Cantinflas

Cantinflas: The Comedian Who Became a Verb

In 1992 the Real Academia Española — the guardian of the Spanish language, an institution not given to whimsy — added three words to its dictionary: *cantinflas*, *cantinflada*, and the verb *cantinflear*, meaning to talk at length while saying precisely nothing. Very few performers in any language have been absorbed into the grammar of the culture they entertained. Mario Moreno had already been dead a year when the entry was formalised, and by then Spanish speakers across two continents had been saying "¡estás cantinfleando!" for half a century.

Eight Children in Tepito

Mario Fortino Alfonso Moreno Reyes was born on 12 August 1911 in the Santa María la Redonda neighbourhood of Mexico City and grew up in Tepito, one of the roughest districts in the capital. He was one of eight children of Pedro Moreno Esquivel, an impoverished mail carrier, and María de la Soledad Reyes Guízar of Cotija, Michoacán, who came from an affluent family and was disinherited for marrying him. His siblings were Pedro, José, Eduardo, Esperanza, Catalina, Enrique and Roberto. The poverty was not a costume he later put on; it was the address.

A Name Invented to Fool His Parents

By 1930 he was working the *carpa* circuit — the travelling tent shows of Mexico City — with the Ofelia, Sotelo and Valentina companies. He took the name Cantinflas, a meaningless invention, specifically so his parents would not discover he had gone into the entertainment business, which they regarded as a shameful occupation. Early on he imitated Al Jolson's blackface routines before arriving at the persona that would define him: an impoverished slum dweller in baggy trousers held up by a rope, with a moustache reduced to two smudges at the corners of the mouth. He danced, tumbled and played every trade in the city. In 1936 he married Valentina Ivanova Zubareff, who remained his wife until her death in January 1966.

Ahí está el detalle

His film debut came in 1936 with *No te engañes corazón*, and almost nobody noticed. He had by then partnered with the publicist and producer Santiago Reachi, and in 1939 they founded Posa Films with Fernandez. The breakthrough was *Ahí está el detalle* in 1940 — roughly, "there's the rub" — alongside Sofía Álvarez, Joaquín Pardavé, Sara García and Dolores Camarillo; *Somos* magazine later ranked it the tenth greatest film largely produced in Mexico. In 1941 he played a policeman in *El gendarme desconocido* and broke box-office records for Mexican films with the bullfighting comedy *Ni sangre, ni arena*. In 1942 he made *El Circo*, an interpretation of Chaplin's *The Circus*, part of a run of parodies; *Si yo fuera diputado* echoed *The Great Dictator*. From 1941 Reachi began using Columbia Pictures' Hollywood facilities. In August 1953 he took the stage in *Yo Colón* at the Teatro de los Insurgentes.

Cantinflear: Comedy as Verbal Sabotage

The act was linguistic before it was physical. Moreno took Mexican patterns of intonation, vocabulary and syntax and pushed them until an ordinary conversation collapsed — he complicated exchanges until, in the standard description, no one understood what they were talking about. The technique was weaponised: it worked best when his character owed somebody money, was courting a beautiful woman, or was talking his way out of trouble with authorities, whom he humiliated without their ever noticing it had happened. That last clause is the political content of the whole career. The *pelado*, the stripped-bare urban poor man, could not win a confrontation with power, so he dissolved it in language instead.

The historian Jeffrey M. Pilcher reads the character as a metaphor for "the chaos of Mexican modernity," arguing that "his nonsense language eloquently expressed the contradictions of modernity" and that "social hierarchies, speech patterns, ethnic identities, and masculine forms of behavior all crumbled before his chaotic humor." The writer Salvador Novo credited him with returning "to the healthy laughter of the people the demagogic essence of their empty confusion."

Eighty Days, and the Highest-Paid Actor Alive

*Around the World in 80 Days* (1956) put him opposite David Niven for American audiences and made $42 million unadjusted. He won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, and became the highest-paid actor in the world. In English-speaking markets Niven was billed as the lead; everywhere else, Cantinflas was. *Variety* wrote in 1956 that "his Chaplinesque quality made a big contribution to the success of the film."

The Hollywood follow-up failed. *Pepe* (1960), stuffed with cameos from Sinatra, Judy Garland, Maurice Chevalier, Debbie Reynolds and others, flopped commercially, though it brought a second Golden Globe nomination. He returned home to *El analfabeto* (1961), *El padrecito* (1963) and *Su excelencia* (1967), then a long series of low-budget comedies directed by Miguel M. Delgado, ending with *El Barrendero* in 1982.

The Union Man

Moreno's authority as a working-class figure was not purely fictional. He served as president of the Asociación Nacional de Actores and as first secretary general of the independent film workers' union, the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica, during the early struggle against *charrismo* — the ruling PRI's practice of co-opting and controlling trade unions. By the 1940s his popularity let him take the actors' case directly to President Manuel Ávila Camacho, though those talks failed and he went back to the theatre. In 1961 he campaigned in San Antonio with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson for Henry B. Gonzalez, who went on to become the first Hispanic congressman from Texas. Not everything he touched was uncontroversial: a 1953 Diego Rivera mural at the Teatro de los Insurgentes placing Cantinflas beside the Virgin of Guadalupe was denounced as blasphemous by the National Action Party and Archbishop Luis María Martínez, and was repainted without her.

Why Mario Is Called a Genius

The claim here is unusually easy to verify, because the evidence is in a dictionary. Moreno's gift was linguistic invention of a kind normally attributed to writers rather than clowns: he heard the rhythms of a specific class in a specific city and built from them a mode of speech that was simultaneously hilarious, evasive and politically loaded, and that mode spread until Spanish itself had to make room for it. Charlie Chaplin is reported to have called him the best comedian alive, and the comparison stuck — he became known as the Charlie Chaplin of Mexico. Gregorio Luke of the Museum of Latin American Art went further about the scale of the achievement: "To understand Cantinflas is to understand what happened in Mexico during the last century."

The counter-case deserves stating plainly. This was performance genius, not intellectual system-building; Moreno was not a theorist of anything, and his later output was a long stretch of formulaic low-budget comedies made to a template. Critics and philosophers who examined the character disagreed violently, variously calling him a danger to Mexican society, a bourgeois puppet, a verbal innovator and a picaresque underdog — and the middle charge has weight, since a comic whose message is that the poor should out-talk power rather than confront it can be read as a very useful figure for the party that ran Mexico for seventy years. What is not disputable is the craft: a mouth that could make authority disappear.

Legacy

After retiring, Moreno devoted himself to charitable work, particularly for children, giving to the Catholic Church and to orphanages, which made him a folk hero. He died of lung cancer in Mexico City on 20 April 1993. Thousands stood in the rain for a three-day national funeral attended by heads of state; the United States Senate held a moment of silence. Rufino Tamayo and Diego Rivera had both painted him as the Mexican everyman; El Teatro Campesino and the Chicano theatre movement of the 1960s and 1970s carried his style into a civil rights campaign; a 2014 biopic starred Óscar Jaenada. His ashes lie in the family crypt at the Panteón Español — and his name remains, conjugated, in the dictionary.