Taking a revered national icon (the masked luchador El Santo) and recasting him as a flawed, scatological, absurd anti-hero exposes the gap between a culture's heroic self-image and its lived reality. Reverence becomes material for ridicule, and the parody reveals what the original idealization concealed.
A character who never removes his mask fuses performance with selfhood: the public persona is not a costume over a private person but the only identity available. The mask stops being disguise and becomes the whole face.
El Santos is a masked lucha libre wrestler, a direct send-up of El Santo, who moves through squalid cantinas, grotesque bodily episodes, and absurdist encounters in Mexican urban underlife rather than noble battles. His adventures replace the heroic silver-mask legend with drunkenness, poverty, and crude bodily comedy.
Crude slang, bodily functions, and lowlife settings can carry genuine social commentary rather than mere shock, speaking in the actual register of the urban poor. The gutter idiom becomes a vehicle for representing a population usually excluded from heroic or polite narrative.