João Paulo Capelotti (practicing lawyer, Curitiba, Brazil)
On 24 August 2010, the Brazilian Association of Television and Radio Broadcasts (whose acronym in Portuguese is “ABERT”) filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court to challenge article 45 of the Elections Act (Bill n. 9.504/1997). The changes brought by Bill n. 12,034/2009 to this law forbade TV and radio broadcasts to ridicule or degrade candidates or parties during the three-month period before the polls.
Brazil has a mixed system of constitutionality review, which means that the Supreme Court accepts constitutional complaints coming from lower courts in form of appeals, as well as lawsuits filed directly to the court by determined entities listed by the Constitution, such as the General Prosecutor, political parties, unions and associations of national range (as ABERT is). The latter lawsuits are called “Ações Diretas de Inconstitucionalidade” (Direct Action for the Declaration of Unconstitutionality), or simply ADI. This one was numbered 4,451 and ABERT could not have wished for a better judge to write the opinion of the court: in 2009 Justice Carlos Ayres Britto had led his peers to strike down the Press Law (Bill n. 5,250/1967), enacted during Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985) and filled with a number of provisions that allowed censorship and other restrictions deemed incompatible with the 1988 Constitution.
Ayres Britto was pretty much convinced by the reasoning presented by ABERT, and considered that the matter was urgent – as the 2010 elections were less than four months ahead. His peers agreed with him, and the excerpts of Bill n. 9,507 that restricted humorous expression during the campaign were suspended until a final ruling from the court. The opinion, later regarded as a sort of pro-humor manifesto, featured some memorable lines that have since then been consistently quoted in defendants’ motions in cases involving freedom of humorous speech. I transcribe some of them here:
“Critical thought is part of a whole and trustworthy information. Humor is a form or style of handling the press. Quoting Brazilian writer Ziraldo by heart, humor is not just an instrument of causing laughter, which can be called comedy or the like. Humor is a critical view of the world, and laughter is the side effect of the unexpected discovery of the truth that it reveals. Therefore, the foreseeable social utility of journalistic labor compensates, by far, occasional excesses of this or that piece of writing, this or that cartoon or caricature, this or that program. In other words, humorous programs, cartoons and a caricatural form of circulating ideas, opinions and witty sketches are part of the activities of the ‘press’, a perfect synonym of ‘journalistic information’ (art. 220, §1º) and deserve the freedom secured by the Constitution to it. As a consequence, the concrete exercise of this freedom allows the journalist the right to criticize anyone, even if in a bitter, blunt, sarcastic, ironic or irreverent tone, particularly against the authorities and State apparatuses. (…) The freedom of the press should not be restrained during the electoral season. It is full all the time, in every place and circumstance. It would be paradoxical to affirm that the press has a relation of mutual dependency with democracy but is restricted precisely when democracy itself reaches its apex or brightest point. It is precisely during the electoral season that civil society as a whole and electors in particular are in greatest need of a free press and their professionals. (…) If TV and radio broadcasts can produce and disseminate cartoons, satires and shows involving political parties, pre-candidates and authorities in general outside of the electoral period, they can also do it during the elections” (Brazilian Supreme Court. ADI 4,451/DF, Opinion of the Court written by Justice Carlos Ayres Britto, determined on 2 September 2010, my translation from the original in Portuguese)
Years later, this preliminary injunction was confirmed by the court, and art. 45, items II and III, from Bill n. 9,507/1997, were forever banned from the Brazilian legal system. As I affirmed in an article published on Humor in 2016, Ayres Britto’s reasoning highlighted the connections between humor and the public sphere, emphasizing how humor could foster critical thought, spread public debate and help the people to make more informed electoral choices.
The landscape of humor production then, however, was quite different from the one we currently witness. Although social media already existed in 2010, they were not as popular and central to our culture as today. Memes were not the main source of laughter. Television provided the much-needed comic relief, with actors impersonating politicians — the most famous being the group behind the show “Casseta & Planeta: Urgente!”, made of short sketches and aired every Tuesday evening. Actors and comedians even organized a demonstration at Copacabana Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, to gather visibility for the cause of striking down the restrictions brought by the electoral law and in favor of the reasoning featured in ADI 4,451.
