Satire inverts hierarchies rather than directly confronting power; irony says what must be said without really saying it. Jokes have an psential role under censorship and oppression. One publication that played the part of humorous resistance is the Brazilian magazine O Pasquim, and one writer from that magazine is witness to over a decade of that paper’s raucous newsroom: the pranks and the heavy drinking, but also the struggles. Here, in this in-depth interview, is Richard Goodwin and the life of a newspaper.
“Do you know the story of O Pasquim?”
Richard Goodwin asks me this simple question and takes a sip of water. We sit at a wooden kitchen table in his house in Paquetá, an island in the Guanabara Bay of Rio de Janeiro.
I pause. Before this interview, I thought I did know the story of O Pasquim, a famous satirical magazine printed in Brazil between 1969 and 1991 that published brazenly political and morally loose articles and cartoons during some of the harshest years of dictatorship censorship. It was the newspaper that became the most important voice of resistance to the military regime in written media, the only independent publication to survive every stage of institutional censorship.
There exist academic articles on O Pasquim’s particular use of satire, archived copies of the magazine, and interviews with the big names, like the celebrated cartoonist Ziraldo and the columnist who wrote on underground counterculture, Luiz Carlos Maciel. But the man across the table from me did not fully fit into the story I had researched. When he asked me if I knew the story of O Pasquim, he spoke in perfect English, his accent surprisingly lilted in a southern drawl. He was originally from the United States but had begun working for Pasquim when he was only 18 years old and stayed at the paper for 14 years.
“Rick is the living memory of O Pasquim,” Daniela Thomas, Brazilian film director and daughter of the cartoonist Ziraldo, told me in an email.
I did not fully understand how this fellow North American was the memory of the famously raucous and underground newspaper of satirical resistance – let alone how he had come to Brazil and, eventually, ended up living in a red house covered in green vines on a pastoral island off the coast of Rio. His mysterious life story seemed to contain a yet untold story of O Pasquim, one that went beyond the narrative I had already read second-hand.
I take a sip of sweet Brazilian coffee before replying to Richard’s question:
“Tell me.”
What comes next, along with new stories of satire and resistance from a remarkable magazine, is the strange life of a quirky North American humorist wandering through the dark history of his adopted country.
Richard Goodwin – nicknamed Rick, or Ricky – was born in 1953 in Durham, North Carolina to a wealthy family. And not just to any family. Richard’s full name is actually Richard Winston Goodwin. The Winston side of his family owns the Winston Cigarette Company, meaning that he comes from the old, white wealth of the American South.
Richard’s father was not in the cigarette business, though. He was a sociologist at Duke University connected to the Methodist Church and focused his research on South America. When Richard was four years old, his family had planned to move to Chile for field research. His parents studied Spanish and prepared for the trip. But during a layover in Rio de Janeiro, Richard’s father found Brazil so interesting that he decided to study there instead. With not a single word of Portuguese, Richard’s family moved to Brazil, and not to bustling, cosmopolitan Rio de Janeiro. Instead, Richard spent six years of his early life between the states of Minas Gerais and Espírito Santo living with the Krenake tribe, one of Brazil’s indigenous groups. Though the tribe had been forcibly westernized by the early 1960s, the Krenake people did not have a western understanding of possessions. Until he was ten, Richard owned few things, including clothes.
He returned to North Carolina at age ten. That was his father’s academic schedule for all of Richard’s childhood: research in South America for a few years, then return to Duke to teach for a year, and then head back to Brazil. The first transition back to the United States was clearly jarring.
Richard had to find a way to adapt to the schizophrenic cultural shifts. Humor became his weapon of choice, not in a political struggle, at this point, but in a personal quest to understand the dramatic changes in his life and to find social acceptance. When he went to an American public high school for one year at age 13, he started a school paper where he would write funny stories and mock teachers. It was a huge success.
It was in Brazil, though, that journalism went from being Richard Goodwin’s hobby to the beginning of a profession. He spent most of his teenage years in the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte. The dictatorship had already begun in 1964. In 1968, the same year that the Brazilian dictatorship began intensifying and formalizing state censorship and extrajudicial arrests, Richard turned 16 and began to work at the Belo Horizonte regional branch of the media giant O Globo.
