The Satire of Masa Enfurecida As Political Incorrectness in Social Networking

Humor 2017; 30(1): 119–137

Marta Pérez-Pereiro* Getting the mob angry: The satire of Masa Enfurecida as political incorrectness in social networking

DOI 10.1515/humor-2016-0086

Abstract: Since Ancient Greece satirists are feared figures in any group articulation. Often protected by anonymity, authors have defied political and social order with a harsh and unpleasant sense of humour, which pushes the limits of political correction. This form based in breaking news and every- daylifehasaparticularlysuitablespaceinnewmedia.Twitter,bymeansof its promptness and need for concision, could be considered a perfect ground for this kind of humour. Provocation and censorship of political attitudes are the objectives of many twitter accounts whose followers echo by commenting and retweeting. Interactivity allows the production of a text without closure which interweaves a myriad of positions, different from the voice of the satirist. My case study is the Twitter account Masa Enfurecida, which targeted for five years the Spanish political and social everyday life by quoting and reversing public messages. With close to 124.000 followers, @masaenfurecida, an anonymous account, impacts political debate and influences popular communication as some repeated expressions become part of the talk of the day. The tweets of Masa Enfurecida are brief pieces that can be considered a pure form of satire, which is transformed in the chains of answers and retweets of the followers.

Keywords: satire, Twitter, political incorrection, Spain

1 Introduction: Dialogic humor and Twitter

In the last decades, computer mediated communication (CMC) has been promot- ing a continuous flow of textual production that defy the capacity for establishing taxonomies and for assigning it to literary genres. The idea of a secondary orality (Ong 1982), which intertwines oral and written codes, is applicable to the succession of humorous pieces in the Web 2.0. Due to new technologies, writing

*Corresponding author: Marta Pérez-Pereiro, Ciencias da Comunicación, University of Santiago de Compostela, Avenida de Castelao, s/n, Santiago de Compostela, Galicia 15704, Spain, E-mail: [email protected] 120 Marta Pérez-Pereiro turns into a dialogic process (Pano 2008) that provides polyphonies where speaker and listener are no longer useful categories. Some texts become real palimpsests in which the original meanings are subverted and played with in a process that has not a real closure. This is the case for the enormous production of comic texts such as memes, endless replications and transformations of humorous remarks. Social media allow the creation and mostly the dissemination of these humorous texts that cannot be interpreted neither written genres nor as pure oral forms. Concepts such as sequence, interdependency, and reflexivity between the discourse and the context come into play when considering the exchanges in the different social networks (Pano 2008). Humor in CMC is therefore produced through conversations where different Internet users interact in a particular web such as a blog, social network or chat room. But it would be wrong to believe that this is a novelty in the production of humor. As Attardo argues “rarely jokes occur in isolation” (2001: 62) when considering situations in which jokes are shared such as stand up routines or informal conversations. In this vein, Attardo’s classification of jokes can be directly applied to some of the humorous texts in social networks: virtual exchanges can include narrative or canned jokes (often taken from other sources); announced, rehearsed and conversational jokes; and not prefaced jokes, created by the teller “on the fly” (Attardo 1994, 2001). The dialogic nature of social media favors the production of conversational jokes, which can be spontaneous or part of more or less structured scripts. Twitter, as one of the most used services for microblogging,1 is a privi- leged space for humor for its brevity and immediacy. The linguistic economy of the joke, in fact, could be compared with the 140-character limitation of the site. In Twitter all users are potential producers of texts in the same time slot. Besides all these tweets are not presented in a hierarchical manner, so communication in the website is potentially “symmetric and polyphonic” (Menna 2011). Twitter offers the possibility for public interaction in different levels: just emitting tweets; retweeting and ‘favoriting’ other users’ messages; and replying to tweets in public conversation.2 Users can show affiliation by following other accounts but the website also allows interaction without any correspondence between users. The interactive and dialogic nature of the microblogging site promotes exchange of different information, which can

