Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Chapter 3
Laughter and reflection, both for the same price: analysis of three comics
Si los caricaturizamos es porque
están haciendo muy mal su trabajo.
Si les molesta que lo hagamos
es que estamos haciendo bien nuestro trabajo.
José Hernández, Mexican cartoonist
In the following pages, I will integrate the theories of humour and the historical context
discussed in the previous chapters with the visual sources. I will examine how the
language of humour was woven into the narrative of comics, highlighting social issues
and criticising the political situation in Mexico. I will also see how mechanisms of
humour (exaggeration, incongruity, superiority, relief) point to a fault of the authorities
or society, becoming acts of ‘true humour,’ since they are pointing to a social flaw. As I
trace the social topics discussed in Hermelinda Linda, Los Agachados and La Familia
Burrón, we will come to a better understanding of the concerns of the Mexican society
at the time. I will also be able to show how humour was used to highlight these matters
in a country under a repressive regime, and in turn, the benefits that readers and artists
enjoyed by using it. I will not try to define something as ‘Mexican humour’ since, as
Roger Bartra states, the idea of ‘lo mexicano’ is subjective and many of the studies
which try to define it do so by resorting to stereotypes from an intellectual point of view
or from the point of view of those in power. 1 Instead, I examine the universe of humour
in its own right, but which is situated in the particular historical context of 1970s
1 Roger Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía. Identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (Mexico: Grijalbo,
1986; repr. 2007), pp. 13-16. This is not to deny the existence of something we could call ‘lo mexicano.’
Numerous essayists discuss it, such as Octavio Paz in El laberinto de la soledad (1950). However, for this
research, ‘lo mexicano’ will be understood as something seen only indirectly, ‘como un estilo, como una
atmósfera inaprehensible directamente, de los personajes y las acciones de una novela, de un tratado de
derecho civil o de la obra de un filósofo’. Jorge Portilla, Fenomenología del relajo y otros ensayos, 3rd
edn (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Vida y Pensamiento de México; repr. Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1997), p. 17.