“When you start out in journalism, at least when I was a kid, they assigned you either to do police work or sports. You start at the bottom rung of the ladder. So I began working in the sports section of the paper, which would have been a bad thing since I wasn’t that interested in sports, but it turned out to be great. Each person covers a specific soccer team in Belo Horizonte, and by coincidence, my turf was a team called Cruzeiro Sport Club.”
His luck was twofold: not only did Cruzeiro become very successful in Brazilian soccer while Richard covered the team, but many of the players also had wide-ranging interests beyond sports. At this point, Richard was deep in Brazilian counterculture. With hair past his shoulders, he wrote plays, composed music, read underground newspapers, and had little interest in doing journalism in a conventional way. So he pitched a new idea to the biggest newspaper in Minas Gerais, Estado de Minas:
“Why don’t we do a Sunday interview, a big Sunday interview, a two-page interview with football players? They said, ‘well, we already do interviews.’” Richard smiles as he recalls the conversation. “But the new thing with these interviews was that no one would speak about soccer. I’d interview these soccer players and we’d talk about anything other than soccer. It was something nobody had ever done.”
The first interview, with the soccer player Tostão, was more interesting than anyone had expected.
“It was 1970 and we were in the middle of a dictatorship. But the fact that I knew Tostão, that I’d seen him practically every day, made him give a very bold and daring interview with leftist political opinions.”
No one had imagined that political content could appear in a soccer interview, and the piece was published. With his two-page sports spread, Richard evaded the dictatorship censor for the first time. It would not be the last.
“Why am I telling you this?” Richard asks me, keeping track of the pacing of our conversation as only a journalist does. The mid-afternoon heat settled over the island, and Richard’s house, airy with huge windows looking out to a verdant garden, was still muggy with humidity. Bugs hummed in the mass of green plants outside the window and a fan whirred slowly in the background.
“Because it leads to 1973,” Richard answers his own question. “Because of those interviews I was doing, I caught the attention of Ziraldo, who also lived in Belo Horizonte. That was the reason I was invited to work at O Pasquim.”
The story of O Pasquim had already begun before 1973. It’s a story that many Brazilians already know: after the increased censorship from the Fifth Institutional Act (AI-5) in 1968, a group of famous journalists and humorists, dissatisfied with their inability to speak freely in the mainstream press, decided to start a newspaper.
“They came together and decided to make this paper called O Pasquim. The word ‘pasquim’ is actually very derogatory. It refers to a terrible, scandalous kind of tabloid, worse than the Daily Mail,” Richard says. He was still covering sports for O Globo in 1969, but when he later joined the paper, he heard the stories about the way the publication started. “They were trying to decide on a name and then in a meeting, Jaguar, one of the humorists, said, well, they’re going to call us a pasquim anyway. Why not just make that our name?”
The first issue of the paper came out in June of 1969. To everyone’s surprise – including the journalists who staffed the magazine – the publication was a total hit.
“No one expected the strength and resistance of O Pasquim,” Márcia Neme Buzalef writes in her doctoral thesis on the newspaper. “By the 16th issue it was selling 80,000 copies, and by December of the year it was founded, it sold 250,000 weekly copies and printed adds from major multinational companies such as Shell. It sold more than the weekly Veja and Manchete, two of its contemporaries, put together.”
I ask Richard why he thinks O Pasquim was so successful. He answers that, in part, it was the content. O Pasquim did not have a fixed editorial line. Instead, all of the famous writers and humorists in the paper wrote what they wanted.
“Some of them were more politically oriented. Some of them wanted it to be the newspaper of resistance to the dictatorship, which it later became.” Richard catalogues the different approaches to the magazine: “Some of them came from the countercultural movement and wanted it to be an underground newspaper. Some of them just wanted to be funny. And others, like Tarso de Castro, wanted it to be a gossip paper that would talk about what was going on in society. Others thought it was a good opportunity for a magazine to publish openly about sex in Brazil.”
Readers from a range of social classes could find in O Pasquim something that they found funny or interesting. But the magazine was also radical in its style. Rather than publish articles in stiff formal Portuguese, which is what most other newspapers did, this new humor magazine had a more vernacular style, printing curse words and slang. Sometimes the writers would even come up with their own slang, which would then catch on in popular parlance. And Pasquim’s interviews, which would run for pages, were radically different from the standard journalistic interview of the time.
