The Strategic Use of Humor in the Spanish Indignados Movement

The ubiquity of humor in social life contrasts, however, with the scant attention paid to it by social scientists. In the field of social movements, the significance attained by the study of emotions in the last decades has surprisingly not resulted in a growth in interest in humor. This paper aims to contribute to fill the gap in connection with humor and protest by studying the use of humor in the Spanish indignados/15M movement. To do this it focuses on various groups and activities located in Madrid, the epicenter of the protests in 2011. The analysis of the strategic use of humor in four different forms of communication (placards, performances, internal documents and Internet communications) will assess its subversive potential in, among other aspects, the communication of demands, the internal organization of the movement, the recruitment of potential activists and the construction of a collective identity. At the theoretical level, this paper draws attention to the benefits that arise from combining an expressive focus in the analysis of humor with another which sees this as an instrumental action of those involved. Results highlight how the Spanish indignados were to a large degree aware of a number of benefits associated with the use of humor that went beyond having fun and, therefore, organized several activities in order to obtain these benefits. In this research I will make use of participant observation, analysis of various documents and websites as well as of interviews with key informants.