Julio Victorio De Rissio (born November 10, 1916), better known with the stage name of Dr. Tangalanga, is a popular Argentine comedian who makes prank phone calls

Prank call

A prank call is a form of practical joke committed over the telephone. Prank phone calls began to gain an America-wide following over a period of many years, as they gradually became a staple of the obscure and amusing cassette tapes traded amongst musicians, sound engineers, and media traders...

 to unsuspecting recipients.

Born in the Balvanera

Balvanera

Balvanera is a neighborhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina.-Origin of Name and Alternative Names:The official name, Balvanera, is the name of the parroquia centered around the church of Nuestra Señora de Balvanera, erected in 1831.The zone around Corrientes avenue is known as Once after Plaza Once de...

 barrio of Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires

Buenos Aires is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after São Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent...

, Argentina

Argentina

Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...

, he started making and recording crank calls in the mid-1960s by way of comic relief for a bedridden friend. Since then, he has released over 40 albums of collected calls, having sold over 250 thousand copies, arguably becoming the most famous prank call artist ever in the Spanish speaking world

Hispanophone

Hispanophone or Hispanosphere denotes Spanish language speakers and the Spanish-speaking world. The word derives from the Latin political name of the Iberian Peninsula, Hispania, which comprised basically the territory of the modern states of Spain and Portugal.Hispanophones are estimated at...

. He speaks in Argentinian Lunfardo

Lunfardo

Lunfardo is a dialect originated and developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the lower classes in Buenos Aires and the surrounding Gran Buenos Aires, and from there spread to other cities nearby, such as Rosario and Montevideo, cities with similar socio-cultural situations...

, and his tapes have been praised by sources as varied as Argentine philosophers Carlos "Caloi" Loiseau and Alejandro Rozitchner

Alejandro Rozitchner

Alejandro Rozitchner is an Argentine philosopher and writer. “Artist of the ideas” or “intellectual nutritionist” are some of the names with which he describes his work...

.

Style

The general form of his jokes is to make a polite call requesting information about some product or service, then randomly insult the person on the other end, generally producing a verbal altercation or exchange of insults. Part of the humour is to use crude words in absurd contexts, exploiting the reactions of his victims.
In other cases, he begins the call with a made-up complaint (although often based on real life ones), regarding things that have supposedly happened to his nephew. For example: "My nephew went to get two "matafuegos" (Spanish for fire extinguisher; literally: kill-the-fire) for the car, but they didn't kill the fire, they just injured it."

Spanish

• Official page
• 90 Tangalangas (Página/12
  Página/12
  Página/12 is a newspaper based in Buenos Aires, Argentina.Página/12 was founded on May 25, 1987, by journalist Jorge Lanata in association with writer Osvaldo Soriano and investigative journalist Horacio Verbitsky...
  
  ).
• "Tal vez ya sea un poco conocido" (Clarín (newspaper)
  Clarín (newspaper)
  Clarín is the largest newspaper in Argentina, published by the Grupo Clarín media group. It was founded by Roberto Noble on 28 August 1945. It is politically centrist but popularly understood to oppose the Kirchner government...
  
  ).