I ask Richard to explain this new style of interview and how it came to be.
Richard: Some things at O Pasquim that everybody considers to be a stroke of genius was just lucky, or even a lack of a notion of how to do things, you know? That happened with the interviews. When they got together to make O Pasquim they said, ‘What are we going do for the first edition? Let’s do an interview that will shock everybody.’
So they interviewed a guy named Ibrahim Sued, a very rightwing fellow who was a social columnist. He only wrote about social gossip. He mainly covered high society women. He was a very foolish, silly, and apolitical guy. The only political views he had were very right wing, so no one expected O Pasquim to interview Ibrahim Sued. But they did.
And then you have to transcribe the interview. Transcribing an interview is lots of hard work. Nobody likes to do it.
Lara: It’s the worst part.
Richard: So when they were putting together the first issue of O Pasquim, nobody wanted to transcribe the interview. They drew straws to see who would transcribe the interview. The guy who drew the shortest straw was a cartoonist named Jaguar.
Jaguar was a great cartoonist at the time, top of his field, but he had no journalistic experience. He went home with the tape recorder and probably slaved at it for days, but he finally transcribed it. But he transcribed exactly what the people on the tape said, with no grammar corrections, with no editing, with no putting it in a proper perspective, nothing.
Because he had never transcribed anything before, it took him a long while. The newspaper was ready to go to print and he still hadn’t finished. He was the kind of guy who never showed up. “Jaguar, you have to finish this. Jaguar, you have to finish that.” So when he finally showed up with the interview, there wasn’t time for anybody to look at it. They printed it exactly as he had transcribed it. And he had transcribed exactly what people had said on the tape.
That turned out to be what everybody considered the big revolution. That’s how O Pasquim revolutionized interviews.
And so O Pasquim began, unprecedented in its success and birthed from a series of ingenious, humorous mishaps.
The unorthodox interviews with soccer stars that Richard printed in Estado de Minas were in line with the kind of interviews O Pasquim printed. In early 1973, Richard was just 18 years old and Ziraldo invited him to join the paper as the interview editor. He moved from Belo Horizonte to the bohemian Santa Teresa neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro and expanded on this idea of the unedited interview.
“I had this concept that an interview with O Pasquim was like a play. You know, you have the characters and they have their lines,” Richard says. “When you write a play, it hasn’t been staged yet, so you have to describe what people are doing. I would write what was going on while people were talking. I would put in the whiskey they were drinking, the music that was playing in the background. Or, if somebody would leave to go to the bathroom and come back and crack a joke that didn’t have to do with the interview, I would also put that in. In parentheses I would include things like ‘Jaguar, laughing’ or ‘Jaguar, being sarcastic’. The aim of the thing was to make people feel like they were there, at the interview.”
During my own interview with Richard, there is a much subtler kind of humor, a sort of playful quirkiness in the way Richard acts. It was evident from the morning of the interview, when he messaged me to say that he would meet me by the ferry wearing a bright blue and red striped shirt that no one else on the island of Paquetá would possibly wear. That way, I would easily be able to recognize him.
After I turn on my tape recorder, the only interruptions come from Richard’s two dogs, which occasionally wander through the room. The big black one, Jack, sits on my foot until it falls asleep while the smaller, spotted one, Kino, sneezes loudly during the more dramatic, impassioned moments of the conversation.
Richard also has a small black and white cat named Pink. I raise my eyebrows at the name, and he explains that he also used to have a cat named Floyd. But Floyd had disappeared, allegedly stolen from the ledge of his garden wall.
“How do you know Floyd was stolen?” I ask.
“Because we never found the body,” Richard replies.
Though Richard’s jokes during the interview might not be the laugh-out-loud Pasquim variety, he is passionate about the value of humor as something political, not just entertainment. Indeed, O Pasquim managed to be so successful under the dictatorship because of the way its writers used jokes. As Richard puts it, “the wit and whims of humor managed to get through the cracks in the censorship.”
The dictatorship did not harshly censor O Pasquim when it was first published. The military – like the writers themselves – thought it was going to be a local humor paper, nothing like other explicitly political publications in the independent press, such as Movimento or Opinião. That is, they thought that up until the newspaper began selling hundreds of thousands of copies per week. By then, it was too late.
