Berto Romero (Manresa, 49 years old) keeps in his pocket one of those anecdotes that guarantee instant success in almost any conversation. If someone asks him (and, apparently, this happens frequently) at what age he remembers doing humor for the first time, he responds undaunted that it was “when he was five or six years old, in a grocery store next to his house.” His mother had sent him to buy “one hundred grams of very thinly sliced cheese.” The shopkeeper, a methodical man, tried to follow the instructions to the letter, but he over-braked. And Berto told him, without the slightest humorous pretense: “My mother asked me for it cut, not grated.”
The adults present in the store were shocked by the occurrence of that baby that barely rose a couple of hands above the ground. And he discovered that other people’s laughter was a balm for his ears. “They gave me candy and I left there in a state of strange euphoria. Above all, because I realized for the first time that I had a superpower, the ability to do something well that people appreciated.”
But with great power comes great responsibility. In the case of Berto, the blessed servitude is that he has spent a lifetime pursuing, alone or in the company of others, a gratification as elusive as the laughter of others. What he today describes as his particular superhero origin story had an immediate continuation: “Very soon I started drawing comics with humorous pretensions. That strange and slightly disturbing child’s habit is perhaps what makes me conceive, even now, humor as a solitary effort. I drew and redrawn my cartoons, turning the joke over, simmering it in my room. And then, when he judged that he was ready, he would show it to the elders to see if it made them laugh. Furthermore, I wanted to see how, when and where they laughed and whether or not their reaction was what I had anticipated.”
Those first steps were very much indebted, as he remembers, to his first hero, Ibáñez, the magician of cañí humor: “You always have to be inspired by the best. If I were a carpenter, I would follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ.” The fact is that he soon became clear that making jokes can be a thankless business, requiring introspection, aim or a lot of silence and, furthermore, it does not always pay off: “It continues to disconcert and frustrate me a little that people don’t laugh when I I want it and that, on the other hand, humor sometimes emerges, by surprise, where I least expect it. It’s as if my intuition failed me, as if I didn’t quite understand the job. But I have ended up accepting that laughter is free.”
Guided by his personal experience, Berto believes that the comedian is very rarely a great intuitive trained in the school of life: “Let’s say that there are comedians of two types: those who feel funny and those who don’t. I belong to the second group, which he would say is the majority. The grown-up comedian, who trusts in himself, dedicates less work to it, because he counts on his natural gift to manifest and everything to flow. We humor workers, those of us who never take it for granted that they will laugh with us, make up for that lack of self-confidence with a lot of work.”
A professional laugher since he took his first steps on the radio 25 years ago, Romero believes that at any moment the source from which jokes flow can dry up: “I don’t know if it’s life anguish, pessimism or imposter syndrome.” , but that’s how I live it. I feel that my … I’m sorry that my hardware basic humor will not be enough if I do not continue investing in software. And I’m glad I live it that way, because that prevents me from relaxing too much.”
These days, the multi-format comedian presents a new television humor space, Berto’s office, which premieres on May 20 on Movistar Plus+. It is the updating, “corrected and increased”, of a formula that already began to work about a decade ago, first in Good source and shortly after in Berto’s program and in Late motive. In essence, it is Berto playing Berto, interacting with his audience from a premise that is as simple as it is difficult to execute with the poise and mastery of which he is capable: offering delirious answers to a wide variety of absurd questions. Berto, in one of his favorite playgrounds. In the center of his comfort zone: “Let the record show that I do a lot to not settle in,” he responds. “I spend my life exploring new formulas, like the series The other side [un thriller paranormal entre la comedia y el terror estrenado en enero] or my new cultural space on Spanish Television, electric sheep. But I also think that insisting on what you are good at is sensible and even intelligent. There is nothing wrong with staying in the comfort zone. The comfort is great. Our parents did their best to make us comfortable. And Berto’s office is a formula to which I adapt very well and to which I like to return from time to time, because there is always room for improvement, there are always more creative, innovative and fun ways to approach it. And that’s where we are.”
Doing a consultancy is not easy: “There is a task of reading and sifting through the questions received and then a very serious work of developing monologues. Because what the consultations are giving me is a minimum basis for me to write small humorous fictions that surprise and, at the same time, are relevant.” This time, his most notorious accomplice, Andreu Buenafuente, will not be there, “because it is no longer the section of a collaborator who interacts with a presenter, but rather an independent program that we launch in a comedy format stand up”.
