The Press, The Literati, Carnival, and Humor

We will look at the involvement of intellectuals in Carnival, its different festive manifestations and how they were portrayed in a humorous and often critical way in the illustrated magazines of the late 19th century, but especially in the first decades of the 20th century. The main documentary corpus of this book, the magazines Fon-Fon! and Careta are presented to the reading public in this chapter, discussing several important pieces of information about them such as: their periodicity, main characteristics, the intellectuals who contributed to these publications, their caricaturists and their readership. In this chapter we also talk about the “battle” that was waged between the different forms of carnival manifestation such entrudo and “carnival”, identified by intellectuals as being the manifestations linked to the Great Carnival Societies, organised in a grandiose and didactic way by the Brazilian intelligentsia, who saw the festival as a way of “educating” the masses.