Some influential names in Brazilian comedy, including Fabio Porchat, above, have taken to Youtube, where their channel can take on life’s absurdity freely. The result is hilarious – and has English subtitles.
By Dom Phillips
In an office brainstorming session, a smarmy, deeply irritating marketing man suggests changes to the bible to an earnest Christian client who is losing ‘numbers’. He floats a name change – ’50 Shades of the Bible’ perhaps – and recommends that the role of Jesus could be played by a woman, fighting the machismo of biblical times.
Perhaps Cléo Pires, one of Brazil’s most famous and beautiful actresses, currently starring in the 9pm novela, or soap opera, Salve Jorge. She’s be perfect, says the marketing man: “Big mouth, big eyes.” The Christian walks out in disgust. As the credit roll on the four minute comedy scene, a brief movie trailer shows Pires playing ‘Jesusa Crista’ – a Portuguese feminisation of the name.
Despite high production values, this is not a Brazilian television show, but one of a series of comedy scenes released on Youtube by a group of Rio de Janeiro actors called Porta dos Fundos (Backdoor). Their Youtube channel has become something of a phenomenon in Brazil, with 1-2 million views for each sketch. Their comedy is much more clever than anything Brazilian television has to offer. It is the freedom of the internet, they say, that makes this possible.
Since launching in July 2012, Porta dos Fundos say television channels have been knocking at their door and offering TV deals. They keep saying no. “The concept of the production is TV quality with the freedom of the internet,” says João Vicente de Castro, one of the partners in the Porta dos Fundos collective. “Television in Brazil is evolving a lot. But not enough to give us the freedom that we need.”
They are clearly well-connected: Cléo Pires is de Castro’s ex-wife, for instance. But their humour is a long way from the exaggerated slapstick of much Brazilian comedy. It is dry, sophisticated, beautifully observed; much more akin to shows that inspired them like The Office (the British original, says de Castro, rather than the American version that followed).
There is no canned laughter, often no obvious punch-line, just a rising absurdity played deadly straight. Monty Python, says de Castro, is another of their influences. But they tackle quintessentially Brazilian subjects like religion, sex, corrupt politicians and mind-numbing bureaucracy, along with universal themes like pornography.
In Superávit (Surplus), an idealistic young politician is easily corrupted.
In Trago a Pessoa (I Bring The Person), a delivery man arrives at a young man’s door because his ex-wife has performed an Afro-Brazilian spiritual ceremony called macumba to bring him back. All the sketches can be watched with youtube captions in English – there is an icon in the bottom right corner of the video.
De Castro denies they want to provoke. “We don’t want to cause controversy, we want to be funny,” he says. And with the freedom of the internet, they can poke fun at brands and difficult subjects without upsetting advertisers. On the contrary, having seen the sketches, brands often contact them to make special scenes – which seems to be part of their business plan.
“This is the type of humour we wanted to do and we don’t see this on the television. We got together and said, ‘Let’s do something that we like,’” explains Fábio Porchat, who stars in two Brazilian television shows – including long-running comedy A Grande Família, the Big Family. “We believe that this type of humour works, it’s funny, it’s popular, and it’s free.”
Porchat scored a major viral success with a sketch last year in which he attempted to cancel his cellphone line with Tim – one of Brazil’s biggest operators, whose unreliable signal and Kafka-esque call centres have prompted scores of internet jokes.
With his face painted blue, like the American performance art ensemble Blue Man Group who advertise the brand, Porchat’s rising frustration and incredulity hit a nerve with Brazilians. The video has been watched more than four million times and its success prompted Porchat and his collaborators to launch Porta dos Fundos.
Like the rest of his troupe, Porchat is a skilled comedy actor, with a sense of conviction that brings his characters of modern daily life in Brazil to life and makes them believable. Brazil can be a very surreal country – not just for foreigners, but for Brazilians too. But it is rare that comedy addresses this so adeptly.
“A comedian is someone who watches 24 hours a day what is happening around him. We have to know how to take advantage of these daily situations,” says Porchat.
The success of the series also shows how big the gap is between what mainstream, free-to-air Brazilian television channels like the dominant Globo show, and what is actually happening in Brazil’s dynamic and creative contemporary culture.
Globo concentrates mainly on soap operas, football and news. Its soap operas are watched by millions and do tackle tough, contemporary subjects. But the channel rarely bothers with documentaries or factual programmes, and then only in a very traditional way, with a reporter or presenter holding a giant lollipop microphone.
And its comedies are generally hysterical and over-acted with lots of visual and audio queues to tell the audience when to laugh. While this can be funny, it is rarely particularly enlightening. Watching Globo is like watching British or American television from the 1970s. Nothing seems to have changed.
Many of the shows, like Programa do Jô, a late night chat show hosted by comedian Jô Soares, has barely altered in decades. Watching Globo, you sometimes have the sensation that the channel likes it like that. It is on Brazil’s garrulous internet that a much more interesting dialogue is going on.
One theme that is normally off-limits also pops up in the Porta dos Fundos sketch ‘Traveco da Firma’ (The Company Transvestite), in which a guy pulls up his car to solicit a transvestite prostitute, only to discover it is a colleague from work.
“Brazil is a country where you have to be macho, you have to fight,” says João Vicente de Castro. “Brazil has a little difficulty talking about these subjects. But we don’t have a flag to wave, we just think it’s funny.” Funny it is. But as the English saying has it, many a true word is spoken in jest.