1 Following the information provided by the company, Twitter has more than 40 million users that send around 500 million tweets per day. Source: https://about.twitter.com/company 2 Twitter also provides a service of direct messages (DMs) between two users. I will not consider this level of interaction because it is exclusively private. Getting the mob angry 121 be verified, contrasted and mocked. Making fun of public figures and breaking news is a regular trend in Twitter. This trend compels users to keep updated in order to grasp the humorous contents of the joke. The swiftness of the publishing of tweets – dependent on the loquacity of users and the amount of accounts followed by each user – makes sometimes difficult to follow some chains of jokes. The ambiguity of the messages is also a common source for humor in Twitter. The brevity of the messages and the absence of acoustic-melodic indica- tions of the written text provoke a certain number of incongruous interpreta- tions. Although ironic tone can be reflected in th3e text with some grammar resources as suspension points (Mancera and Pano 2013), many users show lack of linguistic skills to write and also decode messages with an ambiguous meaning. In this vein, it is quite interesting to note the dissemination of hashtags as #ironymodeON and #ironymodeOFF3 to define the intention of a tweet in social media. The sole presence of these tags seems to indicate that social media users are afraid that their messages could be misinterpreted if they use irony. This consciousness to “handle with care” that sometimes constitutes humor in the public sphere is responsible for many sour debates and can even force the deposition of politicians.4 For its horizontal organization of contents Twitter promotes what can be called a “democratization of the joke.” Same as in informal and unrecorded conversations, users develop their own style and create humorous communities that share a communal sense of humor. Mancera and Pano (2013) quote the “cult of the amateur” of Keen (2007) to refer to the “emergence in the universe of opinions” (Mancera and Pano 2013: 24) in the social media. This could also be applicable to the proliferation of amateur comedians in the Internet. While mass media include professional performers and comedians, social networks allow citizens to create their own puns and develop communities to share them with (Tang and Bhattacharya 2011). The proliferation of memes and parodic impersonations in the social

3 Ironic mode on and ironic mode off are quite popular hashtags in Spanish social media, particularly on Twitter. 4 In 2015 the deposition of Guillermo Zapata, city councilman of Madrid, was provoked by a revision of his Twitter account. Some users retweeted some old Zapata’s tweets with anti- Semitic jokes and others mocking ETA’s victims. Although the jokes were part of a chain of tweets where Zapata debated black humor with other Twitter users in 2011, Spanish public opinion was not presented with the full picture. Zapata resigned from his position days after the publication of his former tweets. Media considered the Twitter affair as a “the crisis of reputa- tion in Twitter with more serious consequences in Spanish politics.” (Sánchez 2015) 122 Marta Pérez-Pereiro networks, where authorship is substituted by creativity and group play, coexist with the appearance of new humor professionals such as the youtu- ber or the twitstar. These new comic personas are often recruited by traditional media, eager for new wonders and for connecting with young audiences, who mix their interaction in social networking with their experi- ence in media consumption. I will argue here that the characteristics of social media, particularly the microblogging site Twitter, contribute to the production of humor, leaving some space for literary genres such as satire. Furthermore, some features of CMC such as immediacy, interactivity and anonymity can foster traditional satire but open- ing its creation to more players that the original satirist. I propose a double analysis that could take into account the satirical production of a certain Twitter user and at the same time the humorous production derived from the interaction of different voices. Making use of the concept “joke cycle” as “a set of jokes that are related” with thematic links (Attardo 2001: 69), satirical tweets can be analyzed in three layers: 1. Particular tweets as 140-character satirical pieces. 2. Thematically related tweet cycles published by the same author or account. 3. Tweet chains of several users that develop a conversation initiated by a particular tweet.

Satire as a genre of provocation, which pushes the limit of political correction is a suitable expression for a virtual space where users can be anonymous or create an avatar for hiding their real identity. Limits of humor can be subjected to questioning and negotiation in CMC. The existence of satirical accounts excites debate in social media and also produces new forms of humorous conversation. The Spanish account Masa Enfurecida, @masaenfurecida, literally trans- lated as angry mob, I will argue here, is a clear example of the suitability of the satirical discourse to social media, particularly Twitter. Its production in the website provides samples to analyze the humorous interaction of users and the emergence of debates around political correction in the Internet. The power of satire could even be amplified due to the interaction provided within this space, allowing some of the basic features of the satirical discourse to emerge: trans- formation and play with other discourses, provocation and challenge to the status quo. Additionally, Internet allows for a growth of satire not normally found in closed literary texts in the past. Because any text in circulation can be replayed and transformed, this augments one of the main features of satire as a discursive practice (Simpson 2003). Getting the mob angry 123

