The Unboxing of Franco: The Role of Comedy in the Exhumation of a Dictator

Since the Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the government’s intention to exhume the remains of dictator Francisco Franco from the Valle de los Caídos in 2018, the public and the media’s reactions were, needless to say, expectedly polarized. This presentation discusses the televisual portrayals of the image of Franco as a comedic character who refuses to be exhumed. I claim that, through the use of humor, these portrayals utilize the event of exhumation as a way to further the arguments that the dictatorship was genocidal in the public’s retroactive evaluation of the regime. The threefold purpose of this humor, which includes coping, cohesion, and criticism - all identified as the common purposes of the use of humor in genocide - aims at establishing Franco as a genocidaire in the public eye. Humor in genocide not only fosters solidarity but can also serve as activism (Ungor and Verkerke), and the Spanish public seems to have a consciousness regarding the Francoist regime that is already part of the mainstream. Scholarship on genocide humor claims that its dark, and often self-deprecating, humor is used to dispel genocide. However, what we see in the humor surrounding Franco’s exhumation seems to push us towards the conclusion that Francoism was indeed a genocide.

Erma Nezirevic is Lecturer of Spanish at the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities. She is the coordinator of Spanish 3105: Introduction to the Study of Hispanic Cultures course. Her research focuses on collective memory, nationalism, critical genocide studies, and intersections between cultural production and biopolitics in contemporary Iberia.