended in the dismissal of the journal’s editor. The empirical discussion concentrates on how the newspaper Kaleva, representing the media, functioned as an active participant in the process of making the incidents surrounding the Kaltio comic strip episode appear ironic, even though the matter was in fact politically highly sensitive. The purpose is to illustrate how and with what intentions political discourses and various textual strategies such as explicit and implicit verbal irony are used. The main argument is that making politically sensitive situations appear ironic is a matter of positioning values, in this case raising the value of freedom of speech above religious norms.

Crisis events and the inter-scalar politics of humor

“…When they get to zero, the American tourists start to scream and Aladeen and Nadal find themselves arrested. In IMDb film reviews this scene was interpreted as an example of the multidimensionality and even educative function of Baron Cohen's political sarcasm, targeted at the hypocrisy of American nationalism (Ridanpää 2012).…”

“…It has been also argued that, rather than clarifying the turbulent situation, the way in which the (Western) media portrayed the episode as a clash between free speech and religious sensitivities contributed to further confusion (Hussain 2007). On the other hand, in the Western media the angry reactions of the Islamic world, and Muslims' inability to 'take a joke', were made to appear not only drastically serious but also somewhat amusing and ironic, regardless of the unquestionably serious nature of the controversy (Ridanpää 2012). This is also connected to the claim that irony is a Western worldview (Muecke 1969).…”

Narrativizing (and laughing) spatial identities together in Meänkieli-speaking minorities

“…Hamilakis, 2000;Ridanpää, 2007), although preconceptions and stereotypes are not funny as such. In fact, the existence of humor or perceiving something as humorous is ultimately a matter of situationality (Ridanpää, 2012). Certain forms of performances are commonly considered more admissible and natural within certain spatial, cultural and social situations.…”

“…People use humor (both as a standpoint and as a rhetoric device) in the process of organizing, representing and reasoning their personal experiences, as well as in performing their identities. Different forms of regional, linguistic, and situational "knowledge" have a crucial role in the process of how the "funniness" of local narratives is comprehended and experienced (Ridanpää, 2012).…”

Humor and parody in Finnish rap music videos

“…However, humor may serve negative goals as well, in case that which is humor to one person may be mockery and oppression in the eyes of another (Barbe, 1995). At worst, humor and laughter can have far-reaching, even global consequences, as happened in the ever-lasting Mohammed cartoons controversy, in which assumedly funny cartoons have several times fomented serious international geopolitical crises (Ridanpää, 2009(Ridanpää, , 2012.…”