Make Me Laugh

A couple of Sundays ago, actors on the variety/game show "Hazme reir y serás millonario"(Make me laugh and you'll be a millionaire) set up a practical joke at the expense of Sammy, a Televisa personality who suffers from some sort of mild developmental disability. (His family says it's dyslexia, though everyone has been acting as though something far more severe were afflicting him. I'm not sure I would have classified him as disabled in any way had I not known beforehand.) Sammy was led to believe that he was being considered for a possible role on a new show, which was untrue, and wound up in his underwear in an effort to prove himself worthy of the nonexistent job. 

After the sketch (which was objectively unfunny, controversy aside) was aired, the show's judges condemned the joke in language that was more offensive to Sammy than the joke itself, calling him "an accident of television" and "abnormal". Katia D'Artigues followed that up with a column critical of the sketch a couple of days later. On this Sunday's show, amid mutual accusations and recriminations, one of the judges who had slammed the stunt walked off the stage during the live broadcast. 

Which leads us to Ricardo Raphael's column on Monday: 

We are so accustomed to discrimination that we don't have the intellectual antibodies to detect it when it is happening. If we are placed in a situation of superiority we tolerate it, we promote it, and we reproduce it without objection. It's telling that, in the case mentioned, we can identify with roles of the señoras Montijo or Castellanos --or at least with the naughty stuffed parrot-- so that the grotesque behavior imposed upon the mocked individual is defended with the most disingenuous of reasons. 

Not even the critical judge from the program, Rafael Inclán, had the intellectual tools to transmit the reasons for his instinctive discomfort. 

[Break]

Meanwhile, it wouldn't be a bad idea for the broadcasters to carry out a revision of their ethics codes and to also name a defender of their audiences, with the explicit purposes of making their business compatible with the freedom of expression and the right to not be discriminated. Let's hope that before doing so, the Constitution doesn't end up coming down on them in the form of a costly judicial lawsuit. 

It's not clear to me if this is a proposal for an internal censor or an ombudsman or what, but if the idea is to forcibly regulate television, that seems draconian; simply banning bad taste is an ineffective way for a democratic country to move its popular culture to a higher moral ground. Encouraging social stigmatizing of programs that trade in this sort of material seems much preferable. 

It also should be pointed out that if the Sammy sketch was over the line, then a huge amount of what appears on Mexican television is as well. Making the regular guy on the street look stupid is a pillar virtually every comedy program. And whatever his shortcomings, Sammy appeared on the show willingly. A lot of the foils for Mexican TV comedians do not.