1In the early 2000s, Juan Joya Borja, known by the pseudonym El Risitas (The Giggles) appeared on a TV show hosted by Jesus Quintero. One scene from the show that was made available on YouTube in 2007 garnered great popularity: in it El Risitas is telling a funny story to Quintero and on several occasions laughs wildly and infectiously. The video, which got more than a million views, was adapted several times and by 2015 had become an emblematic meme of internet culture. In France, El Risitas was extremely popular in forums of the site jeuxvideo.com, in particular in the Blabla 18-25 ans [Blahblah 18-25 years] forum, whose members produced several adaptations with the image of the laughing man. Variants of the El Risitas meme and the word “Issou” became key elements of the JVC Blabla 18-25 ans forum community language, and served as signals to recognise forum regulars.
2This article examines the journey of the El Risitas meme focusing on four aspects: the use of the meme in jeuxvideo.com forums, the genesis of the meme (its origin and spread), the reasons behind its success, and the modes through which the meme existed outside the digital realm. The article attempts to identify through a case study the factors that encourage the spread of a meme, its incorporation into the culture of a community, and its moving beyond the online world into the offline world. To describe the way in which El Risitas spread in diverse spaces, both online and offline, we use an ethnographic approach (Jouët & Le Caroff, 2013), based on a long “online” immersion aimed at studying the different digital spaces, interactions and communities in which El Risitas appears. The research also required the constitution of a significant archive composed of numerous documents produced by journalists and internet users about El Risitas.
3The El Risitas meme shows the laughing face of Juan Joya Borja, a Spanish comedian.1 The meme comes from a 2007 video in which the comedian recounts one of his mishaps on a TV show broadcast on a Spanish station: when he worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant, he accidently left about 20 paella pans to soak in the sea overnight, thinking that the sea-salt would clean them. The next morning, just one pan was remaining, the others had all been washed away by the tide. While telling the story, El Risitas bursts into laughter and his laughter sets off wild laughter in the audience. The meme spread on the internet, especially on social media platforms, where the original video was remixed in different languages to create parodies: internet users used alternative subtitles to tell often absurd stories, using Borja’s facial expressions and laugh to magnify the humoristic dimension. Thereafter, Juan Joya Borja’s face was used as a meme, widely recognised on the web. El Risitas became one of the most famous and long-lasting viral phenomena of the internet, inspiring thousands of different versions and it is still being used for various humoristic contexts.
4The El Risitas meme has appeared frequently in French-speaking forums since 2015, and in particular on forums of the jeuxvideo.com site. From 2016, it became an emblematic meme in the Blabla 18-25 ans forum.
5The French site, jeuxvideo.com,2 which was initially specialised in video games, has since 1997 received an average of six million unique users per month. Beyond its content, the website hosts forums with very high membership, which are amongst the most active forums in France and represent the most visited sections of the site. Among these forums, Blabla 18-25 ans is a section where participants talk about a variety of subjects not necessarily linked to video games3. It is a very popular forum. In 2016, for example, it had on average 40 million page views and 2 million posts per month4. Despite the efforts of moderators, the forum is regularly sullied by numerous hate messages, including racist, homophobic, sexist and Islamophobic content, that are not always sanctioned (Gauducheau & Marcoccia, 2022, p. 94-95). In the past few years, the forum has been involved in several controversies for the spread of such content.
6From a “technical” point of view, El Risitas is used in the forum mainly as a type of sticker: use is generally limited to a simple image and therefore does not correspond to the most common form of meme which results from combining an image with a caption of one or several sentences (Bonenfant, 2014, p. 29). The El Risitas character first appeared in the form of a sticker in spring 2015, when a Blabla 18-25 ans forum user took it up as their signature. By November 2015, El Risitas stickers had become very popular on the forum, and from 2016, they were the most used stickers on Blabla 18-25 ans. The platform that allows users to download stickers for jeuxvideo.com (JVC) forums is even called Risibank, a testament to how important El Risitas is in JVC forum culture. Risibank is an image bank created in 2016 by members of the Blabla 18-25 ans forum: more than half of the stickers available on the platform are variations of the original El Risitas sticker.5 Likewise, the JVFlux community wiki has several articles about El Risitas, its origins and its spread.6
- 7 This is further developed in Marcoccia, forthcoming.
7El Risitas is used in different ways and serves different functions in the Blabla 18-25 ans forum A semio-pragmatic analysis was carried out on a corpus of 1000 messages.7 Qualitative analysis allowed for the identification of the nature and the variations of semiotic material, the position of the messages in which the meme appears in the thread (to understand its interactional function) and lastly, the kind of functions that could be attributed to the meme (pragmatic dimension).
