Nacho Redondo by The New York Times : In Venezuela, Comedy Is Protest.
In November 2017, the stand-up comic Nacho Redondo told a joke at a university about the Paralympics that upset some audience members and drew controversy online, which he promptly used to promote his next shows. It may sound like a common, even mundane story.
But in Venezuela, where Redondo, 32, developed a following for his brash, dark humor, the price for a joke that offends can be much higher than online outrage or a boycott. After politicians harshly criticized him on state-run television, Redondo received death threats online, and the government sued him. He fled the country on the day the lawsuit was filed, and hasn’t returned. “I was terrified and then paranoid and scared for my life,” Redondo said by Skype from Mexico City, where he now lives, adding that he didn’t want to leave his aging mother and other family members but felt he had no choice. “You get jailed there because of tweets.”
American comics often complain about the chilling effect of political correctness and social media mobs. Or about the damage done when the Trump administration targets Kathy Griffin or “Saturday Night Live.” But in an era of rising authoritarianism around the globe, the threat to comedians in countries without a tradition of freedom of speech can be much more severe.
In the fascinating series “Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy,” which debuted in February, Charles, the director of “Borat,” visited comics in some of the most repressive countries in the world, including Somalia and Iraq. “Comedians have been murdered in broad daylight in both countries,” Charles said by phone. Then he added, referring to Ahmed Albasheer: “The Jon Stewart of Iraq, who I profile in the show, can’t do his show anymore because he would be killed.” A Saudi Arabian comic has been jailed since he talked to Charles.
With platforms like Netflix increasing their presence around the world, the policies of regimes that crack down on comedy are not as remote as they once were. When Hasan Minhaj criticized the Saudi regime on his show “Patriot Act,” that government asked Netflix to take the episode down in that country. The streaming service agreed, saying it needed to “comply with local law.”
In Venezuela, a country in economic and political turmoil, laboring under national blackouts and punishing economic sanctions, President Nicolás Maduro has aggressively targeted comedy for years. Using the same broadly defined law that it employed to sue Redondo, the government arrested two firefighters for posting video online poking fun at Maduro.
Mayda Hocevar, the director of the human rights observatory of the University of the Andes, said many comics have been forced out of the country because the government, as she put it in an email, “has been criminalizing satire.”
The most significant comic to leave Venezuela might be Luis Chataing, who was the popular host (4.7 million Twitter followers) of a “Daily Show”-like program. The show was taken off the air in 2014, the day after he made fun of the government. Chataing said the government pressured the TV station by threatening other companies it owns. Maduro denied playing any role, but when Chataing, who now lives in Miami and broadcasts online, took his show on a live tour, he helped radicalize a large segment of the fairly young standup scene.
“Before 2014, comedians in Venezuela steered clear of political content because they didn’t want to alienate their fan base,” said Emiliana Duarte, a writer and editor for the website Caracas Chronicles. “But when Maduro clamped down on dissent, that’s when comedy became more confrontational.”
Redondo said comedy in Venezuela has become a rebellion. “The radio station I worked at, we had a meeting where they said you can’t use Maduro’s name. So comedians did the opposite onstage,” he said. “That was the only place no one can regulate you.”
Redondo, who grew up a fan of the HBO specials of Chris Rock and Katt Williams, has used the lawsuit against him to promote a new show that sold out in Miami last year, and is planning a tour of the United States this year where he will refer to the controversy over his Paralympics joke. The title of his show, translated from Spanish, is “Disabled.”
He is an unlikely champion for comedy as a tool of dissent; his material normally steers clear of politics and makes light of dark subjects like cancer. Redondo said he became a target when he started commenting on protests and the government on the radio and online. To him, the lawsuit was merely a pretext. “They don’t care about disabled people,” he said, adding in an email: “The ‘disabled joke’ facade was the perfect way to hide the fact that I was targeted just for being influential with young people.”
Duarte, the Caracas Chronicles writer and editor, said that far from being the standard-bearer for freedom of speech, Redondo was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. “His joke happened right in a tense, inflammatory moment when over 130 people were killed in protests,” she said. “He was made an example of.” The message was, she said, “Look what were doing to him. Stay quiet or it might happen to you, too.”
In fact, Redondo thought the controversy over the joke — a long bit in which he imagines a 100-meter race between people with different disabilities including a man with one leg, a man with no limbs and a communist — might blow over. But then he was attacked on the television show of Diosdado Cabello, the politician widely viewed as the second-most powerful person in Venezuela.
“If Cabello calls you on the show,” Redondo said, “it’s a sign: Go after him. If he pronounces your name, you have to leave, basically.”
Larry Charles, center, with a soldier and comedian, Bruce Balden, right, in a scene from “Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy.”
Credit
Charles said he began his series with the question of whether comedy could survive governments like that in Venezuela. He came away convinced of the ultimate resilience of the art form. “Laughter is as important as breathing, eating and sleeping,” he said. “Comedy will survive if humanity does.”
There’s no better example than a weekly bar show in Caracas that had been canceled twice because of the blackouts that have crippled the country. The loss of electricity did not stop comedians from putting on a standup show on March 30, albeit one without light. It was called “No Nos Vamos a Rendir” — we will not give up.
Lit up by cellphones from the crowd, the headliner Gabo Ruíz went onstage with a microphone, joking that the state’s ideology had defeated him “because I’m talking into a microphone like it’s working,” he said, to a big laugh.
Speaking by phone last week, Ruíz recalled, “Every joke worked because people wanted to laugh.” He added, “They needed to laugh. They’re suffering and just want to get back to normal and so do I. People called it a show of resistance, but I just want to tell jokes.”
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