Differences between France and Portugal include cheese and TV stars. While journalist Éric Zemmour became the white hope of the far-right French, who censored Marine Le Pen for being lukewarm, humorist Ricardo Araújo Pereira (Lisbon, 49 years old) is conquering Portugal with a political entertainment show, Isto É Gozar Com Quem Trabalha (this is a Laugh at those who work), who has refused to whitewash André Ventura, leader of Chega, the far-right party that has become the third political force in the Republic’s assembly.
Despite satirizing the representatives of Chega in his room, as well as those of other formations, the comedian refused to invite André Ventura to the set during the special programs he was presenting for the 2022 election, unlike other candidates. The President of Chega demanded an interview and accused the moderator of being “a coward sold into the system who is afraid of being dismantled live and directly”. After examining the complaints about the ban, the regulator of social communications recommended that the TV channel SIC, which broadcasts the show on Sundays, try to “redress the imbalance” in the rest of the network. The chain rejected the petition, defending Ricardo Araújo Pereira’s freedom to “exclude the defense of ideas that, in their opinion, violate human dignity, equal rights, freedoms and guarantees”.
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In a lengthy interview on public broadcaster RTP, the comedian explained his position: “I’m not inviting him because I don’t want to. I have an entertainment program and I have no right to be invited to an entertainment program. It’s different from journalism. I invite people with whom I have profound disagreements, but who accept our game, which is democracy. The fact that they agree with me or not is not the reason to invite them to the program, the reason is that André Ventura considers himself anti-system and the system is called democracy, which I find very satisfactory because I don’t have a can find better”.
Ricardo Araújo Pereira has several qualities that explain why he has become a television star. One is charisma and the other is the tables. Although he studied journalism, he always chose to laugh. His career has ranged from writing screenplays for Herman José, another comedian revered by the Portuguese, to creating the mythical Gato Fedorento, a show that made its way onto television after birth as a blog by four stand-up comedian regulars. He has written several books, including the one on the coronavirus crisis (Ideias concrete sobre vagas. Uma história da pandemie), and is a media columnist in Portugal and Brazil, a country where he is widely recognized. His interview on O programa do Jô, in which he sipped several flans and confessed that he loved to induce convulsions in others without touching them, deserves an internet search.
Part of his triumph has to do with his betrayal of a certain Portuguese entity who identifies with restraint and restraint. Each program is a revenge against the “Respeitinho”, the subjugation sustained by decades of dictatorship that still refuses to go away. With a big smile and a mischievous expression on his face, the comedian sticks his finger in his eyes. His impersonations of the President of the Republic are a classic. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the type of politician that comedians dream of in a crisis, helps him as best he can. The same thing bathes in a lake with alligators and goes out at night to pay bills at the register after the Republic Assembly scrapped some budget plans that led to snap elections.
The show’s success has continued since it premiered in March 2020. In each episode, the average viewership was 13.5% and the screen share was 24.4%, making it the leader according to the SIC chain. Last season ended with a special session recorded at the Altice Arena in Lisbon with 10,000 spectators. “It’s natural for 10,000 people to flock to see this, to watch a man talk for half an hour about parliamentary inquiry committees. Who wouldn’t? “That’s what this auditorium was built for,” the comedian joked that night.
Ricardo Araújo Pereira, Portuguese comedian, in the special “Isto É Gozar Com Quem Trabalha” recorded at the Altice Arena in Lisbon.SIC
It is fair to admit that since the Socialist Party’s absolute majority premiered in 2022, the Portuguese news has led to such crazy situations that not even the eight screenwriters of Isto É Gozar Com Quem Trabalha would have dared to imagine a night of excesses . The shadow of corruption of some high-ranking officials, short-lived appointments, resignations, a commission of inquiry into TAP airlines turned into a kind of season series and an embarrassing episode that happened in the Ministry of Infrastructure with the theft of a laptop. The clashes between the minister’s advisers and the police intervention have provided prime material. António Costa’s Annus Horribilis was a party for Ricardo Araújo Pereira and his team.
In October 2022, weekly Expresso ran a front page asking the million-dollar question: “Will Ricardo Araújo Pereira be the real leader of the opposition?” Precedents for comedians throwing themselves into politics are piling up, from Italian Beppe Grillo to to the Ukrainian Volodymyr Zelenskiy, and the Portuguese has never hidden his sympathies for the left or for Benfica. However, he makes it clear that his thing is laughter and not politics.
He often refers to himself as a “clown”, rejects acting offers and does not use the term “artist”. The only concession that is seriously made is this: “Perhaps our great contribution in this moment of bipolarization and fanatical radicalism is to show that people who don’t think the same thing can disagree with warmth and humor.” A new season begins on September 3 with a live program at Altice Forum in Braga, for which all tickets are already sold out.
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