8The meme is most often composed of a simple photo and belongs to the realm of purely visual language. In its original form, this corresponds to the photo of Juan Borja’s wild laughing. Other photos of El Risitas, with other facial expressions, are also used as memes. Thus, in the Blabla 18-25 ans forum, the meme’s spread was not based on replication but on variation. Digital memes are generally characterised by the latter form of dissemination: internet users manipulate and modify original material—the reference image, the sticker or the “first” meme—and its meaning (Bonenfant, 2014, p. 29). For Kaplan and Nova (2016, p. 8) this variation is moreover what distinguishes the circulation of memes from simple viral spread: content is not simply shared, but it is used as a basis to produce new content. We can observe a range of variations of El Risitas based on the original sticker: El Risitas appears in different forms, with different facial expressions (for example, a surprised expression) or different costumes (dressed as Father Christmas, for instance), often linked to the message in which the sticker appears (El Risitas wearing a police cap in a message talking about police, for example).
9El Risitas is most often used in association with verbal content, placed at the end of a message to which the meme can add expressivity (by representing an emotion or an affect: joy, anger, etc) or a sense of community (as a marker of connivence with other forum members). An analysis of the messages featuring the meme shows that El Risitas most often has a function similar to that of an emoticon, adding emphasis to the expressive or emotional dimension of a verbal message: El Risitas (in its original or modified format) can express joy, despair or even anger. In some messages, the meme is used such that El Risitas appears as an actor in a scene described in the message or as the enunciator of the message. Some messages are composed simply of the meme, without any verbal content. The latter always involve cases of reactive messages, in which the meme enables the expression of the emotion or attitude elicited by the initial content (joy, stupor, reflection, etc.)
10The use of the El Risitas meme also fulfils “identity” and communitarian functions (Girard, 2021, p. 32), by contributing to shaping and expressing the individual identities of the most active members on the forums and/or the collective identity of the online community (its values and culture). Thus, the meme sometimes has functions directly linked to processes of identity construction through pseudonyms, signatures—in this case, the meme is also linked to an expressive function—or avatars.
11We observe that users of the Blabla 18-25 ans forum also use other iconic and linguistic forms linked to El Risitas. For example, some messages have a sticker of Jesus Quintero, the show host who interviewed El Risitas in the original video. Messages also feature two onomatopoeias associated with the El Risitas universe: “Issou” and “Ayaaa!” “Issou” is a term referring to how El Risitas pronounced the name of the host, while “Ayaaa” is an onomatopoeia imitating the comedian’s laugh. In a clear manner, the meme and other linguistic forms used by forum members allow for the definition of an in-group and an out-group by drawing a border between those who understand and master the forms, and those who do not understand them (Jost, 2022, p. 10-11).
12What were the different stages in the process of Juan Joya Borja memification, and what factors encouraged the process?
13Borja was born in Sevilla. He started his career as a cook and a handler in the construction industry. His first TV appearance occurred in 2000 on Jesus Quintero’s show, El Vagamundo, which aired on Canal 2 Andalucia. With his jovial face, big moustache and missing teeth, Borja embodied the kind of eccentric or marginal characters that Quintero often brought from the streets to the show. Thereafter, Borja, now nicknamed El Risitas, became a regular guest on the show Ratones Coloraos also hosted by Jesus Quintero. That show aired on the local channel Canal Sur from 2002 to 2005, and from 2007 to 2010. El Risitas made nine appearances in the second series. In June 2007, interviewed by Jesus Quintero, Borja recounted the previously mentioned anecdote about the incident when he was a dishwasher in a restaurant. While telling the anecdote, Risitas laughs continuously, setting off wild laughter also by Jesus and the audience for several minutes. The original video of this sequence, titled “Las Paelleras” was uploaded onto YouTube on 25 June 2007, where it garnered more than a million views in the eight years before the meme was born,8 and was modified numerous times, in particular by the addition of subtitles. In the technology and gaming field, many videos subverted “Las Paelleras” into commentary on the return of the MacBook in March 2015 and on the release of the game Team Fortress 2, presenting El Risitas as its original designer. In the realm of politics, in March 2014, Egyptian web users used the video to mock president Al-Sissi. In France, a video with alternative subtitles presented El Risitas as the father of prime minister Manuel Valls.9
14The memification of El Risitas in jeuxvideo.com forums transpired in three stages. First, at the beginning of 2015, a forum poster used the video to criticise the updated version of the site that had gone up following maintenance in December 2014, by adding subtitles to the original interview. That video met with great popularity, and spring 2015 saw the first use of El Risitas in sticker format, when a forum member adopted it as a signature. In November 2015, El Risitas stickers were often used in the Blabla 18-25 ans forum, and from 2016 on became very popular in that space.
