O riso em tempos de ditadura : os (não) silenciamentos (re)velados pelo Pasquim no período de 1969 a 1971

Abstract

This work examines O Pasquim, a newspaper that marked its time for being an instrument against censorship throughout Brazilian dictatorship. The newspaper used humour as a form of resistance against the interdiction imposed by the state apparatus and its controlling forces upon Brazilian citizens. A journey through its pages shows the resistance character of the pasquinian discourse and brings out a multitude of subject-positions and discursive formations that put meaning across with laughter during the dictatorship. The fact that critical irreverence was above issues of censorship and the extreme strictness of military control lead us to try to understand the reasons through which or the ways how displacements happened and meant, as well as to try to understand how the authors of the Pasquim managed, through laughter, to bring out, all the time, the interpretation, signification and production of meaning. This research was rooted on questionings on how humour was produced in times of military dictatorship and on how humour was shown and became a part of the culture and leisure of those days, among other questions that, for being intriguing, have taken the researcher to the rewarding study of Discourse Analysis. Created and led, among others, by Tarso de Castro, from Passo Fundo, the Pasquim showed texts that were very different from others issued at that time, which was marked by the heavy restrictions of dictatorship. Such texts, which stood out due to their irreverence and political criticism, echoed meanings that were erased, silenced by dictatorship. The analysis of the corpus, composed of discursive sequences and verbal as well as non-verbal images published in the tabloid, allows us to understand that the pasquinian discourse voiced the signs of a dominant sense, one that comprehends the illusion of what is natural, obvious or evident and, thus, an oppressed and not always silenced sense. This (un)silencing is printed in the manifestations of resistance and it is, thus, by looking upon such resistances and the social role (of the people s spokesman) that the Pasquim played during the dictatorship that the relevance of this research is justified. On the one side, the analysis allows us to understand (at least partially) what the pasquinian discourse revealed at a time when censorship dictated what could (not) be said; it also shows, on the other side, the implications that are still experienced now as a result of those days, such as the people who stand speechless before so many atrocities observed within the political sphere. This (current) silence is the fruit of seeds planted in the dark basements of dictatorship and, given the strength of the planting, also bear even today strong resistance