Chespirito

Roberto Gómez Bolaños stood 1.60 meters tall and did not have a leading-man look. For almost two decades nobody saw his face on screen because his job was typing scripts nonstop for others in an office in Mexico City. He was a small, wiry man, an amateur boxer in his youth and a frustrated mechanical engineering student who found refuge in advertising.

There, he wrote radio spots with enviable ease. Film director Agustín P. Delgado read one of his scripts in 1957 and told him he wrote as fast as a little William Shakespeare. The classic nickname stuck hard.

Writing by the Pound for Others

During the 1960s Bolaños was the hidden pen behind Viruta and Capulina, the comedy duo that filled movie theaters in Mexico. He wrote complete films in a couple of weeks. But the relationship with the comedians blew up when production demands and professional jealousy soured the working atmosphere.

So in 1968 he accepted a modest offer from the newly founded Televisión Independiente de México: a half-hour weekly slot on Saturday afternoons with no budget but complete creative freedom.

Nobody gave him a chance in front of the cameras.

In that half-hour, The Super Geniuses of the Square Table was born. Bolaños recruited a handful of stage actors with whom he designed a dry humor based on the mathematical repetition of stock phrases and on the physical pratfalls inherited from silent film. In 1970 the network stretched the show to sixty minutes and asked him to invent something new. That technical need gave birth to El Chapulín Colorado, a cowardly hero dressed in red who parodied the solemnity of American comic books.

Soon after, a poor boy who spent his days inside a wooden barrel arrived. In the mid-1970s the show reached 350 million weekly viewers across the continent.

The Money-Making Machine

Filming El Chavo del 8 was a spartan routine in a small studio with papier-mâché sets. There were no technical flourishes or sophisticated cameras. Bolaños placed complete trust in the rhythm of the script and in an almost choreographed acting timing where every slap landed on the exact second.

And the formula worked like a charm.

In 1979 the team released El Chanfle in theaters, a soccer comedy of mix-ups directed by Enrique Segoviano. The film sold more than nine million tickets in Mexico, outgrossing any Hollywood release in the country's theaters that season.

But the clash of egos blew the company apart from within. Carlos Villagrán left the cast in 1978 after bitter disputes over authorship and the commercial rights to his character, Quico. Ramón Valdés soon left too out of personal loyalty. The show kept airing with patches and forced adaptations, although the comedic machine had lost its original tension.

The Silence of the Screens

Bolaños said goodbye to his characters on television in 1995 to retreat to the stage. He wrote and starred in 11 y 12, a light comedy that stayed on stage for twenty-eight thousand performances between 1992 and the start of the 2000s.

Money ended up devouring the fiction.

After his death in Cancún in November 2014, the rights to his work passed to his heirs through Grupo Chespirito. In August 2020, the broadcasts of all his series were abruptly canceled in more than twenty countries. Televisa and the family failed to reach a financial agreement to renew the distribution contracts, and the tapes were left shelved in a warehouse.