Jorge Cremades: Simple Humor Or Trivialization Of Machismo?
Among young Spanish-speaking 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 Vine and Facebook videos, which have helped him make his fan page on the latter 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 comedians who receives 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: Cultivation Theory.
Jorge Cremades’ videos have received criticism since they began to go viral, although the fact that made the Internet become 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 approach vacations 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.
That is to say, everything basically consisted of a caricature of the differences between men and women (expressed through gender roles) and the way in which these are reflected in the way in which both sexes relate. For example, she highlights the importance of going to a restaurant where they serve “fresh salads” for them while they can “get excited about eating and mixing all kinds of dishes.”
At the same time, his videos show situations such as a group of men arguing about who should accompany a drunk woman home or a friend who rescues Cremades when his girlfriend asks for his cell phone because the battery has run out.
A role model or a comedian?
In a world in which it was assumed that everything expressed in humorous gags has no effect on social reality or its groups, 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 shows may seem ridiculous, but they are not different enough from real gender roles to make them seem totally crazy 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 very far from our daily lives. That part of humor videos that is perceived as something similar to what really happens can feed the latter, downplaying its importance.
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 labor, objectification of women’s bodies, etc.
The criticism of Cremades does not arise because he 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. Criticism occurs 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 in collision) with humor, something that is supposedly beyond any political thought.
For certain ideologies, the impact that Jorge Cremades may generate is totally undesirable and that is why an attempt will be made to include this comedian in the framework of representatives of machismo; not because he personally has to be one, 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 function, and from this position Cremades’ work can be claimed as a reflection of what men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are like. beyond “the complexes of political correctness.”
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 fulfilled, as the Cultivation Theory points out.
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 they are both fictional characters after all) but a unwritten rule about how the figure of the man interacts with the figure of the woman. Ultimately, 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 fictional and non-fictional content transmitted by television, the Internet and digital media in general, the 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 Cultivation Theory is always fulfilled, Jorge Cremades’ videos would have a direct effect on the way in which his audience conceives gender roles and their way of being reflected in society. The assumption that “it’s just humor” would no longer hold true, because Cultivation Theory breaks with the idea that what happens on a screen stays on the screen But that doesn’t mean that all viewers have to imitate those behaviors. In fact, the opposite could happen.
The distinction between person and character
Although it may seem like a lie, Jorge Cremades’ videos are still the work of an author, in the same way that certain cult films can be. That doesn’t mean 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 watching the same 6-second Vine. But when it comes to judging the social impact that Jorge Cremades’ videos can have, what is interesting is If by seeing and interpreting 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 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 watching many of these videos, we can come to assume that what is shown is representative of what happens in society, and embrace a totally contrary and critical attitude towards this
Concluding
It is not unreasonable to think that many of the people who criticize Jorge Cremades’ humor, paradoxically, have been influenced by this multimedia content, although in a sense opposite to what one would expect. Instead of coming to believe that those kinds of actions are normal and therefore morally acceptable, they may believe that those 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 seem far-fetched, although the danger of the first possibility is probably greater than the positive of the second. Besides, The way in which Jorge Cremades’ videos are presented makes it easy to identify with the characters In fact, they usually have a title something similar to “when you go to such and such a place and your girlfriend tells you such and such.”
The humorous potential of some videos may consist of showing totally surreal scenes that do not fit with these titles, but usually It is easy to see a caricatured version of socially normalized behaviors: girlfriends who are jealous of other women, men who feign interest 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; Therein lies 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.
