“And here we are sir. 30 years. 30 years of supporting 16 presidents and 37 Ministers of Economy who kept saying ‘this is the biggest crisis that the country is suffering’, ‘public spending must be reduced’, ‘we must work more’, ‘we must invest in he ispa“, Shooting Tato Bores on Sunday, September 9, 1990.
That broadcast of the program Tato Bores in search of the path of the sun It was not just another one, since he was reading his 2000th monologue, and far from staying in the classic view of what happened in the week, he took the time to summarize, in a language and look faithful to the style with which he has always accompanied , 30 years since his arrival on television.
He was born on April 27, 1927 in a modest home of Jewish descent, located in the heart of Buenos Aires, specifically near Córdoba and Libertad Avenues. Son of a fur trader with strong religious convictions, Mauricio Borensztein he grew up with his brothers Abraham and Enrique. His childhood and youth were characterized by a marked academic disinterest, which led him to be expelled from school. Julio A. Roca and leaving the Otto Krause Technical School No. 1 before completing high school.
From an early age he showed a deep love for music, particularly jazz and piano, which prompted him to collaborate with the orchestra of Luis Rolero and Rene Cospito as an assistant, carrying sheet music and instruments at 15 years old. Before, at 9, he had flirted for the first time with the artistic field working as an usher at the Cervantes National Theater. This set of experiences marked the beginning of his career in the world of entertainment, which laid the foundations for what would eventually become an outstanding artistic career.
It was at the age of 20 when, at the musician’s bachelor party Santos Lipesker He started telling some jokes that caught the screenwriter’s attention. Julio Porter and the comedian Pepe Iglesias, The Fox. He was immediately summoned to be part of his slot on Radio Splendid, and at the same time he was given the pseudonym by which he would be known for the rest of his life: Tato Bores was born.
After that came his foray into theater and cinema, but without neglecting television, where he accompanied since 1957 and for three years Dringue Farias in The GESA familyto also be part of Faces and morisquetaswhere dressed in a tailcoat, with a disheveled wig and a cigar, he began to perform monologues, which would end up distinguishing him: “The monologue has a key: it is a kind of political report; I read the newspaper headlines and tell the news on stage adding a humorous comment. But you always have to update the information: a political joke on Thursday doesn’t make you laugh on Friday.”
This is how the magic began: combining humor with sharp social and political observation, his unique approach to addressing sensitive topics and his ability to make even those who were the target of his criticism laugh, earned him a prominent position and public appreciation.
“When I say that we are experiencing a great moment of monetary expansion, I know very well what I am saying. Notice that instead of paying the dollar at 30, 40, 50, 70, 80 or 90 mangoes we are paying it at 135, and if we get our ear wet we are going to pay it at 200 because we are rich guys and we all buy and we all put together . And the day we have a lot of dollars we can hit a fantastic hit. I’m going to explain to you, it turns out that the dollar is the North American currency, the day we have all the dollars in the world we will go to the United States with their money and they will have to hand over the country to us. I didn’t explain how yankees who are so alive that they do not realize the danger they are running with us“, he detailed, about the Argentine fever for the dollar in 1962 within the framework of the cycle I always tattoo on Sunday.
Thus, after the beginning of its own cycle on Channel 9, two years later it moved to Channel 11 where the cycle was on the air for six years, and then changed its name to Forever Tato on that same screen. In 1973 he landed on Canal 13 where he spent the rest of his career, except for one year on Teledos, in 1988, and another on Telefe, the last year on screen.
But of course, he was not alone in that flagship of political humor, and among his scriptwriters you can find the pen of Landrú at first, then Caesar Brutus for 10 years, and later the Spanish – based in Argentina since he was 9 years old – Jordan of the Cazuelaone of the most appreciated names in the industry, who died in a plane accident just three years after having been part of the comedian’s hard core.
Then they would arrive Aldo Cammarotta, Juan Carlos Mesa, Carlos Abrevaya and Jorge Guinzburg, among others, who shared the writing of the monologues and the sketches. In the early ’80s he was accompanied by the duo of Geno Díaz and José María Jaunarena, who died two years apart. After that he called the journalist and comedian Santiago Varela, who was warned from the beginning: “Look, the last two screenwriters I had died of lung emphysema.” That day she stopped smoking.
Varela began working in 1988 at the time of Tato Diet, on Teledos, and was the scriptwriter who accompanied him until the end of his career. At that time, far from emails, He sent the script of six pages and 10,000 characters on a motorcycle on Mondays, so that Bores could study them until Thursday and record them on Friday, prior to their airing on Sundays.
“There were some authors who were from the UCeDe and other Peronists, it was polychromatic, there were no problems as long as the character was maintained,” he recalled some time ago in a conversation with the Net Channel about whether the change of names over time had any effect. In fact, he recognized that they were such a good student that he did not say a single word that was not outside what was stipulated in the writings.
Screenwriter of Monologue 2000 that begins this note, even he himself was the owner of the bills that were shown on camera to account for how many zeros had been removed from the national currency in each change of denomination, Varela never felt proud that each one of them Those texts, seen today, remain valid. “Talk about how bad we are. because we are repeating things,” he said. “What I feel most is that the same situations are repeated, and sometimes even with almost the same people,” she lamented.
Despite his death in 1996 due to bone cancer, Tato Bores’ influence endures in the memory of the public and in the new generations of comedians who see in him a pioneer of social criticism through humor.