With a huge following, the paper printed explicitly about sex, evading the strict moralism of the dictatorship. The actress Leila Diniz, for example, in her interview with O Pasquim in November 1969, revealed her sexual exploits and described how she lost her virginity. This was at a time when the very word “virginity” was blacklisted by the military dictatorship – but O Pasquim would simply print those blacklisted words using asterisks, avoiding a direct violation of the rule. On the level of politics, there were limits to what the paper could do – no one could print cartoons of anyone in the military, for example – but irony and double entendre filled the pages of the magazine, allowing for criticism of the regime.
But these choices did have consequences. Bernardo Kucinski reports in his book Jornalistas e Revolucionários that a rudimental bomb was planted in the back of Pasquim’s offices in March 1970. Staff at O Pasquim believed that the conservative group Tradição, Família, e Propriedade (Tradition, Family, and Property) was behind the attack, motivated by their anger after the Leila Diniz interview.
Then, in November of 1970, the military itself tried to shut the paper down. Luiz Carlos Maciel, the journalist in O Pasquim who wrote the counterculture column “Underground,” describes in an interview with Sergio Cohn how, in November of 1970, the military arrested everyone on the masthead – besides two members, Henfil and Millôr Fernandes – and took them to the barracks of the Vila Militar in Rio. A captain, who had led an investigation against O Pasquim, wanted to know if the magazine was receiving money from Moscow.
Richard says that this group arrest was actually meant to prevent the paper from being printed. But if that was the military’s strategy, it did not work.
“When word got out that people had been arrested and that the next edition of O Pasquim might not come out, artists and intellectuals from all over Brazil started sending articles to keep Pasquim going. People like Glauber Rocha, big names, like Caetano Veloso, all pitched in. Even people with little journalistic experience went to work at Pasquim’s office. They put together a paper,” Richard says. The contributors managed to put together a full issue of O Pasquim – and then keep the paper going for over two months – as though no one had been arrested at all. “For the public, Pasquim continued.”
The actual writers of the paper were released in January 1971. Having survived the mass arrest, O Pasquim still had to deal with local censors. Members of the dictatorship who lived in Rio were assigned to supervise the paper’s content. Here, the journalists used humor in a strange and unprecedented way.
“Stories about Pasquim and its editors are full of tales about how humor was fundamental to the relationship between the paper and its censors,” Neme Buzalef writes. The staff at the paper befriended their censors in order to get content published.
It was between O Pasquim’s founding in 1969 through 1973 that official censors signed off on content before it went to print. According to Ziraldo, a total of six censors dealt with the paper in this period but two are particularly notable: Marina Brum Duarte – known as Dona Marina – and general Juarez Paz Pinto. With the former, Jaguar recounts in his memoir, Confesso que Bebi – Memórias de um Amnésico Alcoólico (I Confess that I Drank – Memories of an Amnesic Alcoholic), how he noticed that Dona Marina had a drinking problem and used whiskey to lure her into a friendship with the journalists at Pasquim.
But the editors of Pasquim were nervous when they were assigned Juarez Paz Pinto. “You can argue with a low-level bureaucrat,” Richard says. Clearly, that is not the case with a top general.
Juarez Paz Pinto was the censor before Richard’s time at the magazine, but Richard knows the story of what happened when the editors first met the general. Instead of asking Pasquim to come to an official military or government office for him to sign off on the paper, he asked them to come to an apartment in Copacabana.
“So they arrived, trembling. But when they got there, and over time as they kept going, they discovered that this apartment in Copacabana was his bachelor pad, the place where he would receive the women he wanted to have sex with,” Richard says. “He would sit on his bed and they would show him the copies to be censored. He’d laugh and say, ‘Oh this is so funny. Oh, now, I’d like to let you say that, but I know you’re going to cause trouble for me.’”
Jaguar recounts similar juicy details about the general in an interview with Jornal da ABI. Juarez Paz Pinto would even tell the women he was seeing that they had to wait to come in until after he finished censoring the paper. Ironically, that censorship would often block content on moral grounds.
Sérgio Augusto, also a journalist at Pasquim, describes how Juarez Paz Pinto would read copies on the beach, near Post 6 on Copabacabana, and then come to the office of Pasquim barefoot and in a towel to hand back the censored copies.