15The memification of El Risitas was thus a transmediatic phenomenon founded on the popularity of a TV personality to then spread into diverse digital spaces and end up a sort of “mascot” for the Blabla 18-25 ans forum community. Why was this process of memification so successful with El Risitas?
16Analysis of the process of El Risitas’ memification and the meme’s popularity in the Blabla 18-25 ans user forum of the jeuxvideo.com site sheds light on three types of factors: the technological environment, the characteristics of the memified character and the system of values of the community circulating the meme.
17The technological environment plays a central role in the phenomenon of memes, which in their original format (combination of image and text) can be considered as characteristic forms of techno-graphism (Paveau, 2017, p. 320). The digital environment offers internet users a significant stock of images that allow for diverse reuse strategies to create new content, in revisited formats and with different meanings. The web, in effect, constitutes an immense archive and dissemination reservoir of such resources, encouraging their reutilisation in new creations. This explains why, generally speaking, the phenomena of variation and deformation are common in the digital community: digital material is, by nature, malleable and amenable to reuse, sharing and repurposing (Gautier & Siouffi, 2016, p. 7).
18More specifically, the creation and dissemination of the El Risitas meme were encouraged by the fact that the original material was a video, which provided users with a large stock of still images they could manipulate, thus enabling the creation of numerous variations all based on El Risitas’ face. Numerous stickers of the comedian with different facial expressions, corresponding to images taken from the video and which allowed for great expressive range, can be found in the Blabla 18-25 ans forum. This range without a doubt encouraged uptake and popularity of the meme, because, as Jost (2002, p. 22) has shown, one of the conditions for the success of a meme is that it allow for a significant range of transformations.
19It seems evident that the personality and physical appearance of Juan Joya Borja also played a role in the memification process and in the meme’s success. Borja, in effect, presents certain characteristics which favour stereotyping (Paveau, 2017, p. 325). His face is very expressive, and his facial expressions easy to interpret. In addition, his toothless smile and slicked-back hair make him appear a bit like a cartoon character, whose comic appeal stems from a form of amused disdain for people from the working classes. The presence of some characteristics of video memes as described by Shifman (2014, p. 74-82) can be noted in El Risitas: such memes tend to present ordinary individuals who symbolise an “imperfect masculinity” in comical situations and with a form of repetition (with characters repeating the same activity several times over). Shifman (2014, p. 90-92) also noted that memes often enact a confrontation between an individual and their environment (which, in this case, would be the incident that El Risitas recounts in the video) or people in ridiculous postures.
20Lastly, the success of the El Risitas meme in the Blabla 18-25 ans forum is also linked to the rituals and value system of the community of forum users. One important element of the forum’s culture is that of “crazes,” or “délires” in French.10 Within the community, a craze consists in spreading a meme that can have different formats (stickers, videos, expressions, phrases) which other forum users assess to decide whether or not to reproduce it. This kind of competition encourages the creation of memes and efforts to ensure their success. Knowing about “crazes” is indispensable to understanding the subculture of jeuxvideo.com forums. A successful craze leads to lasting incorporation of a meme in messages exchanged between members. We already noted earlier that El Risitas was by far the most successful craze in the Blabla 18-25 ans community.
21Lastly, El Risitas’ success can also no doubt be explained by the fact that the meme symbolises the culture, the value system and the ideology of the community that took it up. Thus, the comic quality – or even ridicule – of El Risitas aligns with the kind of humour appreciated within the forum, one strong on mockery and irony. The meme also aligned with the value the forum places on popular culture, with its numerous references to cultural products generally denigrated by “official culture” (TV series, somewhat voyeuristic documentary stories, etc) and on forms of humour associated with people from the modest classes, whom El Risitas came to symbolise. That system of values – as we shall see later – also concurred with an ideological positioning strongly present in the forum: populist, anti-elite and, often, very close to the extreme right.
22Memes that are very popular, like El Risitas, may come to have a life “offline.” Such memes may be qualified as “post-digital” objects (Wagener, 2022, p. 54) which blur the boundaries between online and offline lives. In El Risitas’ case, four phenomena can be observed.
23The first observation is that the culture of the Blabla 18-25 ans forum community can move beyond the digital platform that brings the community together. In effect, from 2016, forum members started a sort of joke centred around Issou, a municipality with 4,500 residents in Yvelines, situated around fifty kilometres from Paris, and whose name coincides with the onomatopoeia “Issou” that was very popular in the forum. Videos were found on the forum showing the town of Issou, such as one where a forum user shouts “Issou” in the town’s streets at night, or another one chronicling a car journey to Issou’s town hall. In addition, many forum users proposed and approved changes on Google Maps for the town of Issou: places such as the town hall, a park, a church, and a supermarket were rebaptised and had photo montages including El Risitas and Jesus Quintero added to them.
