Humor As Crisis Management

MADRID — Spain’s economic and political crisis has gotten so bad that even the horsemen of the apocalypse are out of work. And they ought to be in demand.

A recent comic in the delightful satirical magazine Mongolia depicts a caped skeleton astride a horse and wielding a flimsy trident. He is spoiling for a city to “destroy.” But a portly, hatted citizen stops him on the way to inform him that he’s arrived too late.

“The bank has already done the job for you,” says the citizen. Late to his own party, the exasperated harbinger of doom rides off under the punch line: “The horsemen of the apocalypse remain unemployed.”

Spaniards are increasingly turning to humor not only to help cope with the dark economicforecasts, but also to make sense of how this grim state of affairs has come to pass. The most trenchant critiques of the present political deadlock rely on humor to make citizens confront the roots of the current malaise.

Mongolia, which hit newsstands in March, already has a circulation of 40,000 and a rapidly growing subscriber base. Its editors define their readers not by age or political inclination, but according to “disenchantment.”

“Our readers are enraged, idealistic and hungry for change,” one told me Tuesday in their makeshift office on Pilar de Zaragoza Street, in a down-to-earth enclave tucked away in the upscale Madrid neighborhood of Salamanca.

Across town, in the bohemian neighborhood of Lavapiés, at a bar called El fin del mundo, I tracked down a new activist group cum performance troupe known as Gila, which has enlisted an array of indignados looking to salt their activism with comic relief. Gila requested total anonymity, and asked that I not even reveal basic information about the group’s members because, it maintained, “anyone and everyone who shares the group’s sensibility is Gila.”

The group is named for the Spanish comedian Miguel Gila, whose pioneering black humor in a series of iconic 1950’s monologues exposed the absurdities of Spanish life after the Civil War. The group strives to revive that “mixture of humor and crisis” that characterized the postwar years.

Gila stages street-bound “interventions,” as it calls them. In one, the group pilloried police brutality at public demonstrations by brandishing porras, pastries that resemble police batons. Other actions have mocked banks executing foreclosures. And during German chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent visit to Madrid, Gila poked fun at the obsequious reception mounted by Spanish politicians.

One of Gila’s slogans is: “Our vengeance is to be happy.”

Likewise, Mongolia’s tone is seriamente desenfadado, or “fiercely uninhibited,” one editor remarked. Its satire lambasts everything from recent political skirmishes in Catalonia and plans for a mega casino in Madrid to the political machinations of Madrid’s political establishment. But the takedowns are carefully pointed, and the final pages of every issue are devoted to serious, in-depth investigative essays. The editors say that the humor helps readers “digest” the bracing social and political critiques.

Mongolia eviscerates the pat myths, postures and privileges cemented during Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy, during the 1970’s and 80’s. Spain’s political stability through those years earned international plaudits, but the period also left in its wake political stagnation and strife, economic precariousness and cultural dyspepsia. Amid the worsening crisis these days, its legacy is being reappraised. The partial subtext of Mongolia’s jokes is, as one editor summarized: “Spaniards, wake up; the Transition is dead!”

In its regular installment “Monarchy Watch,” Mongolia skewers the Spanish royalty. Nothing is sacred, least of all politicians, businessmen or prominent figures who stand accused of abusing the public trust. Only two things temper the editorial line, I was told: “good taste and the penal code.”

“For years, corrupt politicians took advantage of the public and laughed in our faces with impunity,” one editor said. “Now, we’re laughing back. It’s a kind of poetic justice.”

Jonathan Blitzer is a journalist and translator based in Madrid.

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