The Greatest Meme Template Ever
Why does Juan Joya Borja (aka El Risitas aka “Spanish Laughing Guy”) always put a smile on our faces.
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Today, we are bringing back one of my favourite internet topics: El Risitas (aka “Spanish Laughing Guy” aka the greatest meme template ever).
Also this week:
Buffett’s Annual Letter
Wendy’s Surge Pricing Fiasco
…and them fire X posts (including Dune 2)
You've seen Juan Joya Borja.
Most English speakers know him from the “Spanish Laughing Guy” meme.
In that video format, Borja tells a story in Spanish that is captioned with fake English text. The result is a different — but guaranteed hilarious — tale (The Guardian says his infectious laugh is like "a dolphin with a [20-cigarette-a-day] habit”).
The template has had a strong multi-year run in tech and finance communities. A popular use of “Spanish Laughing Guy” is to document a news story in which a corporation keeps messing up.
Fake captions of the video have been used to explain Bitcoin/McDonald's, Peloton, SBF/FTX, OpenAI Board vs. Sam Altman and many more.
Google’s recent botched launch of its ChatGPT competitor called Gemini was particularly ripe for meme treatment (Google CEO Sundar Pichai called the failure “completely unacceptable” and it is probably up there with New Coke as one of the most disastrous consumer product launches in history).1
The footnote at the end of the previous paragraph links to some good reads on Gemini but I’m not going to do a deep dive into the story today. Rather, I want to highlight a version of the “Spanish Laughing Guy” meme that I whipped up.
The clip now has 45m+ views, with thousands of replies following an Elon re-post.
The majority of comments fall into three buckets:
Some combination of “ROFL”, “☠️”, ”“LOL”, “😂”, “bro, I’m wheezing”, “🤣”, “dead”
“I will literally watch and laugh at any version of this meme any time it is posted”
“El Risitas!!!!!!!”
“El Risitas” is Spanish for “giggles” and was the nickname for Juan Joya Borja, who enjoyed a comedic career before sadly passing away in 2021.
But his laughter lives on and we’ll walk through his story:
Who is Juan Joya Borja?
How did he go viral?
The universal appeal of the El Risitas meme
Who is Juan Joya Borja?
Borja was born in Seville, Spain in 1956.
He had a modest upbringing, living in the less prosperous areas of Seville. A spotty professional record included stints in construction, working restaurants and selling wares on the street.
Acquaintances blessed Borja with the nickname "El Risitas" during his teenage years, and his comedic talent was developed in taverns in Seville.
The interview that launched Borja to fame took place in 2001 on a popular Spanish variety show called Ratones Coloraos (Red Mice). At the time, Borja was 45-years old and living off of insurance money he received as a victim in an auto accident.
The show was hosted by Spanish journalist and TV presenter Jesús Quintero (who passed away in 2022). While not a comedian in the traditional sense, Borja was a masterful storyteller and his personality turned even the most mundane stories into content gold.
The interview that became the meme video template begins with Quintero needling Borja about his work experience:
Jesus: Could you please tell me how many days you have worked [in your life]?
El Risitas: I burned down all my pay sheets.
Jesus: But how many days total? Approximately?
El Risitas: 7 years, no more than that.
Jesus: In 45 years, [you worked] 7 years?
El Risitas: Yes.
Jesus: With rest days?
El Risitas: Of course.
The next part — when Quintero asks Risitas about the “hardest job” he ever did — is the key section:
Borja talks about his time working as a kitchen helper for a beachside restaurant. He wasn’t particularly skilled labor, so was tasked with cleaning dishes.
One night, his job was to clean 20 paella pans (aka paelleras). It was 2am and the pans were very moldy. Already exhausted, Borja tried to shortcut the clean by putting the pans in the ocean and letting saltwater work its magic.
The next morning, he returned to the restaurant and all the pans were washed away (except for one). His wages were deducted to buy replacement pans.
(SIDE NOTE: I freakin’ love paella. Oh, you’re gonna mix rice, chicken, lime, butter, squid, shrimp, saffron, mussels and turmeric in a giant cast iron pan? And the uncooked rice is going to crust onto the pan? Yeah, sign up me fam)
The story itself isn’t LOL funny. But Borja’s mannerisms, toothless grin and dolphin laugh take it to the next level. Over the next decade, Borja would continue to serenade Quintero (and Spain) with his wild stories, becoming a celebrity with a brief film career.
However, his global internet fame wouldn’t take off for more than a decade (see next section).
In 2020, Borja had his leg amputated after dealing with severe diabetes. To help pay for his hospital bills and a motorized wheelchair, a French video site (Jeux Video) raised €14k for El Risitas. He died from related health complications a year later in April 2021.
How did he go viral?
The go-to source for any meme etymology is Know Your Meme. Here is the website’s breakdown of the El Risitas story, which has a rather unlikely origin:
2007: About 6 years after the original interview segment aired, a clip of the interview was uploaded to Quintero’s Ratones Coloraos YouTube channel
March 2014: The Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian Islamist movement created a video of Borja, re-captioned with commentary on Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
September 2014: Another version was released by Egyptian students, with “captions mocking the private security used to contain protests at Egyptian universities”.