Sixteen years later, the courts are dealing with new kinds of problems involving humor during the electoral period, deepfakes and AI-generated content being the most prominent ones.
But maybe the most unexpected and most important viral content of 2026 polls is a video in which Fabio Porchat — one of Brazil’s most famous comedians, and a demonstrator at 2010’s Copacabana act — didactically explains a scandal in which Flávio Bolsonaro, one of the candidates to the Presidency of the Republic, is directly involved.
Porchat gained nationwide recognition for acting and writing sketches for Porta dos Fundos, one of the world’s largest YouTube channels dedicated to humor, with 19.2 million subscribers and 3,700 videos. He also hosts TV shows like “Que história é essa, Porchat?” (something like, “What’s this about, Porchat?”), in which his guests tell funny, unusual situations in which they were involved, and acts in comedies that usually perform well in movie theaters, besides touring the country with his stand-up routines.
He is not a writer or producer of this specific video, called “Revelando: Grandes Igrejas, Master Negócios” (“Uncovering: Big Churches, Master Business”), but he lent his visibility and prestige to narrate an intricate plot: how banker Daniel Vorcaro built a corruption cobweb that involved congressmen, evangelical pastors, Supreme Court judges and other high-profile characters of Brazilian political environment, including Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, whose audios asking a huge amount of money for Vorcaro were undisclosed a few months ago.
Although Vorcaro has been arrested for nearly one year, and news related to evidence extracted from his cellphones reach the headlines almost every day, implicating more and more politicians, the press had not been able to properly explain where did he come from, how he built his empire and what are the suspicions — and the evidence — against each character who is deemed to be part of his dirty schemes. The 30-minute documentary does that with clarity — and, maybe most importantly, abundant drops of humor, including irony, sarcasm, puns, unexpected parallels. Porchat, a supporter of Vasco, a football team that has not been particularly successful in the past few years, wraps the video with a snappy remark: “Nothing in this video is about your faith. Your faith has nothing to do with it. I believe in Vasco, I’m not in a position to judge anybody’s beliefs. This story is about what some people did with the trust you placed in them” (28:10 – 28:23).
As of the writing of this post, the video counted more than 8.1 million views and 725,000 likes, being the number 1 among the most hyped videos on YouTube. Excerpts of the video are also spreading in neighboring social networks, such as Instagram and TikTok.
A few hours after the video had been posted, it was struck down by Meta for no apparent reason. A public outcry followed suit, and the company eventually restored the video, apologizing for inconveniences, but refusing to provide any explanation of why the video had been banned. Whatever the reason, this temporary withdrawal just gave it even more visibility, making it reach headlines that it might have not reached before, under accusations of censorship, and enhancing the curiosity of the audience for “forbidden” content (the famous “Streisand Effect”).
The episode also sparked debates about the role played by platforms such as YouTube in controlling the content that reaches (and the one that does not reach) the public sphere. Concerns with censorship sponsored by state governments have been largely overshadowed by fears about the power of algorithms and opaque business strategies.
Moreover, Porchat is being complimented for doing what the traditional media did not, or did not succeed to do. “A humorist doing the work that journalists did not have the guts to do,” declares the comment with the highest number of likes. Maybe Judge Ayres Britto, retired since 2012, would disagree with it, as he saw humor and journalism not as opposites, but sometimes overlapping categories. As we can notice in his opinion in ADI 4,451, humor can be a way to tackle subjects of public interest, and therefore is no stranger to elections. If the Supreme Court highlighted its importance in the past (thinking of cartoons and impersonations of politicians in TV sketches), the judgement is still valid more than a decade later for a documentary peppered with jokes aimed at explaining a scandal, its characters and its political implications.
So far, the video has not motivated lawsuits. But it is probable that if it does, the reasoning connecting humor and politics famously consolidated in ADI 4,451 will be remembered as an applicable precedent. More than that, hopefully the video will earn more than laughter, provoking genuine reflection about topics that have been hovering over the Brazilian public sphere for decades.