‘Mememario’ Vaquerizo | Opinion | THE COUNTRY

A very gentlemanly man is walking down the street with all his pomp and circumstance on his back, he slips on a banana skin lying on the sidewalk and ends up hitting all his bones and his prosopopoeia on the ground. The gag, immortalized by Charles Chaplin in 1915 in the cinema, is, in reality, as old as the first hominid, or hominid, who managed to straighten his back, begin to walk upright on his two hind legs and, therefore, Outside, he would be embarrassed when he stepped on a hippopotamus dung in front of the general chatter of the herd. There is something irresistibly comical about seeing someone who has nothing to do with you fall unexpectedly and fight for a microsecond to simultaneously maintain verticality, physical and moral integrity, not necessarily in that order, before crashing into the harsh reality of that we are nobody. To the point that from the banana gag, to the log games, yellow humorthe horns are a safe bet for comedians from all over the globe and constitute a humorous genre in itself: the slapstickthe Anglo-Saxons call it, they have a name for everything.

The other night, Mario Vaquerizo made a stellar contribution to the matter. She tripped over her own heels while singing and dancing on a rotating platform at the Horteralia festival in Cáceres, lost her balance and did an incredible pirouette in the air before spinning on her own axis due to the force of inertia and falling headlong into the pit. from the stage. At the point, without even knowing if Mario was alive or dead, the networks were filled with looped memes of the fall accompanied by humorous comments. It was enough to see the images to know that the accident was potentially very serious. He could very well have killed himself or suffered severe brain or spinal damage. It didn’t matter. Too many had it in for his political statements and rushed to make fuel for the fallen Mario. I will not be the one to join that chorus, but, now that the affected person himself has declared be wholelaughing even at his shadow, apart from wishing him a speedy and complete recovery, I want to pay him a small tribute from here. Vaquerizo may not go down in history as the singer of the Nancys Rubias, nor as the husband of Olvido Gara, Alaska, nor, of course, as a political scientist. But, now that we young and not so young communicate through gifs and emoticons as minimal units of meaning, the meme of Mario’s fall is a morpheme worthy of its own entry in the Memepedia. In 20 years, perhaps no one will know who the man in the video is, but whoever watches it, here and in Beijing, will smile celebrating that we live in a miracle. There are Language academics who do not achieve such a milestone in their lives.