The Quotes of the Day widget on our iGoogle supplied us with this gem today:

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.

That’s Aristotle, allegedly. “Raillery” is just a fancy Aristotelian word for “teasing.”

So, to recap: A subject which can’t take a little teasing is suspicious.

Take, for example, Islam.

In a previous post, we linked to a report that suggested that a good way of letting the air out of radical Islam would be to ridicule the terrorists. It would hasten the “toxification” of the movement, according to the folks who put together the paper.

And we found another paper on the subject of ridicule as a weapon against terrorism, this one from The Institute of World Politics, by J. Michael Waller, dated February 9, 2006. Here’s a quote:

Muhammad, the founder of Islam, personally used ridicule as a weapon of war early after he announced his prophethood. Islamic poets were not mere literary artists; they were often warriors who wrote satire and ridicule of the enemy as an important weapon of offensive warfare. Muhammad banned the faithful from drawing human images, including his own, in large part to stamp out idolatry. Violent Muslim overreactions in early 2006 to some European cartoons depicting Muhammad appear to be less manifestations of offended sensitivities than of vulnerability to the power of ridicule.

This is especially interesting in light of the recent fatwa on Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the creators of South Park for depictiing the prophet Muhammed in a bear suit. Douglas Murray, blogging for the British newspaper The Telegraph recaps the incident.

The website Revolutionmuslim.com has put up a video on their site as well as on Youtube juxtaposing images of the two men who are behind South Park alongside pictures of Ayaan Hirsi Ali (who still lives with permanent security protection) and the dead body of her own film-making partner Theo van Gogh. Van Gogh was murdered in an Amsterdam street by an Islamist in 2004 for the “crime” of making a film about the abuse of women within some Islamic communities.

We won’t post the video fatwa here. It’s chilling– it does, after all, threaten the lives of two American animators and it features a horrifying photo of the lifeless body of director van Gogh with a knife in his chest… but it’s also boring and way too long! Don’t these jihadists know anything about editing or pacing? Take a class! Buy a how-to book! They could have issued the fatwa and made the hair stand up on necks everywhere had they chopped it in half and made the titles a little snappier.

We ended our post the other day by asking where was this generation’s Charlie Chaplin. Well, I suppose we have our answer: Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They aren’t standup comedians, but they are two of the bravest and most effective satirists in the land.