Needless to say, Pasquim’s censorship was not as strict because of these friendships. Humor was the paper’s way to navigate censorship under the dictatorship.
It was after Richard Goodwin’s first interview for Pasquim in 1973 that everything changed.
Richard: There was an American anthropologist here in Brazil named Angela Gilliam. She was doing research about the movimento negro [the black rights movement in Brazil] and racism under the dictatorship. We thought she was interesting, and we interviewed her. We talked about racism, but racism was a forbidden word.
Lara: You couldn’t say the word racism?
Richard: It was blacklisted. You couldn’t say someone was racist. You couldn’t say someone was black. But it was such a good interview that we decided to publish it anyway. I don’t know how it passed through the censorship.
Lara: Who was the censor at that point?
Richard: There were three. They decided that the problem was having one censor, who would end up being chums with the Pasquim people, so they assigned three different women to take care of the paper. These three women were in charge and let the Angela Gilliam interview go to print. And that’s when the real crackdown started on Pasquim, political more than moral. They went to all the newsstands and confiscated the copies of the paper, which is something they would do with O Pasquim a lot, whenever they got word that something they didn’t like was coming out. But they transferred the censorship to Brasília, to the headquarters of censorship.
Lara: So there was no way to make friends with these new censors.
Richard: No way. And we had to send everything that was going to be published in the paper to Brasília at a time when there was no fax or Internet. It would go by mail. That’s terrible for a weekly newspaper. It took two, three days to send things to Brasília. It would take however long they wanted for the paper to be censored, and then it would have to come back by mail again.
Lara: Did that mean you had to come up with content really far in advance?
Richard: Yes. So we lost a lot of our up-to-date content. It really hit the paper. It was the first crisis that O Pasquim had. We would do everything three or four weeks in advance. And we would have to prepare enough content for three papers with the hopes that enough for one would pass through the censor. We counted. I would have to do three interviews, or an interview that was three times as long. The paper was 40 pages long, and we would send 120 pages to the censor. They started censoring everything. If you insinuated a blacklisted word, it would get censored. And, of course, the censors weren’t very smart, so they didn’t get a lot of the jokes. They would censor what they didn’t understand simply because they didn’t understand it, thinking that people might be passing along a message.
Humor was still a strategy in dealing with these new censors, but not in the same sense as before. Richard and his coworkers would take classics like James Joyce’s Ulysses (unintelligibly dense for a censor) or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (stock full of sexual content), divide the books into article-sized chunks, and sign them with the name of O Pasquim writers as though they were original content meant to be published in the magazine. They would send in these “articles”, which were sure to be censored, along with the real content O Pasquim. Not only did they mock the system from afar, but they overwhelmed the censors with material.
Despite the courageous effort at humorous resistance, the culture in Pasquim’s newsroom suffered from the new model of censorship.
“That stage I’m telling you about, 1972 to 1976, that’s when most of the original people left,” Richard says. Some of the famous writers and cartoonists left the paper because of interpersonal conflicts, but Richard asserts that the exodus also had to do with the new political pressure.
“And I’m talking about censorship,” Richard adds. “I’m not mentioning jail, detention, or people being arrested.”
Later, Richard does mention jail, detention, and people being arrested – specifically, he recounts his own arrest. I sit on his couch, flipping through the complete collection of Pasquim while petting Pink, who is curled up next to me. Richard is on his computer, pulling up digitized images of the paper. He comes across one that brings up a memory and calls me over.
On the screen is an image of a man with a speech bubble that reads, “Telma, eu não sou gay” – “Telma, I’m not gay.” Richard tells me the backstory. He interviewed the rock band Calúnias in 1983. The band had done a satirical cover of a song in English, “Tell Me Once Again” by Light Reflections, twisting the lyrics a bit in the Portuguese version. Originally, the plan was to print photos of the band to accompany the interview, but the film got damaged. Richard, who at this point was the interview editor, decided to accompany the interview with a series of photos of members of the government cabinet, each with a speech bubble containing a lyric from the song.
“It was totally random,” Richard says. Printing song lyrics alongside unrelated images was actually a typical joke in Pasquim. But this time, Antônio Delfim Netto, the man who had the lyric “Telma, I’m not gay,” happened to really be gay, and the dictatorship thought Richard was trying to expose the illicit sexuality of a member of the regime. That episode resulted in his arrest.