In a certain sense, Romero conceives Berto’s office as a space with a “postmodern” orientation: “It does not pursue absolute originality, but there is a desire to creatively combine what already exists. A good friend, the writer and screenwriter Carlo Padial, told me that, in the current context of the avalanche of audiovisual content of all kinds, the relentless pursuit of originality is not even a value in modern cultural industries, although that does not mean that you have to give up difference, personality and nuances. It can be, depending on how you take it, a hopeful or unsettling idea.”
![Andreu Buenafuente and Berto Romero at the Feroz gala in 2024.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/44FW7KKKR5C7FEWNHNNWIJEJSQ.jpg?auth=cd0af58ebb5859eba4557d19e29e08e33b1a8fece68a70318e893b93d52913d9&width=414)
Among the consultations received in his new office, Berto has found “true flashes of ingenuity and a lot of slut consultation, a consequence of how much I lavish myself on slut and how much my audience enjoys paying me in the same coin.” He insists, despite everything, “that questions are, above all, hangers from which I hang myself. I cannot expect my followers to be the ones who solve the program for me with their ideas. Humor is in my charge, it is my business.” He also clarifies that it is not an improvisation or live interactive comedy show: “It is very scripted, and that is how I want it to be. Yes, it is true that, based on questions from the audience, it creates a certain illusion of interactivity that seems very contemporary to me, very much in this era of self in which we all want to have our own channel and aspire for our opinion to be heard and taken. consider. But that’s it, an illusion. The substance of the program is in my scripts. He is not at all a slave to the direction that the public wants to give him.”
Although it is hard to believe, he assures us that improvising does not excite him: “I know that I can be very good at it, especially if I do it in the company of someone with whom I have as much previous experience and as much chemistry as with Andreu. [Buenafuente]. But he is the born improviser. I am more of a conventional humorist, with my script and my roadmap, with the jokes that I have cooked up at home.”
In electric sheep, his television space for the dissemination of narrative, premiered in mid-April, Berto explores another register, that of actor/show host. “In a certain sense, it is also very comfortable for me. Here I stick to a foreign script, with minimal room for interpretation. It is not something very different from what I have done in the cinema, In The proclamation, Eight Catalan surnames either The best summer of my life”. Of course, he finds it shocking that there is so much insistence that it is cultural television, “as if it were an unusual idea, at this point, when the truth is that culture can be a perfectly viable television product. If you also add a dose of humor, it can reach an audience far beyond the exclusive redoubt gafapasta. Let us not forget that those responsible are the creators of Laika orbit, a scientific dissemination program that has been on the air for nine years. If it has resisted all this time, it will be because it has found its audience.”
Berto attributes the somewhat condescending skepticism with which the program has been received in certain circles to the fact that “we have become very cynical and prejudiced in everything: we consume culture, but we assume that we live surrounded by brutalized ignoramuses who will not know how to appreciate it. Even our way of despising the elitism of others is elitist.”
![David Broncano and Berto Romero at the 2019 Goya gala.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/v2/5TELU47LJBDNPLRNBWDYYIQXBY.jpg?auth=5814350ff0f55b604762f4be697abcc35f80de5d6e4b2d3c8bfaf77eda5052aa&width=414)
We spoke with Romero the day after electric sheep debut on the air. As is his custom, he has not seen it: “It’s not just that almost 20 years ago I decided to live without television, or with as little television as possible. It’s just that, besides, I hate seeing myself. I prefer that they tell me. They tell me that the program turned out well, they liked it and the network seems happy. That’s all I need to know.”
Your participation in electric sheep does not respond, as he tells us, “to any delusion of grandeur or any master plan, I did not wake up one day, look in the mirror and say to myself: Berto Romero, you are going to work from now on because cultural television in our country receive a boost.” Everything was much simpler: “I received a call from the producer, Constantino Pérez Ledo, he explained the concept to me, caught my interest and I got on board without questioning much. After all, I haven’t watched television programs since 2006, not even those in which I participate, but I am interested in almost all the narrative formats that are addressed in this program. I watch series and movies, I read novels, essays and comics, I play video games. All of that is fiction, the niche of cultural products that interests me. And that is talked about in “Electric sheep.”
He himself has gradually landed in increasingly complex fictions, from the scripts of his shows and humorous spaces to those of his two series for Movistar Plus+, look what you have done and The other side: “Change the format and, if you want, the scale and level of ambition. But a common thread is preserved, which for me is humor. More and more, I feel like a creator and producer of humorous fictions, although that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop putting myself at the service of others’ projects, which is something that also interests and stimulates me.” The constant remains the same as always, the pursuit of other people’s laughter. That (soft) drug that he hasn’t stopped using since he tried it for the first time in a neighborhood delicatessen.
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