By
My parents voted for a
president for the first time in their lifetime in 1989 when I was 3
years old. I grew up hearing frightening stories about the military
dictatorship. In one, torturers attached a man’s mouth to the carburetor
of a car with the engine running and left the man to die. In another,
Col. Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra inserted rats
into a captive pregnant woman’s vagina. This is what Brazilians were
living through while Woodstock and Watergate were happening in the
United States. Here, reporters like Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein went
missing or “committed suicide” in physics-defying conditions that would
have been impossible without the help of the state.
Those
who find similarities between President Jair Bolsonaro and President
Trump don’t grasp the depth of the situation in Brazil. Mr. Bolsonaro
has not masked his affection for the military dictatorship. In fact, he
considers Colonel Ustra, who ran a torture center in the ’70s, a “national hero.” Though media has given him the nickname “Trump of the Tropics,” Mr. Bolsonaro seems more like a cross between Chile’s Augusto Pinochet and Borat.
I’m
a Brazilian comedian. While it may sound easy given our current
political climate, it’s actually very difficult to make jokes about a
president who already seems to be a parody. It’s hard to compete with
reality.
I’m
part of Porta dos Fundos, a comedy collective I cocreated in 2012 with
four friends — Fábio Porchat, Antonio Tabet, Ian SBF and João Vicente de
Castro. We had all worked in television, where we couldn’t make jokes
about sex, politics or religion — basically, the funniest topics. So we
took to the internet, where our style of humor resonated. Then in 2017, Viacom bought half of our company. We’re now part of an American corporation, but of course that doesn’t stop people from calling us Communists — a word Mr. Bolsonaro is still throwing around as an insult. Vintage, no? But that’s not the worst of it.
Perhaps
it’s common knowledge that Brazilians wouldn’t be caught dead at the
beach wearing surf shorts. But there’s a layer of Brazilian political
life that may surprise some: The secular state is a concept that has not
made its way south of Ecuador, though church and state are formally
separated. Here, Speedos and theocracy reign supreme.
To
give you an idea of what we’re up against, there’s an evangelical
“bancada,” which roughly translates as “bench,” in Congress. This is not
just a Christian lobby, or a handful of congressional representatives
who are Christians. The bench comprises more than 80 representatives out of 513 federal deputies, who go to Congress with their Bibles in hand and vote accordingly.
Many
are pastors, police officers or both, like Pastor Sargento Isidório,
who is famous for claims to cure drug addicts with a clubbing. I guess
it worked for him. Once a gay drug addict, he has been born again.
Here’s an idea of the scale of our problem with secularism: The most cited name during President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment was God.
No, he didn’t make any suspicious deposits, nor did they find any
emails in his name, but apparently it was he who asked a hundred
Brazilian deputies to have the president removed from office.
We did a Christmas special for Netflix about Jesus’ youth titled “The First Temptation of Christ.”
Mr. Porchat opens with the fact that the Bible has a glaring gap. Jesus
is 12 and — bam — he’s already 30 years old being baptized in the River
Jordan. Why is there no account of his youth? What were they trying to
hide?
We hypothesized that Jesus loved
men. We weren’t the first to come up with this, of course. Before us,
Mark the Evangelist had already told us in that apocryphal text that
“The youth came to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And
he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the
kingdom of God.”
Brazil’s evangelical
bench may not know this passage, just as it certainly does not know of
Monty Python, Mel Brooks, “South Park” and so many who have already
poked fun at the sacred cows of Christendom before we did. Today, there
are a dozen lawsuits and petitions demanding the content be taken down.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office accepted a petition from a Catholic organization that demanded
not only censorship but also payment of a fine of nearly half a million
dollars — two cents for each Brazilian who professes Catholicism in the
country. I’m curious about this accounting. I was baptized in the
Catholic Church, but I didn’t receive my first communion. Am I entitled
to two cents? Does not receiving communion disqualify me, or am I
eligible for one penny? Does the remaining penny go to those who were
confirmed?
This is not new to us. What
has changed is that since this president took office, the attacks have
come in different forms. On Dec. 24, for example, a group of masked men attempted to set our offices on fire with Molotov cocktails. The security guard managed to put out the fire and no one was hurt.
The
next day, a group that called itself Popular National Insurgence
Command, inspired by the Integralist movement, claimed responsibility
for the attack. Brazilian Integralism was a 1930s anti-Semitic movement —
yes, there were many Brazilians, of mixed race themselves, who were
sympathetic to a movement that would have sent them to a concentration
camp.
We believed the movement had been eradicated along with syphilis and tuberculosis. But it seems all these evils are back in Mr. Bolsonaro’s Brazil.
Humor, of course, is not the only thing affected by the government. I acted in the film “Invisible Life,”
which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes this year, but in
Brazil it was not supported by the National Cinema Agency, whose
director at the time claimed that the producer was a Communist. Anyone
who knows the market knows this makes no sense. No one is less Communist
than a film producer!
Public agencies
— most of them — are being replaced by “government loyalists,” to use
Mr. Bolsonaro’s own term. The president has already said that he is not
in favor of censorship but rather of protecting “Christian values.”
One
doesn’t need to attack Christianity, however, to be fired. When the
director of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research released data
on deforestation, the president ousted him — perhaps reality is also an
enemy of Christian values.
Although
our president doesn’t deserve the nickname “Trump of the Tropics” (not
even that!), he was certainly greatly helped by the outcome of the
American elections. If the United States elected an oligophrenic, why
couldn’t Brazil? We look forward to the result of impeachment and this
year’s elections. Hopefully Mr. Trump’s fall will presage the demise of
his tropical wannabes.
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