Arrest happened frequently enough that Richard kept a small suitcase packed next to the door in his house. Usually, as with the Delfim Netto incident, the military held him for one day or less. Richard had a tendency to get out of these situations by citing his age, saying that he was just a kid in the paper, someone with no say in the content. But that did not always work. Once, the military came to Richard’s house, woke him up, and arrested him. They interrogated him all day and night in an unknown location.
Fortunately, Dona Nelma, Pasquim’s secretary, was well connected and had a very efficient scheme for locating disappeared staff (she also had an underground network of connections for smuggling goods and letters to Brazilians in exile). No one knew where Richard was for 24 hours, but Dona Nelma discovered his location by the second day and worked to get him out. On day three, Richard was released without having been tortured.
“I was lucky,” Richard said.
A kind of omnipresent fear and paranoia hung over the years of dictatorship, one that was not limited to the writers of O Pasquim. Richard entered into a formal request under Lula da Silva’s administration to see his military police file. In it, he found an article on police violence from Opinião that he had once xeroxed. The state’s surveillance involved not only political activities but also the most mundane of actions.
“Neighbors were the worst.” Richard still has the image of the cabinet member pulled up on the computer, but he looks past the screen. He remembers once thinking that a man who lived a few floors beneath him in his building in Santa Teresa was crazy. The man would constantly say, “They’re watching me.” But one day, the man disappeared. At the time, militant resistance organizations would work to uncover the identities of secret army agents and make that information public. They reported that the person who had rented the apartment adjacent to the disappeared man was a secret army agent from CENIMAR, the Navy intelligence organization. In other words, Richard’s neighbor was not crazy: they really were watching him.
O Pasquim’s use of humor to resist dictatorship oppression becomes all the more remarkable in light of the violent slashes of thick censorship pens and stark memories of disappearance.
The years leading up to the end of dictatorship carry the story of O Pasquim’s slow death.
When the dictatorship began loosening the grip of censorship in 1976 to begin the extended process of opening Brazil up to democracy, the newsroom at O Pasquim breathed a collective sigh of relief. With this new era of the dictatorship, editors did not have to send a full issue of the magazine to be censored in Brasília. Nor did they have to take the paper to the desk of alcoholic Dona Marina or to general Juarez Paz Pinto’s bachelor pad on the beach. O Pasquim would not be censored at all before it went to print.
That sigh of relief, however, was soon cut short. O Pasquim still did not have the freedom to publish openly.
“For edition 300, we decided to do something big. It was the first edition that wasn’t pre-censored. Millôr wrote an editorial about censorship. It was really scathing. It was the first issue that really stepped up to talk about censorship,” Richard says. “And then the copies of the paper were apprehended. It was confiscated.”
Between 1976 and 1979, the dictatorship’s new style of censorship allowed O Pasquim and other papers to say what they wanted – but it was their responsibility. If the paper made a misstep, the state would charge the paper exorbitant sums and the issue would be confiscated before it hit newsstands, which was a big hit to independent publications. O Pasquim was financially forced into self-censorship.
“We learned a lesson with number 300,” Richard says frankly. “We still had to say things by not saying them for a long time.”
O Pasquim managed to speak its mind despite a new, subtler form of censorship. During this phase, the newspaper managed to be the outspoken proponent for the amnesty law that would protect political prisoners and allow exiled Brazilians back in the country.
O Pasquim grew increasingly direct and explicit in its political opinions in 1978 and 1979, when censorship loosened further. As political exiles returned to Brazil from abroad, some would begin writing for the paper, bringing new ideas to Brazilian media – the publication became a vocal proponent for the environmental movement, for example – and everyone, at the very least, would want to do an interview with O Pasquim.
But if the first years of self-censorship took a toll on O Pasquim financially, it was actually the next phase, when state censorship was least strict, that dug the newspaper’s grave.
Richard: We get to ’79 and we have a new president, Figuereido, which marked a new, terrible phase for Pasquim. The extreme right in the military wasn’t so happy with the idea of gradually lightening up and giving power back to civilians. They wanted to keep the power. So during Figuereido’s term, there were rightwing, militant terrorist groups.
