Alfonso Lizarazo

Alfonso Lizarazo Sánchez was born on 29 December 1940 in Bucaramanga, Colombia. At eighteen he left for Bogotá with vague ambitions of engineering, law, or sales. A fellow Santandereano, Julio Nieto Bernal, then manager of Caracol Radio, instead put him on technical control shifts. From those late-night boards Lizarazo learned to fill in for announcers, then to direct. He rose to direct Radio 15, a youth-music station that shared airtime with Nueva Ola artists such as Lyda Zamora, Óscar Golden, and Ana y Jaime. With Carlos Pinzón he helped expand a national youth-radio footprint across Bogotá, Medellín, Bucaramanga, Cali, and Barranquilla. In the mid-1960s he also organized the "Milo a go-go" rock tour, a Cicolac-sponsored run of coliseum shows that carried Colombian beat groups and dancers from Plaza de Toros de Santamaría outward for dozens of dates.

Televisión followed. He directed the musical Estudio 15 without pay and watched it win awards as a top musical program. In 1972 Caracol Televisión gave him the Saturday comedy slot that began as Campeones de la Risa. Within a few seasons the show became Sábados Felices, the family comedy franchise that would outlast almost every other format on Colombian television. Lizarazo hosted and directed it into 1998. He shaped recurring segments such as "Pille el detalle," "A reír en serio," tele-parodies, and above all "Los Cuenta Chistes," the open-mic joke competition that turned audience submissions into careers. Humorists who entered through that door and stayed included Juan Ricardo Lozano ("Alerta"), David Alberto Garcia ("Jeringa"), César Corredor, and Heriberto Sandoval. Later stars such as Nelson Polanía ("Polilla"), Hugo Patiño ("el Príncipe de Marulanda"), and Fosforito also credited his stage and his warmth.

Comedy was not his only invention. With Magda Egas he co-hosted Cafe Concierto, an interview-and-music hour that ran about eight years. Inspired by Saturday Night Fever, he launched a dance competition called Disco, later retitled Baile de Rumba (also cited as Baila de Rumba), on air from the late 1970s into the mid-1980s. From 1982 (English Wikipedia) or 1984 (Spanish Wikipedia) he curated the annual Festival Internacional del Humor, bringing Chilean Lucho Navarro, Mexican comics, Julio Sabala, Moreno Michael, Spain's Gila and magician Juan Tamariz, Cubans, Uruguayans, Venezuelan ventriloquist Carlos Donoso, Argentina's Miky McPhantom, Midachi, and Michael Winslow to Bogotá stages and Caracol cameras across roughly sixteen seasons.

Off-camera he pushed a social brand as hard as any punchline. The campaign Lleva una escuelita en tu corazón (often phrased Lleva una escuelita en el corazón) sent the Sábados Felices cast to play jokey benefit football matches with mayors, teachers, soldiers, and priests, raising money and labor for rural schools. El Tiempo reported in 1992 that the cast had already played more than two hundred matches and that more than fifty thousand Colombian children had benefited; Education Minister Carlos Holmes Trujillo decorated Lizarazo and the cast with the Simón Bolívar medal at Teatro Nacional that September. Later obituaries, including Noticias Caracol, credit the campaign with helping build on the order of 287 schools.

Violence interrupted the joke on 13 November 1994. The Movimiento Jaime Bateman Cayón kidnapped Lizarazo while he traveled with program members. He was freed five days later. He kept working. In 1998 he left the Saturday desk when voters sent him to the Senate of Colombia for the 1998-2002 term. Hernán Orjuela became the on-air successor associated with the post-Lizarazo hosting era. Lizarazo later produced humor formats for Humor Channel and Telecaribe's Caribbean humor festival. He largely retired from public life in Barranquilla, returning to Sábados Felices for a 2023 fiftieth-anniversary homage.

On 4 August 2026, after heart problems in his final years and after heart surgery in a Barranquilla clinic (Spanish Wikipedia), Lizarazo died at age 85. Remains were buried at Jardines de Paz according to the Spanish Wikipedia death note. Don Jediondo, Hernán Orjuela, César Corredor, Patricia Silva, Fosforito, Carlos "El Mono" Sánchez, journalist Ricardo Ospina, and many others posted public farewells that same night and the next day. Caracol's newsroom framed him as the man who made weekend laughter a national habit and who left a Guinness-cited longevity claim attached to the show he founded. Colombia's longest-running comedy franchise still airs on Saturday nights; its first host no longer walks the studio, but the format he invented still does.

This memorial is for Alfonso Lizarazo Sánchez (1940-2026), founder and first host of Sábados Felices, radio pioneer, International Humor Festival curator, and Colombian senator (Wikidata Q4722052). It is not for Antonio José Lizarazo of Colombia's Constitutional Court, whose Commons photographs must not be confused with this subject.