Humor as a disguise for Noel Rosa’s critical “malandro”

Abstract

By depicting his character as a “malandro” (a mischievous yet loveable trickster), Noel Rosa employs a kind of humor that suggests a discursive strategy of disguise to approach critically dominant values. From his discourse, emerges an ironical, scornful, sometimes cynical, voice which speaks from a non-existent perspective at that time, referring to the social tensions which are implicit in his universe. His ambiguous discourse of humor and irony was also a
strategy of disguise that produced a different voice, which depicted his lack of respect for the chaotic and unfair world of order, but praised the chaotic and cheerful world of pleasure. In order to understand the historical determination of the humor discourse, this analysis is based on Bakhtin’s Folk Culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and to understand why the humor discourse can act so efficiently in creating a critical, disguised or attenuated effect, this analysis also adopts a psycho-analytical approach – by specifically referring to Freud’s essay “Humor”.