A Brazilian’s Comic Mania: Social Media
By LARRY ROHTER
SÃO PAULO, Brazil -- When an Internet research group recently released a study concluding that the most influential person in the Twitter universe was Rafinha Bastos, a Brazilian comedian who came in well ahead of President Obama, Conan O’Brien and Kim Kardashian, the English-speaking world was predictably baffled. “Who is @RafinhaBastos?” Wired magazine asked.
But here on Mr. Bastos’s home turf, where he has long had a reputation as an early adopter of technology, there were lots of knowing nods. Mr. Bastos, 34, is a pioneer of Brazil’s burgeoning stand-up scene, appears weekly on two popular television shows, has just issued a hit DVD called “The Art of the Insult” (“A Arte do Insulto”) and has 2.7 million followers on Twitter — all that success propelled by his enthusiastic embrace of the Internet and social media.
“The Internet is my home,” Mr. Bastos (BAH-stows) said during a long, relaxed interview at a cafe down the street from his apartment here. “I’m a creature and creation of the Internet, and I’m very proud of that. The Internet made it possible for me to construct my career the way I wanted to.”
Mr. Bastos may be the most prominent example in Brazil of a comedian who has learned to use the Internet for his own purposes, but he is by no means the only one. In contrast to their comedy predecessors, who favored sketches and slapstick, younger comedians in this nation of 200 million are embracing stand-up, as are their audiences. A flourishing circuit of comedy clubs now exists in large cities, and early next year Comedy Central will be going on the air in Brazil, the channel’s first foray into Latin America.
In a way Mr. Bastos and his group are like the Brazilian musicians who more than 40 years ago mined Anglo-American pop and transformed it into the globally influential style known as Tropicalia, only this time the raw material is comedy, not music. Marcelo Mansfield, Mr. Bastos’s mentor, is a bit like Rodney Dangerfield. Marcela Leal works some of the same terrain as Tina Fey, and Danilo Gentili, Mr. Bastos’s partner in mischief on television and in a club, has more than a touch of Bill Maher in him, as shown by a DVD called “Politicamente Incorreto.”
“There’s a new generation of humorists out there who are acid, vibrant and clever, who grew up watching American sitcoms and Eddie Murphy films,” explained Alvaro Paes de Barros, the general manager for Brazil of Viacom Networks, whose properties include Comedy Central. “Stand-up comedy is an imported format, but this new generation sees it as a platform for self-expression and has learned to use it with a lot of intelligence.”
Living in a society that tends toward the chaotic, Brazilians have always had an appreciation for the absurd. Just last year a circus clown ran for Congress with slogans like “Why not elect a real buffoon to office?” and won by a landslide. But the emergence of Mr. Bastos and others like him is to some extent also an inevitable consequence of globalization.
“In the past people here didn’t have access to American and English humor,” said Augusto M. Costa Netto, who is the editor of a series of books called “The Best of Humor in Brazil” (“O Melhor do Humor no Brasil”) and also lived for many years in the United States. “Richard Pryor, for example, was a genius, but he was unknown in Brazil because the means of communication we have today didn’t exist then. Stand-up comedy is a new phenomenon for us, and there are a lot of young people suddenly wanting to try it, including some who aren’t funny, because they’ve seen it on the Internet or cable television.”
Though he is as witty offstage as on and seems to see the humor in any situation, no matter how vexing, Mr. Bastos came to comedy in a rather roundabout way. Raised in Porto Alegre, a city of 1.5 million that is the capital of Brazil’s southernmost state, he studied journalism in college there before winning a scholarship in 1999 to play basketball in the United States. He ended up in Nebraska, at Chadron State College, and to stay in touch with friends back home he began to e-mail jokes and parodies of Brazilian pop culture figures.
“I was in a town of 5,000 people in the middle of nowhere, near the Wyoming border and not that far from Mount Rushmore,” recalled Mr. Bastos, who stands 6 foot 7 and has an elaborate tattoo on his left arm. “But I quickly discovered that the Internet offered a way to get my jokes out there, that there were people from Angola, Portugal and the U.S. watching me, even way back then in ’99.”
At the same time he began watching Comedy Central and other American cable television outlets and grew increasingly intrigued by what he saw. The comedians who have made the strongest impression on him over the years, he said, tend to be from the school of indignation: George Carlin, Lewis Black, Bill Hicks, Bill Maher, Lenny Bruce and especially Louis C. K.
Upon returning home in 2000, his athletic career cut short by an injury, Mr. Bastos got a job as a reporter at a local television station. But he continued to do comedy on the side, and after striking a deal to distribute his material through Terra, a major national Web portal, he decided to try his luck here in Brazil’s biggest metropolis.
