More than 55% of Spaniards believe that making humor today is more limited in Spain than a decade ago. Only 37% believe that the freedom to make jokes today is greater. Despite this decline, more than two-thirds believe that Spain is a country with a sense of humor. But even with that seemingly widespread good character, 57% say they have stopped making a joke or a comic comment for fear of being misunderstood. These are data from a new CIS survey on misinformation and humor.
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More than 85% of Spaniards also believe that in recent years the topics society laughs at have changed. The topics that most annoy people when joked about now are immigrants and gender, which bother more than half of citizens, far above religion and politics.
The opinion of Spaniards about the freedom to make jokes is complicated to define. Although the majority believe there are more limits to laughing today than a decade ago, when the question is asked differently, there are more nuances. Do you consider that in Spain at this moment there is enough freedom to make humor about any topic? The majority say “it depends on the cases,” with 38%, but then more people say there is more freedom (35%) than not (25%).
Complaints in courts and controversies about the limits of humor are periodic in Spain. This very week the humor magazine El Jueves was convicted of a crime against the right to honor for naming Polonia Castellanos, leader of Christian Lawyers, “idiot of the year 2024.” This same entity also denounced the poster for the Barcelona Mercè festival in 2025 for using religious forms to ridicule the Virgin.
Also in 2025, a case against comedian and broadcaster Héctor de Miguel, Quequé, was dismissed for his sarcastic comments about “dynamiting the Valley of the Fallen” and then picking up the “little stones” left from the monument now known as Cuelgamuros and going to “throw them at the priests who have slept with some child, that is, all of them.” Months later, Quequé himself announced his retirement after parodying journalist Nacho Abad about the Adamuz train accident.
Among comedians, it is also an open debate: “As a comedian, I don’t feel less free than before,” Joaquín Reyes recently said in EL PAÍS. “On the contrary, I feel freer. It seems to me that when we started there were taboo topics that no longer exist, like the Monarchy and the Church,” he added.
Political hoaxes
34% of Spaniards consider Vox to be the party that uses the most misinformation, followed by the PSOE (23%) and all parties together (20%). The only other party that receives a significant percentage is the PP, with 7% of Spaniards believing it spreads misinformation. Although in reality the accusation of spreading false news from voters to their political representatives is overwhelming: almost 92% believe that parties use misinformation in some way.
The spread of hoaxes is something that worries Spaniards a lot, who believe that social networks should be obliged to comply with principles to combat misinformation. Almost nine out of ten Spaniards believe that hoaxes contribute to manipulating public opinion and generating social coexistence conflicts. Cases like Torre Pacheco are clear examples of this concern. The Government has promoted tools to be faster at detecting hoaxes and to get platforms to act before there are consequences in the real world.
Spaniards make confessions that are sometimes difficult to reconcile with reality. 85% say they never or almost never forward messages they find interesting via applications like WhatsApp or Telegram. According to this survey, the persistent group of Spaniards who keep thousands of messaging groups alive represents only 6% of the population (those who always forward are only 0.9%). Each group of friends or family can, therefore, designate its forwarding manager.
There is also a notable third of Spaniards who say they never or rarely receive “jokes or memes.” Only half receive them daily or several times a week. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that, despite the dominant use of social networks today, only 38% say they usually receive “humor content” through that medium. It is also surprising that more Spaniards (5%) say they see this type of content in live monologues than in magazines and newspapers (3%).