Making fun of cariocas and nepobabies is the best thing; as the creators of Malhassaum say

“Aunt Paula only had R$170,000 to invest in our band, it’s normal, a lot of people start with little”, says, seriously, the character of Malhassaum, one of the most pop humor profiles on the networks at the moment. “This song has an arrangement by my uncle Edu….”. Break. “Edu Lobo”, completes the artist, young, looking sideways at the camera, with a sarcastic smile.

This is how, poking with fine irony the privileges of the nepobabies and the bubble in Rio de Janeiro’s south zone, that the Malhassaum page has been successful on the internet. If it is not an overflow in number of followers (there are 145,000 followers on Instagram and more than 70,000 on TikTok), the profile impresses with its ability to engage.

The video “Garoto Leblon”, for example, is moving fast towards 3 million views. In it, the actor Diogo (Dig) Verardi walks down a street in the favorite neighborhood of novelist Manoel Carlos, greeting doormen and friends from private schools in the city, such as the religious Santo Agostinho and the progressive Escola Parque —where the members of the band Bala Quero passed. , the son of Marisa Monte, Malu Mader and Tony Bellotto, and half MPB / Rede Globo.

“I just got mugged at BB Lanches”; “Chopinho at Jobi in the late afternoon?”, he goes on saying, citing post-beach and bohemian spots in the south zone, always cool and with an exaggerated accent, between a wave and another to acquaintances in the neighborhood.

The Malhassaum page was created by Dig and Fernanda Fuchs, actors from the south of the country, and is successful in mocking the clichés and stereotypes of young people from Rio, such as the lebloners, the lemers and they, the nepobabies —a term that combines the words “nepotism” and “baby” and has been used to describe artists whose careers are supposed to have been given a boost thanks to famous parents or godparents.

“Our humor has always been critical and satirical to generate reflection on privileged classes, it has always been to be current and talk about cultural nepotism. We always play with this thing of having artists who are children of actors, grandchildren of directors”, says Dig in an interview to the F5.

Even with the satirical footprint, they admit that they especially like a “breeder” of nepobabies: the Gil family. “I think it’s wonderful. What a beautiful factory of nepobabies that Gilberto Gil is! Being born into an artistic family doesn’t mean it’s all bad, right?”, he jokes.

Fernanda assumes to be a fan of Fernanda Torres. She made more than 600,000 people laugh with her “young mystical carioca”, a cliché of the cliché of Rio’s “boutique hippie” youth, whose fun is precisely in the exaggeration, in the caricature.

Dig is from Porto Alegre and met Fernanda, from Curitiba, when the two were competing for a spot for the Multishow Humor Award, in 2017. Tough and sharing the same room, they discovered their common taste for “Malhação” and began to create characters based on the profile of the teen soap opera, which aired for 26 years.

“That’s the feeling, being an artist in Brazil is not easy, we run into many things and one of them is money. If you don’t have money or referrals, you are barred from certain bubbles that are difficult to pierce. So that generates a lot of indignation” , says the actress.

It was Dig’s move to Rio de Janeiro, in 2018, that brought another look —an experience that only those from Rio have—, to the duo’s content. The closed Carnival blocks that took place during the social isolation of the pandemic (and in which he admits to having participated) were, for example, an inspiration to explore the format.

“I knew about these hypocrisies and contradictions of secret blocks and people on the left thinking that that was the most democratic Carnival in the world, but at the same time just wanting to go where the bubble itself is. Then I thought: ‘I’m going to make a video about this’ , because, in fact, I saw people saying ‘Carnival is the most democratic party in the world'”. Result: More than 1.3 million views on this insight that became a short film on Instagram.

A novelist, Fernanda also used as references what she watched on the Globo screen a few years ago to create her characters from Rio de Janeiro. “Especially in the 1990s and 2000s, we saw Rio a lot and there was this stereotype of beautiful beaches, Manoel Carlos, Leblon and the uniformed maids, the carioquês ​​on the lips of all artists. That’s what we want to play with and satirize” , says the actress.