Congress clown takes literacy test

GRUMPY the clown won election in laughter, getting more votes than any other candidate for Brazil’s Congress. Now he has to prove that he can read and write.

The Sao Paulo Electoral Court held a closed-door exam for the clown turned congressman-elect yesterday to determine if he meets a constitutional mandate that federal lawmakers be literate.

Details of the test were not immediately available.

Francisco Silva became famous as Tiririca — “Grumpy” in Portuguese — and received about 1.3 million votes, nearly twice as many as the next-highest vote-getter in last month’s congressional elections.

His campaign videos drew millions of online viewers, with slogans such as “It can’t get any worse” and “What does a federal deputy do? Truly, I don’t know. But vote for me and you’ll find out.”

But a less humorous element emerged during the campaign: Allegations that Silva, like 10% of Brazilians, is illiterate.

Judge Aloisio Silveira ruled that there were discrepancies between the handwriting on Silva’s application to run for Congress and that on the document in which he swears he can read and write and in autographs he gave to fans.

Silva has attributed the discrepancies to the fact that his wife helped him write his application because he has trouble holding a pen firmly between his thumb and index finger.