2 The rhetoric of satire

Satire, in general terms, is a continuous play with precedent discourses. More than a literary genre or genre of discourse, satire is a “discursive practice that does things to and with genres of discourse” (Simpson 2003: 91). As a mode, more than a literary genre, satire is a process that ‘colonizes’ and modifies the templates of other texts: “When satire takes over another literary structure, it tends not just to borrow it, as when a cuckoo finds another bird’s nest for its eggs, but to subvert it or (in Michael Seidel’s terms) to alter its ‘potential’ and (more like a body-snatcher) to direct its energies toward alien ends.” (Griffin 1994: 3) The ends of the alien force are commonly to censure and to mock (Keyishian 2005), not only particular individuals but also the moral standards of the present. In this sense, satire, together with parody, is a comic expression more dependent on current events. As Simpson (2003) claims, contemporary readers have difficulties in understanding satire from the eighteenth century as they lack the context in which it was written. Satire is a referential art that takes its inspiration from several elements of reality: people, personality types, specific political affairs, and class and gender differences. In order to understand contemporary satire, the audience needs not only the knowledge of the discourses that the satire plays with but also a competence to appreciate the pleasures of the commonly aggressive register of this humorous mode. Decisive factors are religious beliefs, political convictions and sexual orientation, as Willis (2005) argues, and ‘all these positionings involve power, a factor that is particularly important in contentious humour’ (Willis 2005: 130). Apparently, the satirist holds a position of power from which he/she censures the world but also “the notion the clear moral standards of the satire is likewise open to challenge.” (Griffin 1994: 37) Satire develops a greatly unstable system of relations among the satirist, the satiree and the satirized (person, group or abstract concept). While the comedian is supposed to challenge the accepted social norms, the social role he or she uses “is almost always establishing agreement, consensus with his or her specific audience. This is done by developing rapport and understanding between the comedian and the audience, but also by keeping the comments within the frame of acceptability of the particular group.” (Mintz 2005: 577) The satirist is not expected to look for a consensus, not even with his/her ideal audience. On the contrary, as Griffin (1994) notes, provocation is one of the four rhetorical proceedings of satire. In this vein, as with irony, satire is a ‘counter- discursive’ practice (Hutcheon 1988) that challenges the aforementioned social 124 Marta Pérez-Pereiro acceptability. Satirists therefore operate in the margins and do not seek general approval: “For those positioned within a dominant ideology, such a contesting might be seen as abusive or threatening; for those marginalized and working to undo that dominance, it might be subversive or transgressive in the newer, positive senses that those words have taken on in recent writing about gender, race, class, and sexuality.” (Hutcheon 1988: 52) Some satirical work can cause only general annoyance, as it pushes the limits of humor. Satire can provoke “its readers in its calculated ‘difficulty’” (Griffin 1994: 52). Following on from Griffin’s point, inquiry, play and replay are rhetorical resources that work together rendering a text neither morally defini- tive nor stylistically round and closed. Satire is a discursive practice where the relation among the communicative agents is crucial because negotiation is part of the produced text itself. Using examples from Masa Enfurecida, I will try to show how Twitter is a suitable medium for this kind of negotiation as it allows polyphony among its users and a continuous flow of discourses ready to be played with.

3 The tweets of Masa Enfurecida as microsatires

La masa, the multitude, the mob, was the nickname of the account Masa Enfurecida, a secret identity that had an average of 150,000 followers, which increased and decreased depending on the degree of offence contained in its tweets. The anonymity of La masa had been a subject of speculation since 2011. The account was created on 11 February. That same year a supposedly mistaken tweet suggested they were members of El Terrat, a successful TV company. The producers quickly answered that the Twitter account was not related to their programs (ABC 2011), but many followers still consider that Masa Enfurecida is a by-product of Salvados (La Sexta 2008-), a TV show devoted to exposing social and political problems with an important presence in social media. The strict condition of anonymity of the account forced its shutting in June 2016 due to changes in Twitter copyright policies. The website demands contact information, a telephone number, and an email address,5 data that could make any account traceable. Nonetheless its intense public activity for five years provides the researchers with a huge amount of materials for an analysis that has not been initiated in Spanish academia.

