This article is from the archive of our partner 
.
What do you do if you're a 45-year-old clown and TV comedian who likes to wear garish outfits and blond wigs? If you're Francisco Everardo Oliveira Silva, better known to fans as Tiririca ("Grumpy"), you run for congress in your home country of Brazil. And you win. By a lot, actually.
In this week's elections, Tiririca won a seat in the Chamber of
Deputies, the lower house of Brazil's National Congress. His victory was
by no means guaranteed; at one point, his campaign was threatened by
accusations of illiteracy, but a court threw out those complaints after
Tiririca passed a formal literacy test.
He went on to get more
than twice as many votes as the second most popular candidate--a
landslide that might be attributable to Tiririca's catchy campaign
jingles, or to the unusual candor he's displayed in the race. His ads feature the tagline "It can't get any worse," and in one of the TV spots below, he
admits, "What does a federal representative do? I'm not sure, but if I'm
elected, I'll tell you." Now, he'll have the rest of his four-year term
to figure it out.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.
