“I’m a faggot, homosexual is a faggot”

There was a time in Spain when New Year’s Eve nights did not begin when the champagne was opened, but when Tuesday and Thirteen appeared on television. It was a liturgical appointment, a kind of profane mass that Millan Salcedo y Josema Yuste They served with their histrionic, absurd and deeply popular humor in those eighties and nineties, when television still had the power to stop the country on a single channel and the sketches of these comedians became shared mantras. A word, a gesture, a grimace were enough to provoke a collective laugh that reverberated from the living rooms of the houses to the empty streets of the cities the next day.

Black and white television had been left behind, but color was not enough to fill the void of a country that was still searching for its identity between modernity and the echoes of a recent dictatorship. It was there that Tuesday and Thirteen built his kingdom. They didn’t need luxurious sets or elaborate plots: a microphone, a wig and the comical appearance of Millán and his partner were enough to turn any situation into an unforgettable parody. Among all the iconic episodes, the Encarna and the empanadillas sketch stood as the epitome of humor of that time. Millions of people, from the highest aristocracy to machine shop workers, could repeat it by heart. Laughter was a common language.

The country stopped by laughter

In the Spain of that time, still marked by the echo of the Movida and the desire to be modern, laughter became a healing mechanism. Tuesday and Thirteen offered just that: an escape valve that united the country in laughter. Years later, Millán reflects on that time with the irony that characterizes him. “The chemistry went to hell”says; but on stage they were an unstoppable force.

The paradox was in the incompatibility of two men who achieved, together, magic that could not be replicated alone. Fame, tensions and personal exhaustion ended up diluting society, but not memory. As the years passed and the broadcasts of those specials became a Christmas tradition, the country continued to remember how, for a few hours, Millán and Josema made time stop.

The nostalgia of humor that marked an era

Talking about Tuesday and Thirteen is not just evoking the past. It is an exercise in emotional memory, a bridge to a time when humor had an almost medicinal function. What they offered was not just laughter: it was complicity. The viewer felt part of a game in which the rules were clear: everything could be the object of parody, but never from hatred, but from the tenderness that is hidden in everyday things.

Millán, with her unique histrionics, embodied an infinite range of characters: from exaggerated radio presenters to neighborhood ladies with whom anyone could identify. He himself summed it up with his characteristic sarcasm: “My mother didn’t leave me land or money, but she left me humor. It’s a legacy that doesn’t expire,” he says in an interview he publishes. The World.

His talent was, in effect, an inexhaustible inheritance that did not understand generations or fashions. Today, Millán Salcedo returns to the stage like an onion grandfather who cannot leave his recreation site. Sets and cameras have lost their attraction for him, but the theater continues to be the space where he feels free. His humor, like himself, has evolved. Gone were the frenetic imitations and impossible falsettos; Now he prefers to tell anecdotes from his life, explore laughter from introspection and share with the public the stories that have marked him.

When he talks about himself, he does so without filters. He says what he feels and what he thinks, without caring about conventions. “I am not homosexual; I am a faggot”he says, reclaiming a word that for him does not have negative connotations, but rather a charge of truth and authenticity. It is that Millán, without disguises or artifices, who continues to make those who listen to him laugh and move. He says that he did not flirt until he was 29, a fact that gives us an idea of ​​how terrible discrimination was then and reminds us that even in 2025 there is still a long way to go.

A country between empanadas and nostalgia

In a Spain that has changed so much since the days of Móstoles empanadillas, Martes y Trece remains a bright memory. Their jokes, sometimes white and sometimes irreverent, many of them politically incorrect today, are part of the cultural DNA of a country that learned to laugh at itself thanks to them. And although Millán has left the days of television fame behind, his figure remains a symbol of that time when, for a few hours, laughter paralyzed Spain.