5 Twitter terms of service can be consulted at https://twitter.com/tos?lang=en#passwords Getting the mob angry 125

Reluctant to speak about them, and assuming a collective work, La masa has granted only a couple of interviews where they answer in their cryptic and ironic style, always using capital letters to suggest a loud voice. When ques- tioned about their mysterious identity, the satirists claim: “We are a mob. A little like the KGB or Televisión Española. Each cell only knows its immediate com- mand and doesn’t know about the running of the organization.” (Fernández 2011) The interviewer assumes the success of the account (which had 14,000 followers at that time) and its particular style of tweeting. Fernández asks La masa if they consider themselves as representing a new genre in Twitter: “Yes. We call it ‘Masa Enfurecida.’ But it is not new. It exists since the torch was invented. The scaffold is the most acid criticism.” (Fernández 2011) La masa defines its satirical discourse not only with tweets but also with an attitude towards other users, the media, and journalists. Although Twitter “promotes conversation and collaboration” (Mancera and Pano 2013: 216) Masa Enfurecida has a role based on bad manners: users never get an answer and their tweets are ironically echoed. In this vein, “discourtesy [works] as a strategy to ‘win the endogroup’” (Mancera and Pano 2013: 252). An aggressive attitude in social media can fulfill the expectations of a community that shares knowledge about the code of manners in social media and is accomplice of its subversion. An interview in Rolling Stone is the perfect example of this transgressive performance. Although the Spanish edition of the magazine never published that questionnaire, several users of social media echoed the censorship imposed on the interview,6 which circulates in a Word document without attribution. Masa Enfurecida alluded to the interview in the tweet “Nos encanta el olor a entrevista censurada por la mañana” [We love the smell of censored interview in the morning] on 10 November 2011, paraphrasing the famous quote of Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979) (Figure 1). La masa censures not only the journalistic pieces directly related to them, but also the work of renowned professionals as if they were disrespectful vigilantes of the internet. Some critics relate this attitude of humorous contesta- tion to the breaking of political consensus in Spain in recent years: “The violent humor, without the consent of those who modulated it with the alibi of the audience and the laws of the market, has grown similar … to the political activism of the 15-M,7 freed from the two-party system.” (Otero 2012)

6 The interview was anonymously published in http://manuls.tumblr.com/post/11729706337/ entrevista-censurada-por-rolling-stone-a 7 The 15-M movement was named after the date 15 May 2011 when thousands of Spaniards poured into the streets to protest government austerity measures. Peaceful protests that 126 Marta Pérez-Pereiro

Figure 1: Tweet that parodies the famous Kilgore's remark in Apocalypse now.

In a way, the creation of Masa Enfurecida, as representatives of what was called post-humor (Costa 2010), a comedy without laughter, exhibits a generational breach between the values of the Cultura de la Transición [Culture of the Transition to Democracy] of the last 35 years and the latest questioning of this political position. The Cultura de la Transición (CT) is the consensus created in Spain to establish the frame for democracy after forty years of dictatorship and a Civil War. Some claim that this consensus sweeps under the carpet some political tensions such as the territorial organization of Spain and the wounds inflicted during the war and Franco’s regime (Acevedo 2012). The Espíritu de la transición [The spirit of the Transición] works as a sort of foundational myth and is invoked “every time Spain shoots up the indicators of political antagonisms, working as a natural eternal justification, lacking historical precision.” (Delgado 2014: 57) The challenge to the Cultura de la Transición explores the limits of humor within Spanish society too. The clearest example of the different appreciations of humor in this context is one of the most repeated and popular mottos of La masa:theclichédphrase“es ETA” [is ETA], which was the first success of the Twitter account. Joking about the terrorist group ETA in the public arena was a provocationin2011,theyearofthedefinitiveceasefireofthegroup.Ina provocative paroxysm, Masa Enfurecida equates everything to ETA, from NGOs to social or political attitudes, and their followers use the expression to label anything evil in Spanish society. In this way, Cáritas, a charitable association, the Pope or the UN are ETA and, from La masa’s sarcasm, evil incarnate (Figure 2). Although the motto “ser ETA” [to be ETA] derives from the accusations of the conservative Partido Popular of the 15-M said to be part of

occupied the main squares in many cities lasted for weeks and started a new sort of collective conscience to face the consequences of the economic crisis and the political turmoil in Spain. Getting the mob angry 127

Figure 2: One of the multiple tweets in which La Masa uses the self-created cliché “is ETA”.

ETA’s movement, Masa Enfurecida extrapolates it to any aspect of Spanish social and political life which could endanger the alleged democratic stability. Only four years later, after the inappropriate comedy of La masa prepared the ground, the success of films like 8 apellidos vascos [Spanish Affair] (2014) or the TV series Allí abajo (2015) made clear the breakdown of a comic taboo in Spain. The thousands of tweets imitating the “es ETA” of the followers of Masa Enfurecida also contributed to transforming the joke into a widespread cliché in all kinds of media.8 Regarding humorous style and structure Masa Enfurecida’s tweets have the concision of a joke and share its knowledge resources (Attardo 2001). Moreover, tweets are commonly a single sentence that could be compared with the punch line of a joke. As Attardo sustains “the exact wording of the punch line of a verbal joke is extremely important because it is necessary for the linguistic element to be ambiguous and to connect the two opposed senses in the text” (2001: 23). A text that requires such concision as a tweet must work with extreme accuracy to be understood, particularly when it refers to a meaning not included in the text itself. Script opposition as one of the knowledge resources of the joke (Attardo 2001) plays a role in Masa Enfurecida’s many tweets. Ironic remarks of the Twitter accounts incongruously oppose to political statements or images of the day. In order to understand each tweet readers should know the context to which Masa Enfurecida refers to in an evasive manner. The brevity and speci- ficity of these satirical lines requires a great competence of the followers: they

8 The piece of news from The Huffington Post “15 cosas que son ETA” uses the expression of @masaenfurecida, not mentioning the source, to refer to similarities with what politicians do with ETA to discredit civic movements or their opponents. The mention in the list of the “primo de Zumosol” [cousin of Zumosol], a popular character in TV advertising adds an absurd element to the compilation, in a not very clear attempt to approach Masa Enfurecida’s style and therefore to make fun of a formely untouchable topic. 128 Marta Pérez-Pereiro should understand the context of the remark, which is often a bite from current events, and also the satirist’s style. In this vein followers should understand the irony unfolded by Masa Enfurecida. Tweets could be considered a sort of microsatires that present many of the features of the traditional forms of satire. The microsatires of La masa can be valued independently and therefore receive “favorites” and retweets (RT) of the followers. They can get hype for a brief moment but they do not operate independently from other tweets. Masa Enfurecida develops cycles of microsatires, whose success derives from its connection to reality, sharpness and repetition.

4 Tweet cycles as a strategy for humorous impact

The tweets of Masa Enfurecida, although commonly inspired by breaking news and the political statements of the day, seem originally quite absurd. Its humor only makes sense after a sequence of several tweets and the verification of the piece of news they refer to, sometimes tied to the tweets by a tenuous connection. As Henri Bergson (1999) sustained when referring to physical comic effects, repetition is one of the most powerful mechanisms to provoke laughter. In the case of Masa Enfurecida, the repetition of tweets is not identical. While it includes new elements in each tweet, provokes a satirical crescendo, whose effectiveness depends on the loyalty of its audience. In this sense, the term follower attains its full meaning when we refer to Masa Enfurecida. La masa not only demands a constant attention to media, but also a frequent update of the tweets of the account. The pretended difficulty of satire is therefore present in the rhetorical proceeding of La masa. The creation of tweet cycles is the key to understand the success and the imitation of expressions such as “Esta es la España que nos deja ZP” [This is the Spain ZP leaves behind] that, in the comic line of the aforementioned “es ETA,” ironically points that all the social and political failures of our time – from economic figures to the high price of gin and tonics– are a consequence of the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero AKA ZP between 2004 and 2011. Statements and photographs of politicians, daily news or tweets from other accounts are the raw material for the creation of supposedly apolitical and destructive slogans that subvert the sense of the original discourse. To para- phrase someone else’s discourses, to censor and interrogate are other resources of the satirist that condemns social and political attitudes but without a moral position. La masa has a full range of targets for its virtual Getting the mob angry 129 guillotine not only leading figures but also tweeters that mocks and brings to the public light. Repetition as a strategy is also applied to the targets of the account. La masa plays with public discourses to expose the contradictions between political programs and promises and the social reality of the economic crisis in Spain. Political corruption in Spain is therefore a recurring topic of their tweets. Their position can be summarized in a highly ironic tweet: “Lo que hagamos con vuestro dinero en nuestras vidas privadas no os importa” [What we do with your money in our private lives is none of your business]. Published on 8 November 2014, the tweet alludes to the scandal of the private trips of the senator José Antonio Monago with public funding. To understand the tweet, as it was already explained, it is crucial to understand not only the context but, via following Masa Enfurecida’s account, to know their modus operandi and style (Figure 3).

Figure 3: A tweet mocking a senator's fraudulent use of public funding.

