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 establish- ing 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 pub- lishing 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 mean- ing. 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.

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