El Risitas

Joya was born in Seville. He had a number of jobs throughout his life, including cooking and unloading sacks of cement. His first appearance on television was in 2000, on Jesús Quintero's show El Vagamundo, where he interviewed on various life situations with his partner "El Peíto" or "el Cuñao", in a comedic tone. He became recognizable for his high-pitched, wheezing laugh (described in The Guardian as like a "dolphin with a 20-a-day habit."[3]), which led to his nickname "El Risitas" (translated to "the giggles" in English). He also appeared in the 2005 film Torrente 3: El protector. When he became known internationally around 2015 (see internet meme) he also performed for companies outside of Spain, for example in a Finnish commercial.[4] In September 2020, Joya was hospitalized and had his leg amputated due to an illness.[5]

In June 2007, Joya appeared on Jesús Quintero's show Ratones Coloraos and described an incident when he worked as a kitchen porter. He describes leaving some paella pans (paelleras) at night in the ocean to soak and clean, and when in the morning he returned to retrieve the pans, they had washed out to sea with the tide. He frequently interrupts the story with his trademark laugh.[3] The original video was uploaded to YouTube on June 25, 2007, and received over a million views eight years before the meme became widespread.[6]

In March 2014, footage from the interview was used by the Muslim Brotherhood to parody the President of Egypt Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.[7] Other parodies were also produced, usually parodying technology and gaming.[3] The most viewed versions of the video subtitled Joya as the designer of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card, a designer of Team Fortress 2, a Valve employee discussing Dota 2, a Canon representative discussing the C300 camera, an Xbox Live employee describing the platform's system, and a cinematographer describing shooting on a Red camera.[8]

In March 2015, the meme received its most attention after the launch of the 2015 MacBook, where Joya was subtitled as a designer who worked on the prototype. Within a month of its uploading, the video received over five million views on YouTube.[9] The meme's impact has been compared to parodies of the 2004 war drama Downfall, where several scenes from the film are similarly edited with fake subtitles.[3]

Another popular meme was published in April 2015 parodying a political affair in Slovakia known as the Vahostav affair,[10] where Joya was subtitled by popular Slovak stand-up comedy performer Jano Gordulic. In June 2016 it was used to parody the Brexit decision in Great Britain, with El Risitas allegedly having been an advisor to David Cameron in planning the Brexit campaign. [11]

In 2019, a zoomed-in still image of his face, named KEKW, was added as a 3rd party emote for Twitch on FrankerFaceZ. As of October 2019, over 10,000 channels on Twitch have enabled the emote.[12] With more than 95 million uses in chat, the emote occupies 14th place among the most popular FrankerFaceZ emotes.[13]

• 2005: Torrente 3: El protector

• 2000–2002: El Vagamundo, Canal 2 Andalucía
• 2002–2005: Ratones Coloraos, Canal Sur Televisión
• 2005: Caiga quien caiga (TV Series)
• 2005–2012: El loco de la colina, El Gatopardo

• El Risitas at IMDb