List of El Chavo Characters - Main Characters - Profesor Jirafales

Profesor Jirafales

• Portrayed by Rubén Aguirre
• