Originally published 2021-04-29.
The man known online as the "Spanish laughing guy" was Juan Joya Borja, a comedian and actor from Seville better known in Spain as El Risitas, roughly "the Giggles". A 2007 clip of him helplessly laughing through a story about lost paella pans became one of the internet's most remixed videos, and a close-up of his face lives on as the KEKW emote on Twitch. He died in Seville on 28 April 2021, aged 65, after a long illness.
Most people who shared the meme never knew his name or what he was actually saying. Here is the story of the man, the interview, and how a late-night Spanish TV moment turned into a global joke.
Who Juan Joya Borja was
Juan Joya Borja was born in Seville on 5 April 1956. Before television found him he worked a string of ordinary jobs, including in kitchens and unloading sacks of cement, and he was known locally as a natural storyteller with a very unusual laugh.
His break came through the Andalusian broadcaster and interviewer Jesús Quintero, who first put him on screen in 2001 on the programme El Vagamundo. Joya appeared there telling comic stories about a friend nicknamed El Peíto, and he became a regular on Quintero's later shows, including Ratones Coloraos on Canal Sur, El loco de la colina on La 1 and El Gatopardo. He also had a small role in the 2005 comedy film Torrente 3: El protector.
In Spain he was a recognisable cult figure, a kind of folk comedian whose appeal lay less in jokes than in the way he told them. The Guardian once compared his wheezing, high-pitched laugh to a "dolphin with a 20-a-day habit".
The interview behind the meme
The famous clip comes from a 2007 appearance on Quintero's show. Sitting across from the host, Joya begins to describe a job he once had as a kitchen porter at a beach restaurant. He had been told to clean a large stack of paella pans, and to make the job easier he tied them together with sticks and left them on the shore overnight to soak.
When he came back in the morning, the tide had carried them out to sea. Only one was left. Every time he tries to explain this, he dissolves into laughter, struggles to breathe, wipes his eyes and starts again. Quintero mostly lets him go, which is what makes the scene work.
Sources differ slightly on when the segment first went on YouTube: Wikipedia gives 25 June 2007, while Know Your Meme says 21 June. Either way, it was online within weeks of being filmed, and for years it was watched mainly by Spanish speakers.
How a Spanish TV clip became a global joke
The clip did not explode overnight. Its international life began around 2014, when people started adding fake subtitles that had nothing to do with paella pans. In one early version, spread by supporters of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, he appeared to be mocking presidential candidate Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The format really took off in early 2015. A video presented him as an engineer at Nvidia, laughing about the memory problems of the GTX 970 graphics card. Others cast him as a developer for Team Fortress 2 or Dota 2, a manager at Ottawa's bus service, and in March 2015 a designer of Apple's new MacBook, a version that passed five million YouTube views within a month. Typical titles promised a "shocking interview" with an insider who could not stop laughing at his customers.
Commentators compared the trend to the Downfall parodies, in which a scene of Bruno Ganz playing Hitler in a bunker was re-subtitled to rant about anything from football to video games. Both work the same way: viewers who do not speak the language read the subtitles, while the performance itself supplies the emotion.
That is also why the joke travelled so well. Laughter needs no translation, and a man losing control of himself in front of a serious-looking host is funny in any language. The fake subtitles simply gave each audience a reason to share it.
From YouTube to Twitch: the KEKW emote
A second life arrived in 2019. A tightly cropped still of his face mid-laugh was uploaded as the KEKW emote to FrankerFaceZ, a popular add-on for Twitch chat, in August of that year. Viewers use it to react to anything absurd or embarrassing on a stream.
By April 2022 more than 100,000 Twitch channels had enabled it and it had been used over 400 million times in chat. Many people who type it every day have no idea it shows a real man from Seville telling a true story about a job he once lost.
Illness and death in Seville
Joya's health declined in his final years. He lived with diabetes, and in September 2020 he was admitted to the Hospital de la Caridad in Seville with a vascular problem that led to the amputation of a leg. Fans abroad noticed: a donation campaign started on a French gaming forum reportedly raised around €14,000 to help with his care and an electric wheelchair.
He died on 28 April 2021, aged 65, after his condition suddenly worsened and he was moved to the Virgen del Rocío university hospital. Tributes poured in from Spain and from online communities that knew him only as a face and a laugh.
RIP juan joya borja / El risitas.
— Winged Neko (@wingedneko) April 28, 2021
You brought me lots of laughs pic.twitter.com/qu0yLmmT16
Remembering the person behind the joke
The meme version of El Risitas is a man laughing at whatever the subtitles say. The real version is a working-class comedian who made a career out of telling stories about his own misadventures, and whose joy was so unguarded that it reached people who could not understand a word.
If you have shared a parody, it is worth watching the original once with a proper translation. The story is small and silly, which is exactly the point: he found it hilarious that he lost a restaurant's pans to the sea, and millions of strangers ended up laughing along with him.
Sources: Wikipedia: El Risitas; Know Your Meme: Spanish Laughing Guy; original interview by Jesús Quintero (video above).
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