One of the trademarks of Masa Enfurecida is the creation of series of tweets following a theme with variations. La masa creates a satirical symphony with a leiv motif, the core of the activity of the account during several days, which progresses with variations in the tone of their aggressive humor. This is the usual strategy when the target of Masa Enfurecida is a tweeter that holds a conservative ideology. Instead of the direct confrontation by means of allusions and answers, La masa develops what could be considered a sort of blitzkrieg of retweets. This strategy turns the message of those tweets upside down. They then become comic due to their cyclic exposition in the satirical account.Atthesametime,thefusionofmessagesgeneratesthesnowball effect that Henri Bergson (1999) understood as one of the most effective comic motives: a tiny tweet, among many others, increases the comicality by exaggeration. 130 Marta Pérez-Pereiro

La masa has a particular virtual confrontation with the twitter account of Sigfrid Soria, a former MP from Canarias and member of the Partido Popular, particularly aggressive in his liberal positions. The satirical strategy of Masa Enfurecida of retweeting the most extreme comments is the most common practice with @SigfridSoria. The cycle of retweets of this account is an indis- pensable part of the satire, particularly when Masa Enfurecida finds (and retweets) a certain repetition in Soria, transforming the original material entirely. For instance, La masa recovers the recurrent sentence of Soria “como la niña del Exorcista” [like the girl of The Exorcist], which uses as a hyperbole to refer to reactions of disgust or irritation, and transforms it into a sort volition of style. In fact, the cycle of retweets produces a supposed imitation of the style of Masa Enfurecida, which operates as a “super satire”: the satirized emulating the satirist. Again, the target, Sigfrid Soria, gives a serious answer, unable to understand the implicit play of the retweeting scheme of Masa Enfurecida (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Masa Enfurecida retweet their opponents’ public messages and transform them in new satirical pieces.

The stings of Masa Enfurecida can also be directed to collective or anonymous targets. They provoke the most furious reactions from tweeters who feel offended by the characterizations of certain social groups. La masa has special fondness for other national identities within Spain.9 These series of tweets are a clear imitation of joke cycles “that have come to dominate oral expression in contemporary society” (Oring 2008: 193). Although “it was argued that jokes

9 By national identities I refer to Catalan, Basque and Galician cultures, which are included in the Spanish State. Getting the mob angry 131 could not be reduced to outlets for aggression” (Oring 2008: 194), Masa Enfurecida works with them in a clearly injurious way with a set of particular ethnic jokes. The imitation of these jokes is a way to expose the contradiction between the political correction that is imposed in social media and their widespread circulation. As with other topics or targets, the account focuses its attack on an ethnic or regional identity for days, increasing the degree of aggression as the answers of the followers multiply or unfollows result as a last measure against the feeling of humiliation. The reactions of the users produce chains of tweets in which there is not actual conversation as Masa Enfurecida do not answer the tweets of the followers although uses them for satirical purposes.

5 Chains of tweets: Texts without closure and debate of the limits of humor

Tweets about ethnic identities generate the most intense and debated chains of tweets in the account of Masa Enfurecida. They use to mock identities that seem to know first hand as the Galicia or the Canary islanders. For Galicians, the inhabitants of the Northwestern corner of Spain, La masa points to their perceived economic backwardness and the ‘uselessness’ of the Galician language. By retweeting the answers given to their provocation, most of them serious, the humorous effects of the original tweet increase. The answers that followers give to tweets referring to Galician culture reveal, for instance, the vigor of some Twitter users to defend their language and literature but also their inability show an accurate knowledge on the topic. Meanwhile, Masa Enfurecida demonstrate the opposite in their allusions to Galician culture and history, as in the tweet where they relate the quantity of unfollows with the massive emigration of Galicians during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: “Hoy nuestra cuenta es como Galicia: se está yendo gallegos de ella todo el rato” [Today our account is like Galicia: Galicians are fleeing all the time] (9 April 2013). Again, La masa uses retweets for increasing the humorous effect of the collective defiance, as many of the indignant answers are quite serious and therefore incongruous in this context. Two scripts oppose in the chains of tweets: the satirical starting point of La masa and the outraged answers of the followers, who never get a direct response from the account. Whereas, as part of the discourtesy that leads the communication policy of Masa Enfurecida, the sole answer of the account is a retweet that works as an ironic remark. 132 Marta Pérez-Pereiro

