Jorge Cremades: simple humor or banalization of machismo?
Among young Spanish-speaking people accustomed to using the Internet, few people do not know Jorge Cremades . This humorist of 28 years has become famous thanks to his videos of Vine and Facebook, which have enabled him to make his fan page in this latest social network accumulate more than 5 million followers .
But Cremades is more than a viral phenomenon; It has also become, for many people, one of the largest representatives of socially accepted machismo in Spain and, consequently, in one of the comedians who receive more criticism.
To what extent does Jorge Cremades make only humor? Are the criticisms against him justified? Let us try to answer these questions through a psychological concept: the Theory of Cultivation.
The controversy of Jorge Cremades
The videos of Jorge Cremades have received criticism since they began to viralize, although the fact that made the Internet 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 humorist 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 those that Cremades uses in all his videos.
I mean, everything basically consisted of a caricature of the differences between men and women (captured by gender roles) and the way in which they are reflected in the way in which both sexes are related. For example, it emphasizes the importance of going to a restaurant where they serve "fresh salads" for them while they can "swell to eat and mix all kinds of dishes".
In turn, in their videos are situations like a group of men who argue about who should accompany a drunk woman or a friend who rescues Cremades when his girlfriend asks for his cell phone because he ran out of battery.
A role model or a comedian?
In a world where it was assumed that everything that is expressed in gags of humor does not have an effect on social reality or on their collective, the videos of Jorge Cremades would not have generated controversy. In their dialogues there are no phrases that are directly offensive with clear insults towards collectives, 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. Criticisms of his work focus on the implicit message of his videos , not in the literal content of the dialogues. The situations that it shows may seem ridiculous, but they are not different enough from the real gender roles to make them seem totally outlandish.
There is a part of reality that can be fed and legitimized by those humor videos, unlike what happens, for example, with the brutal acts we see in series like Game of Thrones, set in something very far from our everyday life. That part of the videos of humor that is perceived as something similar to what actually happens can feed the latter, downplaying it.
And, if we add to 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 labor, reification of the woman's body, etc.
Does politics clash with humor?
Criticisms of Cremades are 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 heretical representations. The criticisms occur because it is understood that in the current context certain implicit messages can have a negative social impact. This is where ideology comes into contact (or rather collision) with humor, something that supposedly is beyond any political thought.
For certain ideologies, the impact that Jorge Cremades can generate is totally undesirable and that is why we will try to include this humorist in the framework of representatives of machismo; not because he personally has to be, but because to 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 the work of Cremades can be claimed as a reflection of how men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals are, more beyond "the complexes of politically correct".
Finally, a third group of people limits itself 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 fulfilled, as the Cultivation Theory points out.
The Theory of Cultivation
So, what really generates criticism is the possibility that each of Jorge Cremades' gags is not a joke about a man in particular reacting to a particular woman (since in the end both are fictional characters) but a unwritten rule about how the figure of man interacts with the figure of the woman. 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: the more we expose ourselves to fictitious and non-fictional content transmitted by television, the Internet and digital media in general, more 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 the Theory of Cultivation is always fulfilled, the videos of Jorge Cremades would have a direct effect on the way in which his audience conceives the gender roles and their way of taking shape in society. The assumption that "it's just humor" would stop, because Crop Theory breaks with the idea that what happens on a screen stays on the screen . But that does not mean that all the spectators have to imitate those behaviors. In fact, the opposite could happen.
The distinction between person and character
Believe it or not, the videos of Jorge Cremades are still the work of an author, in the same way that they can be certain cult films. That does not mean they have quality; means, among other things, that it is impossible to know for sure what the author tries to tell us with his work and, in fact, that does not matter much either. What does matter is the way we as viewers interpret these videos . What teaching do we draw from them?
The easy answer to this question is also the most disappointing: it depends. Each individual can extract a totally different message by seeing the same 6-second Vine. But when judging the social impact that the videos of Jorge Cremades can have, what matters is If we see and interpret them, we put ourselves in the shoes of one of their protagonists or if, on the contrary, we never abandon our position as a spectator who laughs (or not) at fictional characters.
In the first case, yes we can get to internalize the biases and behaviors of a fictional character , that is, it is possible to adopt it as a model of behavior. In the second case, by dint of seeing many of these videos, we can assume that what is shown is representative of what happens in society, and embrace a totally contrary and critical attitude with this .
Concluding
It is not unreasonable to think that many of the people who criticize the humor of Jorge Cremades, paradoxically, have been influenced by these multimedia contents, although in a sense contrary to what one would expect. Instead of going on to believe that such actions are normal and therefore morally acceptable, they may believe that such behaviors are more normal than they really are and that the struggle for equality between men and women deserves more. respect and attention
Neither of these two cases seems preposterous, although probably the danger of the first possibility is greater than the positive of the second. Further, the way in which the videos of Jorge Cremades are presented makes it easy to identify with the characters . In fact, they usually carry by title something similar to "when you go to such a place and your girlfriend says such a thing".
The humoristic potential of some videos may consist of showing totally surreal scenes that do not fit with these titles, but normally It is easy to see a caricatured version of socially normalized behavior : jealous girlfriends of other women, men who feign interest in what their friend tells them, etc. Regardless of whether or not the audience feels identified, it is very easy for that to happen; there is a good part of the problem, 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.