O Pasquim was starting to sell a lot again, finally back on its feet after all those years. But we had become really outspoken politically. What happened is that this terrorist group started bombing newsstands that would sell Pasquim. They would throw a Molotov cocktail on a newsstand and leave leaflets saying, “If you sell Pasquim, we will destroy your newsstand. Don’t sell Pasquim or you’ll hear from us.”
Lara: What was the timeframe for this?
Richard: This is ’78 through ‘81. And that really hit Pasquim. There was another slump in sales and the newspaper never recovered.
Lara: Did newsstands stop selling the paper?
Richard: Newsstands didn’t sell Pasquim anymore. Some crazy brave bookstores would sell it under the counter. But in Rio, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and Porto Alegre, four main cities, there was this terrorist campaign that would explode leftist newspapers. Later, everything got a bit more under control.
Lara: And then you could sell openly in newsstands again?
Richard: Yeah. But by then Pasquim had lost its audience. It was a wreck.
Richard worked at Pasquim until 1986. He only left when the paper owed him 10 months’ salary, when he was so in debt that he had to sell his apartment. Even then, leaving the paper was not easy.
“O Pasquim was like a second family for me,” Richard says. “When I was a teenager, these guys were my idols. They were the best, the top journalists, and there I was as an 18-year-old, working with them as an equal. And I worked there for 14 years.”
The end of O Pasquim was not the end of Richard’s career. Under Brazil’s democracy, he worked for the Ministry of Culture, in the organization Funarte, which is essentially a Brazilian National Endowment for the Arts. He was part of the team that started MAD Magazine in Brazil, using his knowledge of the US and Brazil to translate humor from one cultural context to the next. He collaborated in the humorous TV show, Casseta & Planeta, which he describes as a Brazilian Saturday Night Live. He even edits a local paper for the island of Paquetá.
But just by looking around Richard’s house it is clear that O Pasquim held a special place in Richard Goodwin’s heart. The walls have framed prints of O Pasquim cartoons. On his coffee table are the three volumes of O Pasquim, as well as a book of Ziraldo’s collected cartoons.
Reflecting back on the magazine as a whole, Richard reminisces on the craziest and most memorable interviews. He interviewed former president Jânio Quadros, a conversation that ended in the following scene: “It’s night time. It’s already dark and on the lawn of this mansion in Sao Paolo, lies the former President of Brazil, Jânio Quadros, completely drunk, and Jaguar, now president of Pasquim, completely drunk, snoring in each other’s arms, sleeping off the interview.” Richard was also part of the team that did Lula da Silva’s first interview for a major paper. It was this interview that gave the politician – who would later become president of Brazil – national attention.
But Richard recognizes that O Pasquim was far from perfect. While it supported many social movements, like the struggle for racial justice, it was dominated by men and skeptical of feminism.
“Pasquim is a paper made by men in the 1960s,” Richard says. In terms of the feminist movement: “It was a Mad Men’s paper. It didn’t catch on.”
The magazine folded completely in 1991, but a group of its original writers always dreamed of bringing the magazine back. In 1999, Ziraldo brought Richard and some other writers together to start a color magazine in glossy paper called Bundas, which lasted three years. When it failed, former O Pasquim writers gave the comeback yet another shot with a paper called OPasquim21. That lasted through 2004. Something about the new iterations of O Pasquim simply did not stick.
By the time the interview is over, the sun is just beginning to settle over the horizon in Paquetá. The island’s dirt roads bustle with people riding bicycles and walking around as the oppressive heat of the summer day finally lifts. Richard and I talk about current politics. Over the course of the day, he had mentioned Brazilian candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who has openly expressed his support for the Brazilian dictatorship in congress, the coordinators of the rightwing group Movimento Brasil Livre (Free Brazil Movement) that received training from the Koch brothers, and other stories of the far right on the rise in Brazil.
“What I lament is that there’s no O Pasquim to cover everything that’s happening.” Richard’s main takeaway from the discussion of current events is not an adamant political statement but an appeal to humor and satire. If there is a thread that runs through his life, it is an insatiable love of jokes and consistent irreverence towards authority, even the authority of the newspaper that was so formative in his life.
“On the other hand, something like Pasquim wouldn’t work well today, not on paper,” Richard immediately qualifies his original statement. “It would need to do something online, decentralized.”
With that comment – or was it a suggestion? – I say my goodbyes to Jack, Kino, and Pink and turn off the tape recorder