2015: Redditors began making versions of the video to mock various tech-related trends such as graphics chips (NVIDIA), games (Team Fortress) and Apple products (new MacBook release).
These Reddit examples set the template that continues to this day: Borja re-captioned as an exec or expert telling the story of a failed product, corporate or controversy.
The universal appeal of the El Risitas meme
The El Risitas meme is built on two universals: the laugh and the story arc.
1. The laugh
A few years back, I asked Spanish-speaking Twitter users if they found the dubbed El Risitas videos funny.
Those who didn't like the dubs thought the overlapping of text and audio was distracting. Those who did enjoy it mentioned something we discussed earlier: the real magic lies in El Risitas' legendary, language-agnostic laugh and body language.
The content itself was secondary.
Why is hearty laughter so universal?
Laughter seems to be an evolutionarily ingrained mechanism for social bonding. And like yawning, it is often an uncontrollable behavior, which suggests it is hardwired into us.
Recent neuro-scientific research set out to answer “why is laughter contagious?”.
There are a few pieces to the puzzle, per Psychology Today:
Laughter releases endorphins leading to “pleasurable and calming effects” that “might signal safety and promote feelings of togetherness.”
Laughter engages areas of the brain that “facilitate social reciprocity and emotional resonance, consistent with its established role in promoting affiliation and social cohesion.”
Translation: laughter is a helluva of a drug. And El Risitas’ cackle is one of the most potent doses around.
To wit: he is the most popular emoticon on the video streaming service Twitch, with people using his face to indicate — you guessed it — laughter.
2. The story arc
While not as important as the laugh, the structure of El Risitas’ story adds to the meme’s appeal.
American author Kurt Vonnegut — the author of legendary books such as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions — explained it in a Master's thesis he wrote while an anthropology student at the University of Chicago. For the paper, he studied thousands of narratives and found that there are only four story shapes. Each shape follows a protagonist as his or her fortunes shifts between ill and good.
Three out of the four shapes — "Man in Hole", "Boy Meets Girl", and "Cinderella" — end positively. The fourth shape — which he called "Kafka" — just keeps getting worse and worse (for anyone who has ever read Franz Kafka, you understand).
In 2004, Vonnegut walked through his four story shapes during a lecture at Case Western University. Here is his description of the Kafka shape:
Now there’s a Franz Kafka story [begins line D toward bottom of Good-Ill axis]. A young man is rather unattractive and not very personable. He has disagreeable relatives and has had a lot of jobs with no chance of promotion. He doesn’t get paid enough to take his girl dancing or to go to the beer hall to have a beer with a friend. One morning he wakes up, it’s time to go to work again, and he has turned into a cockroach [draws line downward and then infinity symbol]. It’s a pessimistic story.
The story of El Risitas and paella follows the shape of Kafka's story and I have identified the important moments below: his "fortune" gets worse with each section of the story.
1) Not Good: El Risitas has a crappy job as kitchen help.
2) Bad: He puts 20 paella pans in the ocean and they wash away (except for one).
3) Worse: The restaurant makes him pay for the pans.
The best El Risitas parody videos present a situation and make it worse and worse for the story’s main subject.
Watch the videos again and you’ll notice the pattern.
Final Thoughts
In the annals of video meme templates, El Risitas only has one other competitor. It is the scene from the 2004 film Downfall, which shows Hitler losing his shit — speaking German — in a Berlin bunker during the last days of WWII.
Like “Spanish Laughing Guy”, the Downfall format also follows the Kafka shape and uses English subtitles to parody literally any random event: Facebook IPO, Michael Jackson, Disney buying Marvel, Bitcoin.
While the Downfall parodies are hysterical, the El Risitas meme obviously takes the cake because…
American psychologist William James famously said “we don't laugh because we are happy, we are happy because we laugh”.
In the case of El Risitas, we are all happy because he giggled.
RIP Juan Joya Borja.
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Links and Memes
New Coke’s 10D Chess Move? I mentioned the disastrous “New Coke” launch at the top of this article (it would have been perfect for an El Risitas meme).
Here’s the full story: In the 1970s, Coca-Cola had lost share in the beverage market to diet drinks and more sugary-tasting fare (e.g. Pepsi). So, the company re-imagined its iconic formula from the 1880s and launched “New Coke” in 1985.
The blowback was instantaneous: it received 10,000 calls a day from very very upset customers. After only three months, Coca-Cola folded and re-introduced its original formula as “Coca-Cola Classic”. Customers flocked back to the new old drink and sales boomed.
It all led to a conspiracy theory that Coca-Cola had orchestrated the “New Coke” PR disaster to make users remember how much they missed the OG Coca-Cola (is Google trying pull some 10D chess move we’re not seeing?).
***
Berkshire Annual Letter: Warren Buffett penned his annual letter to investors. The first page is dedicated to his long-time partner Charlie Munger, who passed away in November at age 99. Buffett calls Munger “part older brother, part loving father” and notes that “Though I have long been in charge of the construction crew; Charlie should forever be credited with being the architect” of Berkshire.
