Analysis reveals how digital satire critiques corruption and religion in Brazil's polarized society.
This article analyzes the role of Porta dos Fundos and Greg News , two controversial digital media outlets of satirical videos from Brazil, in relation to some of the prevalent sociopolitical tensions in the country during the last decade. Created in 2012, Porta dos Fundos (which translates as “backdoor”) was the first Brazilian YouTube channel to reach ten million subscribers (now seventeen million). In 2017, Gregório Duvivier, one of the creators and stars of Porta dos Fundos, began hosting a satirical news show inspired by John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight . Both digital shows became popular alternatives to mainstream news and entertainment. Since the wake of the mass protests of 2013 in Brazil and the Odebrecht corruption scandals, the shows have satirized sensitive and problematic social and cultural issues in Brazilian society. This article analyzes the sociopolitical critiques of Porta dos Fundos and Greg News in relation to religion, discrimination, and corruption in the context of the extreme right-wing discourse of former president Jair Bolsonaro and the consequential intense national polarization of the country. We find that the Brazilian satirists analyzed here offer alternative ways to represent prevalent gender stereotypes and create a connection between religious prejudice, corruption, and polarization as part of a structural critique of contemporary Brazilian democracy.
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Alonso et al. (2025) studied this question.
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