Cross cultural humor?

I´ve been learning alot about the typical clashes between cultures during my stay here. One of the most intriguing and bizarre clashes I have experinced is the difference in humor. For example, I spent a good part of last night talking to a bunch of spanish snow boarders. And while I could understand most of what they were saying, I was completely left in the dark when they started telling jokes. I noticed the same problem arises in my advanced grammar class (which is not, by any stretch of the imagination a grammar class). The professor will make some kind of comment, and its obvious by the tone of her voice that it is a joke, and yet it just simply goes right over my head. The words would translate perfectly in my head, but there is something lacking behind them, a cultural feeling and understanding that I cannot yet grasp. And so I am left to wonder if humor really is a social/cultural thing, rather than something that we as humans share as part of our curious nature.

It is a relevent topic, I think, to be writing about now, as I have been engaging in discussion with many people about recent repercussions of the controversial cartoon. And it´s interesting how much background can influence the way someone sees the situation. One of my friends, a christian (a liberal one) from the US stated something along the lines that if there was ever any evidence to show how violent that culture is, this would be it. She also mentioned that people always make fun of christianity and get commended for it. A catholic from Spain shared similar sentiments, saying that their violent reaction to humor just shows how disconnected they are. I´ve been exposed to a lot of those perspectives. But then I came across something really interesting on my college´s webpage just now. Kamila Shamsie (a writer-professor-former grad of my school) wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about the subject. This is what she said:

Writing from her native Karachi, Pakistan, Shamsie says "There is nothing but condemnation here for European newspapers' publication of the cartoons... But there are two separate threads to this condemnation. The first relates to the extreme religious offense caused by the cartoons, which has prompted an increasing number of protests, with a worrying trend towards violence," Shamsie wrote. "The second thread to the condemnation concentrates not on the offense itself, but on the motive behind it. The idea that the cartoons were a deliberate provocation to get us to behave badly is being encouraged by officialdom: various political groups have condemned 'the planned conspiracy by the West to instigate the Muslims'; the Foreign Office has said the cartoons are part of 'sinister agendas...'"

And its incredible to think about it from that perspective.Clearly, on the one hand, the authors of the cartoon have the right to produce whatever they would want to produce. But it certainly causes one to wonder, what truly were the motivations behind publishing such a contraversial piece-- why about Islam? Why now? Just because you can do something, doesn´t mean you should.