Ruiz Gurillo explains how irony works in a conversational context where “come into play different aspects of inference. In one hand, the participants can reply to the ironic remark or to its implications (Kotthoft 2003). Also can choose a mixed, ambiguous answer” (2012: 105). While in private conversations speak- ers tend to answer to what it was said, in public debate participants respond to what is implied (Ruiz Gurillo 2012). The mixed formula of computer communication favors an interaction where users feel free to engage in conversations with unknown people or avatars but tone tends to be personal rather than imperso- nal. In this sense Masa Enfurecida’s followers use to reply to what it is said in the tweets, often in an attempt to correct what they consider a mistake or simply to censor the content of the tweet itself. It is interesting to note that positive responses are commonly retweets or favorites instead of a public message or answer. For instance, when Masa Enfurecida says ironically that the world’s richest retailer Amancio Ortega did not go that far by speaking in Galician “Amancio Ortega no ha llegado a donde está hablando gallego” (8 April 2013), some followers call La masa dumb because Ortega was born in León, not in Galicia. The reply that @masaenfurecida gives to this inappropriately accurate answer is that “El gallego más internacional es de León” [The most international Galician is from León] (8 April 2013). The public consideration about what is politically correct in the account depends on who is the target of the tweet. It can be extremely funny if it is someone else, but rather irritating when our identity or ideology is the one pilloried. Although Masa Enfurecida has a great army of followers, who contribute to blitzkrieg, the chains of tweets and retweets generate a constant debate about the humorous limits of the account. Since 2011, the phenomenon Masa Enfurecida has generated strong con- troversy but also a fandom that has no equal in the Spanish Twittersphere (Mariño 2012; Mengual 2012; Herreros and Moya 2013; Roman 2011). As José Luis Orihuela explains, the popularity of a Twitter account “is directly related to the value that produces to their referential communities. This value can come from the quality of the information, the sharpness of comments, the mastery of irony or humor, the capacity for provocation or the originality of contents.” (cit. in Mengual 2012) Masa Enfurecida gathers some the proposed values to establish a humorous community, meaning a group of appreciators for its satirical production. The humor of the account has another element for success to consider, the quicknessoftheresponsestonewsandpolitical statements. This is a virtue in the fast world of micro-blogging, where the quickest tweet is the most likely to be popular. This community is not intended to be homogeneous Getting the mob angry 133 and, as I will try to show, can be quite volatile when the account plays with delicate matters. Although some other humorous and polemical accounts have many followers, only Masa Enfurecida has become a franchise in the network. The success of La masa generated an imitational fury in Twitter that makes it impossible to locate all the Spanish accounts which include the term enfurecido in their identification.10 Trying to develop the same provocative speech, anonymous users create accounts to make fun of particular situations, celebrities or professions. From impersonations of football players to unofficial accounts of universities, the satirical style is not the sole preserve of single writers but a collective creation. The adoption of the term “enfurecido/a” [angry] in the name of the account is a clue to understand the humorous style, a mark to know that nothing can be taken seriously. It is quite significant therefore that, in five years of huge popularity, Masa Enfurecida attracts so many indignant responses. Audience involvement amplifies the effect of the satire of Masa Enfurecida but, at the same time, also wants to control its production in their responses. Followers alternate in sanctioning the good humor or denouncing what is considered excessive and an attack on appropriate taste and decency. In the case of Masa Enfurecida red flags are a daily norm as provocation is the trade- mark of the account. It is the collective followers who decide what is acceptable across slippery terrain. It is the job of La masa and some other accounts to expose the hypocrisy of this indignation as part of the provocation. A tweet from the 1 July 2013 relating to the defeat of the Spanish football team in the Confederations Cup of Brazil raised the general indignation and led to a massive number of unfollows. The sentence “Vaya cara de hijo de Del Bosque se nos quedó anoche” [We all had a face of Del Bosque’s son last night] seemed simple but it was an offensive and twisted way to say that the Spanish supporters were left dumbfounded by referencing the son of the team’s coach, who suffers from Down Syndrome. This was not the first reference to Del Bosque’s son but the most successful: it was retweeted 403 times and obtained 377 favs. Answers given by the followers were quite polarized. On one side, hundreds of outraged comments and unfollows; on the other, the current use of the “hijo de Del Bosque” [Del Bosque’s son] as a metaphor for mentally

