Zorayda Sanchez Dies at 57

The film and television comedian Zorayda Sanchez has passed away at the age of 58 57 from breast cancer. Condolences to her friends and family. By many accounts, she was quite smart -- a a journalism graduate who also wrote for the Manila Bulletin. She attained fame though in the late 1980s for trafficking in her homely looks in various film and television shows, most famously in Goin' Bananas.

Now there is a lengthy tradition of comedians going for laughs based on their unattractive looks, from Zasu Pitts to Chichay to Anne Ramsey to Elizabeth Ramsey. I have decidedly mixed feelings about that tradition. On one hand, the humanist spirit that proclaims the triumph of inner beauty would balk at the notion of ugly women seeking laughs on their looks. The offense seems especially egregious if, as with Ms. Sanchez and Whitney Tyson so often did on Bananas, they earned the laughs by vamping it up as wannabe sexpots. One of the few dogma I learned from Catholic school that was reinforced by a very liberal liberal arts education was that it is wrong to laugh at ugly people. From that perspective, it was sinful to laugh at Zorayda Sanchez.

(Sidebar: I remember a commentary published in my neighborhood church newsletter that dared Hollywood to make a version of Rambo where John Rambo proclaimed his love and forgiveness to all the Vietnamese who had wronged and tortured him instead of killing them with mattress box springs. For your consideration, Mr. Stallone.)

But as far as I know, Ms. Sanchez did not express later regrets or proclaim herself victimized by her showbusiness circumstances. She was an adult when she chose the path that led her to steady work and some measure of fame. I suppose that people who have free will in making the choice on how to make a living (or to not make a living) will consider themselves absolutely liberated, no matter what other people say. And it would be but decent for their friends, their family and their strangers to respect those choices. It was well within Ms. Sanchez's right to exploit her looks to make other people laugh, and but fair for those others to laugh in return.

And yup, if laughing at Zorayda Sanchez was sinful, me and my family are guilty as sinners. I distinctly remember my dad actually gagging on his food one family dinner as the camera stayed lovingly in extreme closeup on Ms. Sanchez's face. Presumably, the deliberate purpose of her comedic career was to make people laugh, and she performed quite fine in that respect. For that, she is receiving our appreciation at this sad time. But offscreen, she had every right to live life in the dignity she defined for herself. That side of her, to which the public was not privy to, will be her fullest measure, and those who only knew her onscreen will have to understand that fact even as we remain unfamiliar to those facets of her personality. It is those private aspects of her that her family and intimates will mourn the loss of the most.