Jorge Cremades: simpleton humor or trivialization of machismo?

Among Spanish-speaking young people accustomed to using the Internet, there are few people who do not know Jorge Cremades. This 28-year-old comedian has become famous thanks to his videos on Vine and Facebook, which have helped him make his fan page on this latest social network accumulate more than 5 million followers.

But Cremades is more than just a viral phenomenon; It has also become, for many people, one of the greatest representatives of socially accepted machismo in Spain and, consequently, one of the humorists who receive the most criticism.

To what extent is what Jorge Cremades does just humor? Are the criticisms of him justified? Let's try to answer these questions through a psychological concept: the Cultivation Theory.

The controversy of Jorge Cremades

Jorge Cremades' videos have received criticism since they began to go viral, although the fact that he caused the Internet to became a battlefield between defenders and detractors of his work was the publication of one of his articles in the magazine cosmopolitan Some months ago.

In that text, the comedian gave a series of "advice for men" about how they should face the holidays as a couple so that everything goes well. However, neither the content of this text nor the type of humor on which it was based were different from what Cremades uses in all of his videos.

In other words, everything basically consisted of a caricature of the differences between men and women (embodied by gender roles) and the way in which these are reflected in the way in which both sexes relate to each other. For example, he stresses the importance of going to a restaurant where they serve "fresh salads" for them while they can "inflate themselves to eat and mix all kinds of dishes."

In turn, in his videos you can see situations such as a group of men arguing over who should accompany a woman home. drunk woman or a friend who rescues Cremades when his girlfriend asks for her cell phone for having run out battery.

A role model or a comedian?

In a world in which it is taken for granted that everything that is expressed in humorous gags does not have a effect on social reality or on his collectives, Jorge Cremades' videos would not have generated controversy. In his dialogues there are no phrases that are directly offensive with clear insults towards groups, in the style of the speeches of xenophobic and racist political parties.

But that is normal, because Jorge Cremades is not dedicated to professional politics, but to humor. Criticism of his work focuses on the implicit message of his videos, not in the literal content of the dialogues. The situations it depicts may seem ridiculous, but they're not enough different from actual gender roles to make them seem totally far-fetched to us.

There is a part of reality that can be fed and legitimized by these humorous videos, unlike what happens, for example, with the brutal acts that we see in series like Game of Thrones, set in something far removed from our daily lives. That part of the humorous videos that is perceived as something similar to what really happens can feed the latter, downplaying it.

And if we add to this that the majority audience of Cremades is very young, the root of the rejection of these gags appears: the possibility that they continue to inoculate harmful social and psychological phenomena, such as implicit biases about gender roles and sexual orientations, division of labour, reification of the female body, etc.

Does politics collide with humor?

Criticism of Cremades is not born because it produces ideas that would not be acceptable in any context, in the style of what happens when religious fundamentalism cries out to destroy representations heretical. The criticisms occur because it is understood that in the current context certain implicit messages can have a negative social impact. It is there where ideology comes into contact (or rather collides) with humor, something that is supposedly beyond any political thought.

For certain ideologies, the impact that Jorge Cremades can generate is totally undesirable and for this reason an attempt will be made to include this humorist in the framework of representatives of machismo; not because he personally has to be, but because in practice his work can feed a sexist ideology.

For other ideologies, what can be seen in these videos is, beyond humor, how society should work, and from this position one can vindicate the work of Cremades as a reflection of how men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, are, beyond "the complexes of the politically correct".

Finally, a third group of people limits themselves to pointing out that humor is humor and that it does not have a political or propaganda effect. Only the latter will act as if politics and humor never come into contact, although that is an assumption that does not have to be true, as indicated by the Theory of Cultivation.

The Theory of Cultivation

So, what really generates criticism is the possibility that each of Jorge Cremades's gags is not a joke about a specific man reacting to a particular woman (since in the end they are both fictional characters) but an unwritten rule about how the figure of the man interacts with the figure of the woman. women. After all, history has shown that implicit discourses based on "this is so" can easily be transformed into an alternative version: "this must be so."

This connects with a theory of communication known as Cultivation Theory, based on a relatively simple idea: how much the more we are exposed to fictional and non-fictional content broadcast on television, the Internet and digital media in general, further we assume the belief that society is as it is described in what is seen on the screen.

If we assume that this principle of Cultivation Theory is always fulfilled, Jorge Cremades' videos would have a direct effect on the way in which your audience conceives gender roles and their way of embodying themselves in the society. The assumption that "it's just humor" would no longer hold, because Crop Theory breaks with the idea that what happens on a screen stays on the screen. But that does not mean that all viewers have to imitate those behaviors. In fact, the opposite could happen.

The distinction between person and character

Oddly enough, Jorge Cremades' videos are still the work of an author, in the same way that certain cult films can be. That does not mean that they have quality; It means, among other things, that it is impossible to know for sure what the author is trying to tell us with his work and, in fact, that doesn't matter much either. What does matter is the way in which we as viewers interpret these videos.. What lesson do we extract from them?

The easy answer to this question is also the most disappointing: it depends. Each individual can extract a totally different message by viewing the same 6-second Vine. But when it comes to judging the social impact that Jorge Cremades' videos can have, what matters is if when we see and interpret them we put ourselves in the shoes of one of its protagonists or if, on the contrary, we never abandon our position as a spectator who laughs (or not) at some fictitious characters.

In the first case, yes. we can internalize the biases and behaviors of a fictional character, that is to say, that it is possible to adopt it as a model of conduct. In the second case, by dint of watching many of these videos, we can come to assume that what is shown is representative of what happens in society, and embrace a completely contrary and critical attitude towards this.

concluding

It is not unreasonable to think that many of the people who criticize the humor of Jorge Cremades, Paradoxically, they have been influenced by this multimedia content, although in a sense contrary to that would be expected. Instead of coming to believe that these kinds of actions are normal and therefore morally acceptable, they may believe that these kinds of behaviors are more normal than they really are and that the fight for equality between men and women deserves more respect and attention.

Neither of these two cases seems far-fetched, although the danger of the first possibility is probably greater than the positive of the second. Besides, the way Jorge Cremades' videos are presented makes it easy to identify with the characters. In fact, they are usually titled something similar to "when you go to such a place and your girlfriend tells you such a thing".

The humorous potential of some videos may consist of showing completely surreal scenes that do not fit with these titles, but usually it's easy to see a cartoon version of socially normalized behaviors: girlfriends who are jealous of other women, men who pretend to be interested in what their friend tells them, etc. Regardless of whether or not you want the audience to feel identified, it is very easy for that to happen; That's where a good part of the problem lies, and the reason why it is assumed that instead of questioning what is being seen, an important part of the audience will see it as something normal.