Among Spanish-speaking young people who are used to using the Internet, there are few people who do not know Jorge Cremades . This 28-year-old comedian has become famous thanks to his Vine and Facebook videos, which have helped him to build up a fan page on the latter social network with more than 5 million followers .

But Cremades is more than just a viral phenomenon; he has also become, for many people, one of the greatest representatives of socially accepted machismo in Spain and, consequently, one of the comedians who receives the most criticism.

To what extent is what Jorge Cremades does just humor? Is criticism of him justified? Let’s try to answer these questions through a psychological concept: Cultivation Theory.

The polemic of Jorge Cremades

Jorge Cremades’ videos have been criticized since they began to be viralized, although the fact that made the Internet a battleground between defenders and detractors of his work was the publication of one of his articles in the magazine Cosmopolitan a few months ago.

In that text, the comedian gave a series of “tips for men” about how they should face the holidays as a couple so that everything goes well. However, neither the content of this text nor the type of humor on which it was based was different from the ones Cremades uses in all his videos.

In other words, everything basically consisted of a caricaturization of the differences between men and women (captured through gender roles) and the way in which these are reflected in the way both sexes relate to each other. For example, it stresses the importance of going to a restaurant where they serve “fresh salads” for them while they can “puff up and mix all kinds of dishes”.

At the same time, his videos show situations such as a group of men discussing who should accompany a drunk woman home or a friend rescuing Cremades when his girlfriend asks him for his mobile phone because it has run out of battery.

A role model or a comedian?

In a world where it was assumed that everything that is expressed in gags of humour has no effect on social reality or on its collectives, Jorge Cremades’ videos would not have generated controversy. In his dialogues, there are no phrases that are directly offensive with clear insults to collectives, in the style of the speeches of xenophobic and racist political parties.

But that’s normal, because Jorge Cremades is not a professional politician, but a humorist. The criticism of his work is centred on the implicit message of his videos , not on the literal content of the dialogues. The situations he shows may seem ridiculous, but they are not different enough from the real gender roles to make them seem totally out of place.

There is a part of reality that can be fed and legitimised by these comedy videos, unlike what happens, for example, with the brutal acts that we see in series like Game of Thrones, set in something far removed from our daily lives. That part of the comedy videos that is perceived as something similar to what really happens can feed the latter, making it less important.

And, if we add to this that the majority audience of Cremades is very young , the root of the rejection of these gags appears: the possibility that they continue to inoculate harmful social and psychological phenomena, such as implicit biases on gender roles and sexual orientations, division of labour, reification of the woman’s body, etc.

Does politics clash with humor?

Criticism of Cremades is not born because it produces ideas that would not be acceptable in any context, in the style of what happens when religious fundamentalism claims to destroy heretical representations. Criticism occurs because it is understood that in the current context certain implicit messages can have a negative social impact. This is where ideology comes into contact (or rather collides) with humour, something that is supposedly beyond any political thinking.

For certain ideologies, the impact that Jorge Cremades may generate is totally undesirable and that is why an attempt will be made to include this comedian in the framework of representatives of machismo; not because he personally has to be, but because in practice his work may feed a sexist ideology .

For other ideologies, what can be seen in these videos is, beyond the humour, how society should function, and from this position the work of Cremades can be claimed as a reflection of how men and women, heterosexuals and homosexuals, are, beyond “the complexes of political correctness”.

Finally, a third group of people simply points out that humour is humour and has no political or propagandistic effect. Only the latter will act as if politics and humour never come into contact , although this is an assumption that does not have to be fulfilled, as the Cultivation Theory points out.

Crop Theory

So, what really generates criticism is the possibility that each of Jorge Cremades’ gags is not a joke about a particular man reacting to a particular woman (since in the end they are both fictional characters) but an unwritten rule about how the figure of the man interacts with the figure of the woman. In the end, history has shown that implicit discourses based on the “this is so” can easily be transformed into an alternative version: “this must be so”.

This ties in with a theory of communication known as Cultivation Theory, based on a relatively simple idea: the more we are exposed to fictional and non-fictional content transmitted by television, the Internet and digital media in general, the more we assume the belief that society is as it is described on the screen .

At the same time, his videos show situations such as a group of men discussing who should accompany a drunk woman home or a friend rescuing Cremades when his girlfriend asks him for his mobile phone because it has run out of battery.

A role model or a comedian?

In a world where it was assumed that everything that is expressed in gags of humour has no effect on social reality or on its collectives, Jorge Cremades’ videos would not have generated controversy.
In his dialogues, there are no phrases that are directly offensive with clear insults to collectives, in the style of the speeches of xenophobic and racist political parties.

But that’s normal, because Jorge Cremades is not a professional politician, but a humorist. The criticism of his work is centred on the implicit message of his videos , not on the literal content of the dialogues.

The easy answer to this question is also the most disappointing: it depends. Each individual can extract a totally different message by watching the same 6-second Vine. But when it comes to judging the social impact that Jorge Cremades’ videos can have, what matters is whether when we watch and interpret them we put ourselves in the shoes of one of their protagonists or if, on the contrary, we never abandon our position as spectators who laugh (or not) at fictional characters.

In the first case, yes we can get to interiorize the biases and behaviors of a fictional character , that is, it is possible to adopt him as a behavior model. In the second case, by watching many of these videos, we can come to assume that what is shown is representative of what happens in society, and embrace a totally opposite and critical attitude towards this .

Concluding

It is not unreasonable to think that many of the people who criticise Jorge Cremades’ humour have, paradoxically, been influenced by these multimedia contents, although in the opposite direction to what one would expect. Instead of going on to believe that these kinds of actions are normal and therefore morally acceptable, they may believe that these kinds of behaviour are more normal than they really are and that the struggle for equality between men and women deserves more respect and attention.

Neither of these two cases seems far-fetched, although the danger of the first possibility is probably greater than the positive of the second. Moreover, the way Jorge Cremades’ videos are presented makes it easy to identify with the characters . In fact, they are usually titled something like "when you go to such a place and your girlfriend tells you such a thing".

The humorous potential of some videos may consist in showing totally surrealistic scenes that do not fit with these titles, but usually it is easy to see a caricatured version of socially normalized behaviors : jealous girlfriends of other women, men pretending to be interested in what their friend tells them, etc. Regardless of whether or not you want the audience to feel identified, it is very easy for that to happen; there is a good part of the problem, and the reason why it is assumed that instead of questioning what is being seen, an important part of the audience will see it as something normal.