Martin Boyd

Throughout the Spanish-speaking world and in Mexico in particular, Cantinflas is, beyond all doubt, a cultural icon. With Cantinflas, the Mexican comedian Mario Moreno created a character who featured in more than 50 feature films and became an emblematic image of Mexico’s national identity: the archetypal “pelado”, obtuse, at times insane but always hilarious, with a strong dose of social satire.

A milestone in recent Mexican cinema is the film Cantinflas, an ambitious biopic on the life of the Mexican comedian, and in particular on his short-lived burst of stardom in the English-speaking world playing the lead role in the film Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), one of the few films in English in which he appeared. Although this film, directed by Sebastián del Amo, met with a mixed reception at the time of its release in 2014, with accusations of “malinchismo” (the Mexican word for the cultural inferiority complex that tends to assume the superiority of all things foreign over anything Mexican) due to its casting of a Spaniard (Óscar Jaenada) instead of a Mexican in the title role, the international success of Cantinflas sparked a renewed interest in the work of this great comedian, satirist and social commentator in recent years.

Cantinflas’s success in the Spanish-speaking world was so great that his name has even given the Spanish language a new word: the verb cantinflear was added to the Royal Spanish Academy dictionary (DRAE) in 1992. The DRAE defines the word as “speaking like Cantinflas, saying a lot of words that sound intelligent but that in reality have no logical unity or possible interpretation; i.e. speaking without saying anything coherent.” Linguists in Mexico and Spain have been unable to identify exactly who introduced cantinflear to the dictionary but believe that it became part of common parlance in Mexico, Spain and Chile as early as the 1950s. And there is also the noun “cantinflada”, which refers to any specific instance of cantinflear.

Most of the cantinfladas in the films of Cantinflas are so firmly rooted in the Spanish language that they are almost impossible to translate, particularly because many of them depend on puns that lose their meaning in any other language. Nevertheless, to conclude this celebration of the legacy of the immortal Mario Moreno, below I offer a few of his more memorable cantinfladas, which I have attempted to translate into English in the interests of sharing them with Anglophone readers:

“There you have it, Your Honour. It’s neither one nor the other, but rather the complete opposite.”

“If it’s difficult I can get it done right away; if it’s impossible it takes me a little longer.”

“There are moments in life that are truly momentary.”

“I don’t suspect anybody, but I distrust everyone.”

“What did you say you told me you said?”

“Either we act like gentlemen, or like what we are.”

“We are at war because we are. For what reasons? You tell me. And I’ll answer you: fundamental reasons that every organization should understand, and there are three of them: the first, the second and the third. Amazing, isn’t it? Well, that’s how it is.”