Political Humor in a Dictatorial State: The Case of Spain

Abstract

Political humor is examined as a response of individuals to the conditions typical of dictatorial regimes. The trading of jokes and stories with anti-regime content helps to mitigate anxiety and the sense of helplessness encountered in highly controlled political contexts. Furthermore, the joke-teller engages in a form of nonviolent resistance that is difficult to counteract by the agencies of state authority. Material for this essay is drawn from the period of Franco rule in Spain, due allowances being made for the specific cultural and political attributes of time and place. I While the material in this essay is contemporary, in the sense that it belongs to our own times, it is also very much historical, since it concerns a recent past sharply separated from the present by a major political discontinuity. I will be discussing oral political humor during the long dictatorship of Francisco Franco Bahamonde, the man who ruled Spain for almost forty years prior to his death on November 20, 1975. Political analysts often refer to those long decades as the era of Francoism, franquismo in Spanish, and the term is quite appropriate since it was an individual, rather than a distinctive ideology or a given set of institutions, that chiefly characterized the period. Generalisimo Franco Commander of the Armies, Chief of State for life, Caudillo, and head of the Falange - made it a policy to delegate only administrative functions while retaining full personal control of the machinery of government. He was the state, and it is thus in no sense surprising that the political humor we shall be examining has Franco as its central theme.