It’s all fun and games until…: unintentional (?) direct fire amid the playful humor of Miguel Mihura’s <i>Codorniz</i>

Abstract Spanish humorists associated with the avant-garde of the early 20th century developed an abstract, playful brand of humor dubbed “Humorism” and “New Spanish Humor.” The movement’s heyday came when Miguel Mihura created the weekly humor magazine La Codorniz [ The Quail ] and kept tight editorial control over its content. Scholars and humorists hold up Mihura’s magazine as a watershed in the evolution of Spanish humor. Much of the commentary on Mihura’s Codorniz (1941–1944) focuses on its assiduous disengagement from the social and political realities of postwar Spain and its satirization of popular media and the linguistic and social conventions of previous generations, which many humorists saw as an indirect and largely unintentional attack against the conservative Franco regime (1939–1975). This paper argues that the unintentional attacks included surprisingly direct criticism of Spanish society and government, examining three single-panel cartoons on courtship and marriage as examples of topical humor that was published and/or created by Mihura despite the fact that it went against his personal and editorial aesthetic as the champion of New Spanish Humor.