Seriously Funny: Mexican Political Jokes as Social Resistance

5. Zedillo, Fox, and Calderón: Alternate Political Parties in Power under a Neoliberal Model

176 chapter five Zedillo, Fox, and Calderón Alternate Political Parties in Power under a Neoliberal Model One day, a woman in a restaurant suddenly began shouting: “Help! My son is choking! He swallowed a coin and can’t breathe!” Some man gets up from his table, grabs the kid by the testicles [balls—to the intellectual], and gives them a tremendous squeeze. The kid immediately spits up the coin. The man goes back to his table and sits down as if nothing has happened. The boy’s thankful mother gets close to him and says: “A thousand thanks, sir, what an effective method! Are you a doctor, or do you work for the Red Cross?” “No,” the man answered, “I am a tax auditor.” Introduction With the passage of time, political jokes have consistently become more pointed and sharp, with each new presidential term and each new president , as they seem to satisfy Mexican society’s demands less and less. Ernesto Zedillo has few physical features that the joke can exploit. He is young, good looking, so modest in his dress that he can bore one to tears, and when he smiles he naturally produces sympathy. Those who know him say that, in short, he is fascinating; the problem is that in short is an irrelevant concept to a society that only sees him on television or across barricades with his sharp, monotonous crybaby singsong, and who in his statements proves to be arrogant and intolerant. One politician regally summarized the presidential image, when during a lunch meeting he said, “He even speaks better now.” Zedillo, Fox, and Calderón • 177 The Zedillo joke explosion truly is unique. It’s possible that just in the first fourteen months of his administration, more jokes were made about him than were made about other presidents during their entire terms. The jokes focus on three areas: the economic crisis, his silliness, and his chicken-heartedness. Many of the jokes have been taken from the past, being mere adaptations, but many others are specific to him, especially those that play with his last name. One added ingredient is that they have been circulated with unusual speed and have penetrated new areas. Even people who in the past thought little or not at all about humor began to tell Zedillo jokes. This could have the advantage of re-politicizing Mexican society, and what better method than through humor? For everybody and even for him,1 it is well known and obvious that he attained the presidency by accident. Diego Fernández demolished him with one great truth in the historic first televised debate: “You are the outcome of two tragedies: Colosio’s assassination and presidential appointment.” Presidential appointments that were a blessing and not a tragedy were beginning to look like part of a distant past. The problem was that the long Mexican political stability began to be stained with blood, bad economic decisions that generated poverty, and instability—and the political system showed fissures that daily grew larger. In front of this type of perception, humor couldn’t be benevolent, and not even courteous. If the end-of-grace periods began with Salinas, by attacking Zedillo immediately, the process continued: his mistakes as a member of the presidential cabinet earned him humoristic jabs. As minister of public education, he struggled to survive the scandal in which the Salinas intellectuals sunk him, because of the history textbook volume in which, with good reason, he placed responsibility for the 1968 killings on the army; humor brought the polemic to a close in a cutting manner: “In what way is Zedillo like Madonna?” “Neither one knows how to write children’s books.” The long and drawn-out economic crisis, and the enormous failure to resolve it on the part of neoliberals, technocrats, bureaucrats, or whatever you might call them, caused growing resentment. Among the jokes involving the economic crisis, we found the following: The new national emblem has a seal [the animal] on it, because we’re in water up to our necks and we keep on clapping. • 178 • Chapter 5 Nineteen ninety-five is the year of José Luis Cuevas [a popular painter] because pinta de la patada [this is an expression with a double meaning: literally it means “he paints badly,” but it also means “the outlook is bad (for the year)”]. • “In what way is the minimum wage like menstruation?” “It...