El Risitas was the stage name of Spanish comedian Juan Joya Borja, whose hearty laugh became famous through a television interview that later spread online as a subtitled parody meme. Creators kept the original audio but added invented subtitles, making it look as if he was commenting on everything from technology to football. The format travelled across YouTube, Reddit and TikTok in the mid-2010s and beyond, and the laugh alone is now shorthand for finding something unexpectedly funny, even when viewers do not understand the original Spanish.