Marcelo Madureira

Marcelo Madureira is the stage name of Marcelo Barreto Garmatter (Curitiba, May 24, 1958), a Brazilian comedian. He was part of the troupe that developed and presented between 1992 and 2010, the comedy show Casseta & Planeta Urgente at Rede Globo. Along with another group member, Hubert, he writes the Coluna do Agamenon to the newspaper O Globo. and is a graduate in Production Engineering at the School of Engineering at UFRJ, having worked as an engineer in the Planning Department of the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). Madureira is a black belt in judo and has been married for 25 years to the psychoanalyst Claudia, with whom he had three children. Madureira studied in a school which now he describes as "a den of Communism" and where he became active in left-wing underground organizations (he was a member of the PCB).

Despite having been a Communist in his youth, Madureira said he had "no aversion to Globo," This undoubtedly made things easier when he and his fellow comedians were hired by Rede Globo in 1992, to star in the comedy show Casseta & Planeta Urgente in primetime on Tuesday nights. Although the President of the Globo Organizations, Roberto Marinho, feared the reactions against a program whose humour he regarded as "scatological", it proved to be a great success, with the group being ranked "the most powerful artists of the country" in 2003 by Veja, and the show lasting until 2010 (four years after the death of Bussunda, the group's most popular member). - apart from being a perfect target for comedians of all ideological hues, due to his low educational level and the use of quaint expressions. In Casseta & Planeta Urgente, the Brazilian President was parodied by Bussunda, who died while covering the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Germany. In an official statement, Lula da Silva regretted the death of the comedian, regarded by him as "a great artist, a youthful symbol of Brazilian creativity and irreverence."

In September 2006, the "Casseta" Claudio Manoel said: "I was never a Lula voter and did not expect much from him. I find it sad the continuity of a government in which I do not personally believe." The tone of the criticism (in the show and beyond) would be increased in subsequent years, Marcelo Madureira standing out. On the night of the first round of the 2010 presidential election, he said at the program Manhattan Connection (GNT, Globo TV) that Lula da Silva was "an impostor, a tramp and a swindler" and that Dilma Rousseff looked like a "transvestite of Kim Jong-Il." The controversial part was deleted in subsequent repetitions of the program, but it can be easily found on YouTube.