Eugenio never laughed and always made people laugh. If you're of a certain age you know all the jokes, and there were a lot of them, from Eugeni Jofra Bafalluy, simply Eugenio for Eighties Spain. Short jokes, very short ones, a sentence or two that hit like a punch, or something longer. He practiced absurd humor with a touch of bitterness. He masters the pauses: silence is also funny. Always serious, in black and dark glasses, smoking and drinking whiskey, sprinkling Catalan words into his peculiar Spanish. His son Gerard Jofra says he never saw himself as a comedian, but only collected and wrote jokes as a hobby. He created an unrepeatable character, a portrait of masculinity from another time that has remained in the collective memory.
A special Movistar+ program, Eugenio solo hay uno, brings together various comedians in a theater to perform their jokes. But what's most striking is that they brought the comedian, who died in 2001, back to life using artificial intelligence. What's more: The deepfake Eugenio, or Ultrafalse as the RAE recommends, presents the program, projected onto a screen behind the stage. Dressed in white, without smoking or drinking because he is in heaven, he is a hybrid between his synthetic replica and the impersonator Raúl Pérez, we do not know exactly in what proportions. That Eugenio introduces Joaquín Reyes, Eva Soriano, Ernesto Sevilla, Anabel Alonso, Pablo Chiapella, Arturo Valls and even his son Gerard, who goes behind the screen to chat with his father. Each comedian tells Eugenio's jokes in his own style, without imitating what is inimitable about him, and they show that they continue to work.
To put the award winner in context, the same platform offers the 2018 documentary Eugenio. The comedian, who would never have considered himself one, was a man with a strong tendency to sadness. He was initially a jewelry designer and a fan of painting before he brought the guitar onto the stage in a duet (Els Dos) with his first wife, Conchita Alcaide. She was the performer, but the between-song jokes she was supposed to tell in the bars worked so well that Conchita stepped aside and let her take the spotlight. He wore black before he was widowed: his wife died of cancer at age 37, when he was 38 and just starting to appear on television and sell thousands of cassette tapes in stores and gas stations. His two children were 11 and 8 years old at the time, and he always kept too much distance from them. He had two other partners (another Conchita, Ruiz, with whom he had another child, and Isabel Soto), but he fell into hell (cocaine, cancer, a stroke, two heart attacks, depression, esoteric obsession, self-abandonment). until his death at the age of 59. The latest take on the character is David Trueba's film They Know That, which was released in November to critical acclaim.
This return of Eugenio and his tragic story to the present fits into the wave of boomer nostalgia that the audiovisual industry is exploiting with programs like “Journey to the Center of Television.” Not all deepfakes are out to deceive you: that's not the case. In the near future we will see entire programs generated by AI, but the spark of humor ignites in geniuses as human, all too human, like Eugenio. Comedy often comes from a pain that a machine will never feel.
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