10 In a simple search for the word “enfurecido” on Twitter there can be found hundreds of mimickers of the satirical account: https://twitter.com/search?q=enfurecido&src=typd&mode= users 134 Marta Pérez-Pereiro disabled11 in thousands of tweets from that moment on. In the middle, there is an interesting position described by Lockyer and Pickering (2001) when ana- lyzingtheresponsesofthereadersofthesatiricalmagazinePrivate Eye.The letters of the readers, same as Masa Enfurecida’sfollowers,wereexamplesof prolepsis, commonly used in relation to prejudice: “It operates as a way of articulating prejudice while also simultaneously denying such articulation.” (Lockyer and Pickering 2001: 639). In both cases, protests against what is considered bad taste are articulated in a double discourse: on the one hand, a complaint of a gross behavior; on the other, a self-defense of the accuser as a humorous person. Followers therefore show their attachment to Masa Enfurecida before a particular moment when they considered that a sensible line was crossed. Some responses from the followers are quite illustrative of the strategy of prolepsis: “Debe de ser una de esas veces que no pillo el humor, o no me hace gracia, o . . . un placer, hasta otra” [Itmustbeoneofthefew times I do not get the humor, or it is not funny to me, or… pleasure, see you soon]; “Siempre me has hecho gracia, pero te has pasado. Enga (sic), rectifica, quenoquierodejardeleerte” [I was always drawn to you, you have gone too far. C’mon, rectify, I don’twanttostopreadingyou]ortheeloquent“Muy desafortunado tuit. Ni en la sátira más mordaz cabe todo. Me divertía mucho con ustedes pero se merecen un unfollow” [Very misguided tweet. Not even the most scathing satire allows everything. I had a lot of fun with you but you deserve an unfollow]’. The tweet of the son of the coach fostered a debate about the limits of humor in social media. Gay (2013) quotes the tweet of Ricardo Galli – @gallir – in an article about the polemic that summarizes the tension between humorous expression and its blurred limits: “I am a limitless champion of freedom of speech, but I will explain to you what you cannot joke about.” This tweet ironically addresses the limits of humor in social networking: everything is hilarious until we are the target. In its particular style, Masa Enfurecida uses the idea of political correctness to challenge their followers ten days after the publication of the (in)famous tweet: “Nos acercamos a los 100.000. Por favor, sugeridnos límites del humor que no deberíamos cruzar para no volver a meter la pata” [We are reaching 100,000 again. Please, suggest to us limits on humor that you believe we should not cross to avoid upsetting you again] (Figure 5).

11 It is relevant to note that the online translator I used for the most suitable meaning included a neutral, a pejorative and a “politically correct” entry of the term. Although there is an “apparent ‘quantitative’ decline” of the use of PC, it still infiltrates public discourses.” (Suhr and Johnson 2003: 5) Getting the mob angry 135

Figure 5: Some tweets of Masa Enfurecida are intended to boost public debate about the limits of humor in social media.

6 Conclusions

The self-awareness of the satirist, the conscious play with humor, is continu- ously present in the tweets of La masa like a metasatire, a live exploration of its functioning and consequences. The constant and quick replay of followers and enemies creates a chain of tweets where different discourses are interwoven and played with in a text without closure that is open to debate and challenge. Humorous tweets can be analyzed therefore as individual pieces but mostly as part of thematic cycles and chains of messages that are exchanged in public conversation. The formula of micro-blogging on Twitter favors the rhetoric strategies of satire as a multitude of very different discourses collide in the same time slot and interact in a horizontal level. Satirists, who are not professionals for the first time in media thanks to the Internet, can play with these discourses and develop new comic proposals that are spread widely and without apparent censorship. Wit and speed in the humorous answer are rewarded with continuous repetition and copy in a process that generates an endless flow of 140-letter satires. It could be said that the characteristics of the medium, namely immediacy and interactivity, are suitable for the creation of satire, which is collectively boosted by its appreciation, replication and imitation. The repetitions, the use of catchphrases and the breaking of the boundaries of political correction are the trademarks of the satire of the account Masa Enfurecida and the reason for its success and the apparition of a great number of mimickers on Twitter. The phenomenon of Masa Enfurecida even crosses 136 Marta Pérez-Pereiro boundaries to reach traditional media, where the satirical purpose of the account is commented on in political forums. “We did something wrong,” La masa published in 2 July 2014, “to be mentioned in talk shows.”

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Bionote

Marta Pérez-Pereiro

Marta Pérez-Pereiro has a PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain) and graduated in Communication Studies from the University of Glamorgan (UK). She is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the University of Santiago de Compostela. She is also a member of the Research Group for Audiovisual Studies: content, formats and technology (USC- G.I. 1786). Her research focuses on humor in media, small European cinemas and fictional television.