Onstage Mr. Bastos, who is married and recently became a father for the first time, often touches on traditional subjects like marriage or the aggravations of urban life. “A wedding is a much more happy occasion for a woman than for a man,” he observes in one of his routines. “It’s not by accident that at the ceremony she wears white and he wears black.
“Men were not born for long-lasting relationships. Why do you think a dog is a man’s best friend? Because it’s a faithful companion? No, because the damn thing dies in 14 years. When it comes time to choose a pet, you’re never going to see a man pick a turtle, which sticks around for 90 years.”
Stand-up comedy was initially hard to sell to bar and club owners, Mr. Bastos explained, because they were accustomed to “pratfalls, wigs and funny voices.” So when he and his colleagues tried to explain their approach, they would ask, “Do you know that monologue that opens ‘Seinfeld?’ ” which had been a big hit on cable television in Brazil. “That’s what we do.”
Even before Facebook started, Brazilians were flocking to a social media site called Orkut, and Mr. Bastos immediately got involved with that. As soon as YouTube emerged, he began posting excerpts of his stand-up work there, and when Twitter became available, he jumped on that too. On an average day, he said, he posts four or five tweets about subjects ranging from politics to sports, and has the highest ranking on Twitalyzer’s Influence Index.
More recently Mr. Bastos has been featured on two weekly prime-time television shows. The more established “Custe o Que Custar” (“Whatever It Takes”) is political satire in which Mr. Bastos and other cast members interview politicians or take to the streets to force them to respond to questions. Mr. Bastos has gone to the Brazilian Congress to quiz legislators on national affairs and mock them when they answer incorrectly, and once, in a town where the sewers didn’t work, went to the mayor’s office dressed as a piece of excrement.
“You ask absurd questions, or basic questions like, where is Canada?” he said. “You show them a map and ask them to point it out, and when they can’t, that lets you talk about the lack of qualification or preparation of our representatives.” He added, “Politicians in this country are not used to being confronted, so in the beginning they wanted to beat us up.”
Mr. Bastos admits to having a split personality as a performer. “On TV I do what Jon Stewart does, with political jokes,” he acknowledged. “But what I really like is to talk about daily life in a provocative way, touching on subjects that are more sensitive, and that’s the focus of my stand-up.”
For that Mr. Bastos now has a 300-seat club here called Comedians, where he is part owner and can try out new jokes and routines. The club fills up even on weeknights, drawing locals and tourists from all over the country, and numerous other spots like it have also sprung up in the same general area, allowing aspiring comics to hone their skills before they move to the stodgier world of television.
“We’re not considered artists, we’re compared to punk rockers playing in the garage to see what happens, and I’m fine with that,” said Mr. Gentili, 32, who has just been given a late-night talk show on the Bandeirantes network.
Mr. Bastos, whose full name is Rafael Bastos Hocsman, shares something else with some of the American comedians he most admires: He is Jewish, with ancestors who emigrated from Russia. That background makes him unusual in Brazil, where less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the country’s 200 million people are Jews, and is also, he thinks, relevant to his approach to comedy.
“I never carry that banner because I never had a real Jewish education, and I don’t do jokes about Hanukkah or bar mitzvahs,” he said. “But I inherited a lot of traits from my father, who is a doctor and has all the sarcasm, the eternal skepticism, the self-depreciative streak and the sense of irony that I associate with the Jewish people.”
When asked about his designation as the most influential Tweeter, Mr. Bastos made light of it: “Of course it’s natural that I’m being recognized as a genius.” But turning serious he also expressed hope that the recognition will give him some insulation from a wave of lawsuits he is facing, many of which seem, by American standards at least, frivolous. In one case government officials in an Amazon state are suing him because he describes the state’s inhabitants as ugly in his routine and on his DVD. More seriously, prosecutors here recently questioned Mr. Bastos about an admittedly offensive joke of his about rape victims.
The Twitter recognition has also led to some inquiries from American entertainment companies, reviving his longstanding desire to perform in the United States. To emphasize that point, after speaking in Portuguese for 90 minutes, he switched to English, which he speaks fluently, though with a slight accent, no more than, say, Yakov Smirnoff’s.
“I want to do stand-up over there, but I don’t want to do just two or three nights,” he said. “I want to build a career.” He paused for a second and then asked, earnestly, “Does my English” stink? Assured that it does not, he continued.
“The thing that I would really like to try to do is translate my material, I mean translate the literal words,” he said. “I know that some jokes I do here, about states or people or a supermarket chain, would never work over there. But the marriage jokes would work, and so would a lot of my other material. Actually the only reason I haven’t done it already is because I have a lot of things happening here. I cannot just leave here. But yes, maybe it’s something that will happen. Why not?”
