It’s been a while since Grego Rossello He is not “the kid of the videos”. He hosted the classic ESPN “Redes” with Migue Granados, filled the Gran Rex with his solo show, participated in a program as traditional as “Polemica en el Bar” and realized that this was not his place. She fought her off, fell down, and had her revenge.
He started again from scratch with his cycle of interviews “Ferné with Grego” and broke it, heads Red Flag one of the most successful programs on the streaming platform Luzu TV and now co-hosts “LOL” (Last One Laughing) with Susana Giménez. The Emmy-winning international format and global success that hits Prime Video on March 17 is a reality show in which ten comedians —Dan Breitman, Juampi González, Migue Granados, Yayo Guridi, Mica Lapegüe, Charo López, Julián Lucero, Darío Orsi, Martín Rechimuzzi and Lucas Spadafora, in the Argentine version— must live with a single premise, to make their teammates laugh and be eliminated. This contest was originally developed in Japan, and was later adapted in other parts of the world such as Australia, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, Mexico, India, and Brazil.
The new humor, the thread of television, the fear of cancellation or failure. Grego Rossello, actor, conductor, IUNA graduate and comedian of uncommon sincerity does not avoid any issue in this hand-in-hand with NEWS.
News: Let’s go back to that moment when they told him: “We want you to be in charge of this project and your driving partner is… Susana Giménez.” How did she react?
Grego Rossello: I think it was one of the only times I cried with joy, posta. It sounds kind of cheesy, but I’m very self-demanding, I always say that I get more angry with the bad than I am happy with the good. I’ll tell you one, when I applied to enter the IUNA (National University of the Arts) I went to look at the lists, I couldn’t find it and I got very angry. Later, a friend told me: “Boludo, you made the wrong list, that is the one for the bochados, not for those who entered.” That’s when I saw that he had entered and I was not as happy as what he had bitched.
News: It’s on the A list this time, did it take a while to get there?
Rossello: Yes, that’s why it was very nice to have genuinely been very happy. I started driving at a very young age, at the age of 24 they gave me that opportunity on ESPN and When that project was finished I was convinced that proposals were going to rain down on me, I had meetings and I fantasized that I was going to jump on air TV. And the reality is that in Argentina it is very difficult to drive, there are four or five drivers that we all know, many are at the forefront of their own formats. And for me it was a strong blow to approach producers where I thought they were going to offer me the job of a lifetime and it didn’t end up happening. Going from that situation in 2019 to being called by an international platform in 2022 for a successful format in the world like “LOL” and next to Susana was a lot. But I would like to say that it was not like that from the beginning.
News: And how was it? Because the fantasy of the magical call is on the minds of many content creators. And that of being Susano, by Guido Süller for here, too.
Rossello: (Laughs) Take Guido, I also arrived! The truth is that they first called me as a participant and I wrinkled a bit, I’m in a good moment and I didn’t want to risk a competition. Later they called me to tell me that there was a possibility that someone would assist Susana, that role of secretary began to grow more basically due to her generosity, she gave me a place practically on par. For example, she let me say the name of the winner, there is no greater show of humility than the fact that a number one does that. Sometimes you have to wait, things happen when they have to happen.
News: Regarding the competition, “LOL” is characterized by bringing together a wide range of comedians, some associated with traditional comedy such as Yayo Guridi and others who are figures of the new comedy with very different codes such as Charo López, Rechimuzzi, Migue Granados. , Darío Orsi, Juampi González. Is there old humor and new humor? How do they coexist?
Rossello: I think that what exists is a change of language and form that applies to everything. Today kids don’t talk like a thousand years ago and they don’t laugh at the same things they did in the 90s.. The craziest and most beautiful thing about the program is that they put these comedians from different generations to live together and the objective is to make your classmates laugh, find the tools to achieve it and some that we did not think would laugh at certain things will end up doing so. Yayo was surprised by the level of humor of many kids that he didn’t know directly and for those kids Yayo was at some point his reference point. Then everything intersects and is closer than you might think at first.
News: Now there is a lot of discussion about what makes us laugh and if the fear of cancellation is always on the head of comedians. Do you believe in limits?
Rossello: The rod is always on what makes you laugh, if xenophobic jokes amuse you a lot, go and see why, the limit of political correctness is your ideology and your morals. And let’s also say something, you have to realize that it takes a while to understand, I’m going to get rude and they’re going to cancel me (he laughs), that it’s funny for us to laugh at a person who, for example, is overweight. First you have to internalize it and after a while you stop laughing. I don’t believe anyone that when the deconstruction tab fell on them, the joke stopped being funny, first you have to understand it, process it and humor is at the end. There are jokes that I don’t do anymore simply because they don’t make me laugh anymore, it’s not that they’re prohibiting me from something. I find irony more funny than a joke about mothers-in-law, that’s what it was. Being banned from something is a garrón.
News: Twitter is difficult, it is a network that brings out the most ingenious and also the worst, don’t you feel the danger of cancellation every time you tweet?
Rossello: On Twitter there is a double standard and understanding it relaxed me a lot: there is a Twitter for public figures and another for people who sometimes hide behind an anonymous account. C.I understood that Twitter is theirs and for them, for the guy whose fun it is to go in and throw shit. They are not bad, they enjoy it. They have rented me, until I understood that they will always win.
News: And how did that epiphany of “I understood everything” come about?
Rossello: Once I wanted to become a liberal and it came out like ass. Boca had won a championship after River had won in Madrid, I became a thermos head fan and tweeted something that I regretted. A Boca party account came out to attend me with something from an ex-partner of mine, I wanted to give her a class like “you are putting her in the place of an object” and the truth is, I was wrong. They made me laugh three times obviously but with good reason (we laugh). Mind you, it took me a lot to understand, my grandfather’s last Christmas I was a Trending Topic for nonsense and I was worried about that stupidity instead of enjoying it. And that’s not their fault but mine for not understanding the game.
News: In that game, how do the shelving work where sayings from years ago are resurrected?
Rossello: When that started to happen I was on ESPN with Migue Granados and Nati Jota who suffered several situations like this. I started to get paranoid and I told my girlfriend at the time: “Go on Twitter and look for something I must have”, because as a boy to try to hit a viral tweet I could write anything. The joke is that first my ex saw things that already raised doubts in her, she almost incinerated me (laughs). I also tried to retrieve the tweets with keywords next to my name, like Grego boludo. And thousands appeared… but not written by me but about me with the greatest outrages you can imagine. They were from people saying those things to me now, not in 2015! If you don’t understand it with that… (he laughs).
News: And what are you laughing at?
Rossello: I recently assumed how basic I am. With Franzo, my partner from Red Flag, we laugh at such silly things that I often clarify that I am 36 years old because we look like 12-year-olds. Some are jokes about sexuality that are funny because they are things that happen to all of us, but there are a veil on the subject and talking about it, tempting us, also generates complicity with the public. From the silliest to Lenny Bruce’s wild monologues that he was a guy who revolutionized stand up or the great African-American comedians, all of that makes me laugh. I love anecdotes, always a big fan of “Inside The Actors Studio”, it amused me a lot when an actor knew how to count and it also makes me nervous when someone doesn’t know how to do it. If a friend has a really good anecdote, but the story doesn’t start, I don’t even ask if I can tell it, I wasn’t even there (we laugh). I know, I have to treat it in therapy.
