Enrique Pinti
Enrique Pinti was born on October 7, 1939 in the city of Buenos Aires. Her father worked in the Ministry of Public Works, and her mother had had a very good economic situation, since her maternal grandfather, who had come from Italy in 1898, had a farm with a winery in Mendoza and gave his daughter a petit 14-room hotel at the intersection of Av. Entre Ríos and Brasil, in the Constitución neighborhood. Enrique grew up there, and he said that as a boy he was “totally sociable” and added with humor: “But they didn't let me go out on the street, and since I had a big house, they said: 'I don't understand why you have to hang out with those lazy people from the neighborhood. tenement opposite; Invite your school friends. Of which three lived in the tenement across the street.”
Pinti remembered that at school he was not a good student because he “studied nothing but what I liked.” At the age of 6, his overweight problems began. “I personally didn't care until I began to have contact with competitive society,” he once commented. His overweight and total indifference to football turned him into a movie fanatic. “They never sent me to goal. When they invited me to play soccer, I told them 'go, win but don't break my balls because I wasn't born for this. I went to the cinema three times a week. If I wasn't good at football, I was three times good at it,” he said proudly.
He said that when he saw “The Mark of Zorro” with Tyrone Power he decided that he would be an actor, he dreamed of appearing with a wig, a beard, and making period films. “I imagined the sign with my name with little red light bulbs. At the door of the theater there was a line of people who then gave me a standing ovation.” As a child that was his dream, when he grew up it was his reality. It was also around that time that he discovered that humor was something almost innate. After the movie, he would come to his house and tell the plot of the movie and everyone would die of laughter, but when they went to see it they would die of boredom.
When he finished high school he started studying law but as “a way to support my father.” He already did independent theater, he got up at 8 in the morning and went to bed at one in the morning, so he spent most of his classes sleeping. He just took a class after a year and a half. His path was the other way.
The artist who made verbiage a personal brand had a frustrating start. In 1957, it was his theatrical debut. He was supposed to say only one phrase—“we want the lefty”—but they cut it out because he had bad diction. “How could it be that I, the great charlatan, who the only thing I had from school was for chatting, couldn't say a sentence because I couldn't hear myself?” he reflected ironically.
His first small but important role was at the age of 18 in Moliere's “The Bourgeois Gentleman.” “It was an independent but professional theater. Solidly armed with Alejandra Boero, Héctor Alterio, Pedro Asquini. "It wasn't nonsense." However, critic Kive Staff destroyed them. “For the children, classes start on the 14th,” he heard like a stab. Fifty-three years later his life would give him revenge. He would star in the play at the San Martín Theater, which Staiff directed at that time.
He gradually abandoned law. He got a job at the Nuevo Teatro box office and began to earn a few pesos for copyrights on some works he had written. In 1969 he was working doing surveys when Andrés Percivale asked him to write some humorous scripts for his program Casino Philips, at the same time Osvaldo Miranda asked him to write the sketches and Eduardo Bergara Leumann also asked him for some texts for Botica del Ángel. Until Canela called him for his program “La luna de Canela”, where he made him write but also made him co-host. “That started to feed me a lot.” Furthermore, between 1969 and 1975 he wrote the scripts for the comic strip “El Mono Relojero”, for the magazine Billiken.
Established as the author he did not want to be, he fought for his place as the actor he dreamed of being. He had passed 30 and could not make a name among those who he felt were his artistic brothers: Antonio Gasalla, Nacha Guevara, Edda Díaz. In 1973 he was invited to be part of Juan Moreira Supershow but neither the work nor the text convinced him. “I couldn't find anyone who could say what I wanted to interpret,” he lamented. Then, he decided to star in his texts and began with the one-man shows “Historias collected” and “El Show de Enrique Pinti”. Thus he began his own path.
On March 15, 1985, he premiered “Salsa Criolla” at the Teatro Liceo, located at 1499 Rivadavia Street in the San Nicolás neighborhood. The work was a historical musical cavalcade that reviewed Argentine history from the arrival of the Spanish to the present day. It gave 2,998 presentations and was seen by almost three million viewers. He received a lot of criticism for what would become his personal trademark: the use of bad words. Some viewers even wrote letters complaining. “I don't give a damn. For me it is the shell, everyone chooses what best expresses them. Aristophanes used obscene language to say very important things. Boccaccio or Rabelais did the same. Niní Marshall, Juan Verdaguer, Luis Landriscina did not need to say bad words but I need to say them to express, something that scandalizes imbeciles.”
References and Photographs:
https://www.infobae.com/teleshow/2022/03/27/enrique-pinti-el-humorista-de-raza-y-el-entranable-charlatan-que-nos-enseno-a-reirnos-de-nuestras-desgracias/
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Pinti
https://www.infobae.com/teleshow/2022/03/27/murio-a-los-82-anos-enrique-pinti/
10/2022
To justify his style, he said that his parents' family were all “fantastic foul-mouthed people.” Every Sunday the dirty jokes appeared, bitches from my godfather who was a class doctor, and from my aunt, a great saint but also an excellent whore. She was outraged by those who told her “Oh, Pinti, how rude!” because “it is a very great social hypocrisy. Not only here, all over the world..."
After the success of “Salsa criolla”, he followed two years with “El Hell de Pinti”, another two with “Pinti canta las 40”, three with “Candombe nacional”, “Pingo argentino”, “Pinti argentinos” and others. . He also acted in the musicals “The Producers”, “Hairspray” and “Antes de que me forget” and made the adaptations of “Chicago” with Nélida Lobato, “Yo Quiero a mi mujer”, “Filomena Marturano” and #Elyoung Frankestein ”. He recognized that on stage he transformed: “I believe in what I say and I share with people a kind of fascination” to affirm “mine is a beautiful job, but be careful that there are some who believe that this is not just another job and they deify themselves stupidly. When they fall they make a horrible noise and obviously they don't get up again.”
The man who made people laugh was made to laugh by “the purity of Pepe Biondi, the genius of Chaplin, the wonderful acidity of Woody Allen, the subtlety of Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, I enjoy the comedy of Moliere and I writhe with the old guaranguadas of Quevedo, Bocaccio and Aristophanes.”
Perhaps among his outstanding debts was that of not having experienced a great love. “I was always afraid of commitment. I read that it is something typical of my sign (Libra), a fear that nothing will work; "I prefer friendships." He stated with humor that "as one always has to be in a relationship, my partner has been my representative, or Juanito Belmonte, my press chief who is also a friend, or Andrés Percivale or Alejandra Boero, my mother, my father... I always had problems with them. Jealousy, abandonment, arguments: all the trouble that one has with the couple.”
He defined himself as “a good guy. Sincere, open, a little cowardly, a little pessimistic and a good actor.” When they asked Pinti how he imagined Heaven, he answered that he imagined himself in a house “full of foul-mouthed people, crazy people and rude people. With the occasional conditional.” I hope he finds that house and if he doesn't find it it is because perhaps, instead of a house, God prepared a theater for him where laughter is confused with applause and only the artists remain.
The artist, who in recent years had been suffering from severe diabetes and circulatory problems in his legs, also experienced depression since the coronavirus pandemic began. With his death, on March 27, 2022, at the age of 82, a symbol of Argentine humor of the last 50 years said goodbye, who captured the misfortunes of our country like no one else.