24The memification of Juan Borja even spread to the real person, who became a key figure in the Blabla 18-25 ans forum. Following the transformation of his image into a meme, the “real” person of Juan Borja became the mascot of the forum users. Users came to express their admiration of and their affection for Borja, and this in particular on two occasions. The first, in January 2021, after Spanish media announced the news of Borja’s leg amputation and his battle against diabetes, a member of the forum launched an online fundraiser which raised more than 14,000 euros. In March 2021, one of Borja’s family members published a video on YouTube to express his gratitude to the donors. In the video, Borja is seen moving about in the electric wheelchair funded by the donation from the forum. The second occasion was on 28 April 2021 when it was announced that Borja, following a brief illness, had died, and numerous messages paying homage to Borja flooded the forum. From these two examples we can note the impact of the meme on the real world, manifested in two manners: an integration of meme culture into the real world (with the wordplay on “Issou” and the “vandalising” of Google Maps pages of the town in Yvelines) and a transposition of the real towards the digital world, when the meme rebecomes a human being in the eyes of forum users reacting to his suffering and to his death.
25The meme also came to be exploited outside of its universe of reference, for both commercial and political ends. Unsurprisingly, from the commercial aspect, baseball hats and T-shirts sporting the El Risitas meme can be found on various online sales sites.11
26The political facet of the interaction between El Risitas and the “real world” was manifested in the meme’s co-optation by the French far right. Like Pepe The Frog in the United States, El Risitas is used in France by some online users to express their adhesion to a set of far-right, racist, anti-feminist or homophobic ideologies. This political instrumentalisation gave the meme a new meaning, and for some Blabla 18-25 ans forum users turned the forum into a community of political engagement (Wagener, 2021).
27The use of the meme reflects a tactic regularly used in the Blabla 18-25 ans forum: the “dog whistle” tactic which consists in using “coded” language to share extremist messages (Bath & Klein, 2020), both to avoid (automatic) moderation, as well as to establish complicity with those who understand the language specific to the community. It should be noted that the Blabla 18-25 ans forum in France has been widely recognised by many experts as being a major platform for the French “fachosphere,” facilitating connections between young far-right identitarians and the spread of their ideas to young forum users, with the aim of influencing and recruiting the latter. The coded language used includes the term “chances” to designate, with irony, youth of migrant origin (a deformation of the slogan “Immigration, a chance for France”), while the terms “N” and “A” or “Noix” [nut] and “Arbre” [tree] are used to refer respectively to “noirs et arabes” [Blacks and Arabs]. “QLF” (standing for “Que la famille,” or “Just the family” taken from the rap band PNL) also designates youth of migrant origin, “GR” standing for “grande randonnée,” or the “great hike” means “great replacement,” etc. Very often the El Risitas meme is to be found in messages using this type of coded communication.
28In 2017, Florian Philippot, then vice-president of the National Front, conscious of this political dimension was seen drinking in a mug whose bottom sported an El Risitas sticker in a video shared on YouTube. For Philippot, this was a way of showing that he understood the codes of the community, and represented for him a key political ploy to draw young electors to his cause. Following that video, Philippot and his “Risitasse” were taken up and reused several times, and now Blabla 18-25 ans forum users include stickers of Philippot in their messages.12
29This article proposed a description and an analysis of a meme, its use in an online community, its genesis and the way in which this element of digital culture was able to spread into other offline spaces. Some general lessons on the itineraries of memes can be drawn from this case study.
30The technological dimension of the phenomenon of memes is primordial to the extent that the production of these cultural objects is directly linked to their techno-discursive nature and to the importance of the process of reuse and remix. In the case of El Risitas, the process of memification moreover took place in a transmediatic environment, in which a TV show accessible via a YouTube video served as the original material for the construction of the meme. Moreover, it is interesting to note that the genesis of the meme involved both professionals (those who produced the TV show) and amateurs.
31Outside of technological factors, the success of a meme also largely depends on the extent to which the meme can be integrated into different codes shared by members of the community which is circulating the meme and symbolise its system of values. El Risitas, through his comic working-class personality, embodied the culture of the Blabla 18-25 ans forum, one based on irony and imbued with an anti-elite and anti-system discourse. The political exploitation of the meme was, for its part, the extension of this online culture transformed into political positioning.
32Lastly, two phenomena appear central to the analysis of memes: the fact that these digital objects can cross online/offline borders is to be taken into account; as should be the fact that memes are objects that can federate communities of word or of political action.
Flux RSS
