An undescribably interesting life he lived.

Although sometimes his humor was too slapstick/physical for me, more so in the background context of many of his characters, he certainly will always be remembered as among the great comedians.

Oddly, he had an engineering degree, and started to work as an engineer before entering showbiz. During his time there he started writing. Although his original goal in writing was writing for theater, needs of a budding writer took him to write the plays for ads, and then for cinema. From there his career took off and his focus in humor shone more than ever.


His age of fame arrived at a critical moment in the history of Mexico and Latin America entire. Mexico entered a long period of economic crisis, peppered with the political turmoil associated with the decline of the long lived Kemalist regime. The rest of Latin America was facing similar economic crises, and the political problems of Mexico paled in comparison to the civil wars erupting in other places or the totalitarian military dictatorships emerging as a reaction against those civil wars. In that time and place, his shows not just provided well needed laughs to millions of Latin Americans enduring desperate times. They also, from his personal values and beliefs which show in his teleplays, showed that people of good faith could still exist even in those dark days and called people to be those good persons ameliorating the pains just a little.

His movie El Chanfle, compulsory viewing not just for Chespirito fans or students of Latin American humor, but also for soccer fans, as he was, is very much about this. It feels dated today - very 1979. But also because it feels very 1979 it is that both the aspects in which it is dated and in which it remains entirely current show most. In a time of pan-Latin-American widespread crisis, rising crime, and rampant political corruption, the story of a likeable honest man is most salient.

It was only fitting that he eventually became the first big celebrity endorsement the Christian Democrat Vicente Fox got in his eventually successful bid for Mexico's presidency, finally ending 70 uninterrupted years of PRI rule. Even though he was a stalwart of Televisa, not just the largest Spanish-language media company in the world, and for a long time Latin America's largest company (and even longer if we limit it to non-oil) but also historically and in many ways still, the media arm of the PRI. (In a way reminiscent of how Fox News is of the GOP and MSNBC of the Democrats in the USA) Same as how, in El Chanfle, his character walks up to the referee to inform him that the penalty he just granted for his team (América, the team he supported in real life, owned by Televisa and historically the team of the Mexico City elite) was wrongly called as the player faked the foul and dived.

Making people laugh is already a hard business. Making people laugh while telling them, and calling them on, that life can be better and that they can be better, in the middle of a social crisis, that only he could do, and that was the reason for his success, and that is his legacy to Latin America.