Aside from that, the most interesting part of the letter for me was Burlington North Santa Fe. Berkshire acquired the massive railway network in 2009 for $44B and has invested over $30B in the years since maintaining it. Buffett estimates that the current cost to build BNSF from scratch would be $500B:
BNSF is the largest of six major rail systems that blanket North America. Our railroad carries its 23,759 miles of main track, 99 tunnels, 13,495 bridges, 7,521 locomotives and assorted other fixed assets at $70 billion on its balance sheet. But my guess is that it would cost at least $500 billion to replicate those assets and decades to complete the job.
***
Apple spent $10B+ over 10 years on its autonomous car project. Jony Ive originally created a concept that looked like a “European minivan such as the Fiat Multipla 600”, per NYT.
One reason Tim Cook started Project Titan — which some internally joked as Project “Titanic” — was because the Watch was just completed and engineers were “restless” looking for the next challenge. Apple was targeting a $100k price point but the car never made much sense: Apple had no unique vehicle design advantage.
The company went back and forth on whether to make an EV (eg. Tesla) or self-driving only car (eg Waymo). Apple briefly spoke to Elon about buying Tesla (~$40B market cap at the time while Apple had a $155B cash pile). But obviously nothing materialized and now the 2000-person team is being disbanded with some employees joining Apple’s generative AI effort.
***
Wendy’s Surge Pricing: On its latest earnings call, Wendy’s said that it is exploring “dynamic pricing”. The media reported it as “Uber-style price surges”. What the company apparently meant was that it was creating digital displays so that it could adjust prices (but on deals and discounts). Either way, Senator Elizabeth Warren said it was price gouging and the internet meme’d “Wendy’s Price Surging” so hard that the fast food chain backtracked and won't do any dynamic pricing.
My initial reaction was “this is so dystopian” and “families that rely on this food and stable prices for dinner will get hosed”. But my pea brain didn’t recognize the bigger picture as laid out by Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who was involved in this exchange on the Warpcast social app:
Vitalik: [The Wendy’s news] is amazing. Ideally restaurants would just price using automated market maker (AMM) curves.
Bored: Problem is they are only exploring the surge and not the reduction of prices in slow times. I want half-priced square hamburger meat.
Vitalik: In equilibrium, it will have the same effect. From a PR perspective, of course they should have announced it as an off-peak discount then when they need to raise prices, blame it on inflation (notice how no one gets upset at stores for doing “clearance sales” seemingly at least 50% of the time).
Yep, Wendy’s did horrible messaging on “dynamic pricing”. It should have leaned into the potential price savings during off hours. Either way, I would eat a combo of a Spicy Chicken Burger, Baked Potato and Junior Bacon Cheeseburger at any price point between $10 to $300.
***
Elon sues OpenAI: The TLDR on the OpenAI founding story is that Elon wanted to create an open-source AI lab to counter Google’s internal AI project (because he was alarmed by Larry Page’s position that it was OK if an AI superintelligence superseded human intelligence). He teamed up with Sam Altman to found OpenAI in 2015. Fast-forward to 2024 and OpenAI is a de-facto “closed and for-profit subsidiary of Microsoft” according to a lawsuit that Elon filed (the full 44-page PDF reads like a novel).
Elon put $44m to get it started and is seeking to have OpenAI open-source its tech per the founding documents. Between this lawsuit and a separate SEC lawsuit around OpenAI’s communications with investors, it seems likely that OpenAI’s “for-profit tucked inside a non-profit” corporate structure won’t hold.
…and them fire X/Twitter posts:
This was the absolutely funniest thing I read all week: a group in Scotland called House of Illuminati organized a Willy Wonka event at a warehouse in Glasgow, Scotland. The group used generative AI to make photos of an “immersive” Willy Wonka building but the actual venue was basically empty. Photos (and memes) from the event can only be described as … demented.
Finally, the Dune 2 reviews are very impressive. I need to watch the first one, now! The major Dune 2 meme so far has to do with a special popcorn bucket designed as a massive sand worm from the film. Many internet commentators pointed out that it looks like a Fleshlight.
When the NYT asked about the bucket, director Denis Villeneuve said, “I don’t want to make stupid jokes right now that I will regret tomorrow morning. But I will say this. When I saw it, I went, ‘Hoooooly smokes.’ What the [expletive]!? At the same time, it created a lot of fun online. So maybe it’s positive? It’s some kind of …impressive design.”
And the best meme of the week combined the Willy Wonka and Dune 2 stories.
TLDR: Google — which has the stated goal to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” — was manipulating user requests in the Gemini AI chat app to fit with the left-leaning politics of “an Oberlin college sophomore in an anthropology seminar” as Nate Silver frames it. The snafu is some combination of bureaucracy, culture, broken internal processes and overly zealous employees. But a service that is supposed to render “unbiased” information — literally stated in IPO docs — Gemini should not be taking a political slant towards the right or left. Some reads on the topics include Nate’s piece, Ben Thompson at Stratechery and my friend Rohit Krishnan.
Connecting El Risitas with Vonnegut’s Kafka shape?! My man is on a heater!