[They say that I've been the baddest of the bad in Bad-landia.
And that the people of this country want to stone me.
Here I am.
Stone me.
Let he who is free from corruption
cast the first stone.]
The world now today exists in a way that everyone feels
some kind of oppression.
And being able to laugh about what’s oppressing us is sometimes
the only way of challenging the power.
Take Brazil, Columbia, Venezuela, and Mexico,
those four countries are responsible for
almost 25 percent of the homicides in the world.
And so, that's definitely something that is affecting the region
in a way that we're really concerned about.
But the thing we are not prepared for is crisis around democracy.
We thought this was something
that was progressively going to get better.
And I think we weren’t prepared for the kind of backlash we're seeing.
[Good morning!
Honorable-
—it’s really hard to start with “Honorable” no?
Since Mexican politicians are more discredited
than the telethon right now.]
Overall, in Latin America, we know that
political parties are the institutions that they trust the least.
The comedy gives us an opportunity
to laugh about it a little bit to understand it better.
[What we can do is something even the Greeks used to do,
and that all important comedians do,
which is to ridicule and disrespect
corrupt people.]
[Reading has a certain degree of difficulty because to start,
you see the book and you ask yourself,
“Well, where does it turn on,” no?]
Humor certainly deactivates a lot of the tensions that kind of arise
from political confrontation.
But you can also use comedy as a call to action.
We launched something call the laughter effect
and it is a massive exploration that attempts to ask and answer
how are we impacted by comedy when it comes to
civic, political, and social issues.
This is important to study from a social justice perspective
because we're running out of ways
to communicate with people that are not just like us.
[. . . to take direct actions,
to leave that powerful position that theater provides.
Something very similar to what happened
with the vanguard between the wars.
Yes, that the artists decided to leave the theater
because they were a place for the bourgeoisie
and intervene in the streets.
So, let's say that those vanguards are an influence on me.]
[More deaths aren’t needed in this country.
More fear isn’t needed.]
[The situation is really critical, and at the same time,
the humor must be very critical, very radical.]
The '60s and the '70s musicians and writers,
they had this role of protesting to change things.
But I think that the people who are really thinking about it
and proposing new ways of looking at
current situations are the comedians.
So what we’re doing with the groups from Latin America
that are already doing political and civic comedy
is we're trying to work with them very intentionally
to identify humanitarian groups in their countries of origin,
and for those groups to really make art together.
How do we get John Oliver to talk about Cuba?
And this is the before the U.S.
had normalized relations with the island.
And we started to talk to him.
“This is a story that we want to do.
We think it’s funny because of this.”
And so, he’s helping us brainstorm and all of a sudden you can see
that the light bulb in his mind is starting to go off.
All of a sudden he goes,
“You know what? I think we're going to do this story.”
I had no idea the Cuban embargo had to be renewed once a year.
I just assumed it was like an Amazon Prime trial. You just—
you sign up once and it simply rolls on without you even noticing.
I found the opportunity to speak
about LGBT issues.
And after I started, very, very quickly
I started to talk about women issues.
And I haven’t stopped talking about that.
[The way we write reflects our personal experiences.
We are lesbians,
bisexuals,
pansexuals,
and polyamorous.
There are very few writings on this subject.
Are you a lesbian? Only a little.
Especially at night.]
Comedy is inherently risky,
and of course there's always a line you have to tread carefully.
Half of the cultural authorities have fear of what we say.
So, we are dealing with some censorship in the rest of the country.
But in Mexico City, we are very well recognized.
It’s kind of a bipolar relationship.
But I feel that humor makes me stronger than what I am normally.
And it helps me to fight fear.
The most important role of an organization like Open Society
is to provide the strength for people that want to resist.
We need to provide the tools.
We can never lose track
that it's about them and it’s for them to speak.
[And somehow, what we want to do
is change the way we perceive the state.
We see it “this” way,
But we have to face it head on.