“Poor Gutenberg! He died without knowing the business he had in his hands. But that’s it: Now we are going to support new causes, and in the process we are going to save some trees”says the journalist and author Cristina Wargon from Mendiolaza, the city in Córdoba from which she makes a digital humor magazine.
He says it through the site that he has been running for a little over a year, Wargon humor. And also for his books: “Everything at the cap, available truly free. Not like other sites where they offer you free books and they turn out to be three-month offers or other internet tricks. Of course: those who want to collaborate help us, because We are a team of nine or ten people who leave everything and, in some cases, they have no other income.” The journalist goes against the grain of the inventor of the printing press.
Wargon left his long journalistic career in Buenos Aires – he spent time at the emblematic magazine Humor– and a few years ago he settled in Mendiolaza. Live among trees, plants and birds: “In the middle of the field,” he says.
Throughout his career and his life, he always opted for humor and irony. He wrote six books and also participated in projects for graphics and television.
Then the Internet appeared and traditional media changen. Many journalists, too.
Some took refuge in self-entrepreneurship. With disadvantages (many) and advantages (working from anywhere).
In the case of Wargon, without losing his sense of humor. Like when he tells Viva: “Wargon humor It is done in the middle of the field, because I have no neighbors on either the right or the left. Bah, I have no neighbors anywhere. It started out humorous, but when the situation in the country became so funny, I said: ‘No, I can’t be stupid with just humor,’ so I incorporated a section called Memocracywhich is political jokes: Guess who they are against…”.
Wargon changed his lifestyle when a few hours before the start of the quarantine due to the Covid pandemic (March, 2020) his daughter – settled in Córdoba – recommended that he leave Buenos Aires and go there for a few days. Those days were years. Until today.
There he gave humor workshops, entered the world of social networks and expanded its local ties from Mendiolaza (14 thousand inhabitants, neighbors who know each other).
She met the designer Ricardo Zárate -El Vikingo- (“my previous partners were twenty years older than me; now I’m the one who’s twenty years older than him,” she laughs) and they started Wargon humorwhich had 200 thousand visits.
He does it together with local collaborators: Diógenes Altonabo, Claudia Baier, Filípides de las Casas, Pablo Colombo, Mónica Gervasoni, Sol Herrera, Liz Marino, Gabriela Martínez, Lidia Poggio, Leonardo Silveira, Gabriel Steinberg and Viviana Sgvastti: “Everyone with a future huge in humor,” he says.
He misses Buenos Aires and its theaters on Corrientes Avenue. Remember your Buenos Aires timeswhen I lived in the Abasto neighborhood.
“We lived a thousand lives, we did them all,” he says when talking about his friendships and outings. And he longs for journalistic newsrooms: “The Humor It was not an essay. It was a permanent party. “I came from Córdoba, so I enjoyed it twice as much, because I didn’t expect it to be like this.”
From that editorial office she remembers the journalist Miguel Gruskoin (screenwriter of Jorge Guinzburg), who then received her with open arms: their friendship continues today and now he helps her prepare a play, Sixteen years oldwhich will be presented in Buenos Aires and then tour the country.
Cristina also found another space for expression on local FM 102.7 (FM Demendiolaza), where she makes a radio version of her magazine. “I am multi-target,” he boasts: “I write theater, I write notes, I write books… I made a lot of money with books in the 90s, but there is no business more shady than what book publishers do. “They are very screwed.”
And she boasts again: “I am the only female director from the interior of the country who runs a humor magazine; first of all because there are few women who make humor; and, second, because people from the interior who have two neurons go to Buenos Aires, and I did the opposite: when I got old I returned here, which is where I have my children and my family.”
And he continues: “In general, it is believed that the professional ideal is to go to Buenos Aires, stay for a long time, do well, have lung cancer and return to Córdoba, because there you have all the fame and glories that you ever thought of.” . I don’t have lung cancer, as far as I know, but I do have my career in Buenos Aires. I didn’t go to Buenos Aires to succeed; I left to follow the husband I had at the time. “I left for 15 days and stayed almost 40 years.”
A friend of María Elena Walsh, she refuses to say her age, but instead responds: “I have the number of years according to which, supported by statistics, anything I say can be posthumous.”
Another of his friends, the graphic comedian Tomás Sanz, was the one who at the time recommended him how to make humor in times of the Internet. “I asked him, ‘What advice would you give me?’ And he told me: ‘Look, it seems to me that the basic change is that the networks have allowed each person to feel like a comedian and make jokes.’ Today the networks are full of memeswhich have an aesthetic very determined by brevity. The story, as it was used in my time, no longer appears. Except for some who have that profile: the last one I detected was Hernán Casciari. In that sense, Wargon humor It is a bet against the opposite direction. But it doesn’t matter, there are always people who read.”
-What is humor, Cristina?
–The humor is indefinable. It is the highest form of intelligence. It can be exercised, its mechanisms can be studied, it can be studied what humor or laughter is for. The first thing I tell those who come to my workshops is that if someone defines their humor, run away, because they are scamming you.