Although entire libraries have been written about humor, it remains a mystery why some things amuse us and others don’t. We know that although there are universal juices, context matters. The Marx brothers, or the Sancho Panza proverb, always get a laugh, and there are very local comedians who transcend, like the very British Monty Python. But that’s strange. The normal thing is that humor works through contact. The further the humorist and viewer are (culturally) apart, the less likely it is that the latter will laugh. Recently in Berlin I tried to explain to a group of Germans who Chiquito de la Calzada is. Trust me, don’t try.
Humor also has a subjective component that cannot be fought. If something isn’t funny to you, no one will make you laugh. But since it is above all a collective community, it is very uncomfortable to know that you are the only one not laughing at a joke that amuses an entire country. You rarely feel like a foreigner.
It’s happening to me now with Alpha Males (Netflix). I’ve been trying to understand what so many people are celebrating just by seeing a bunch of jokes more widely seen than comics, some from gas station cassettes, smelling rancid and sometimes even sexist. I don’t know where the daring, the refined and the parodic are: they are the married couples of José Luis Moreno, packaged in Netflix format, with an excellent production design. Topics about men are like that and women are like that, written lazily. I don’t mind everyone there with their laughter. The strange one and the one who is wrong is me, but I thought that Spain left this humor in the last bingo that Pajares and Esteso took part in. It fascinates me to see how it survives disguised as postmodernism.
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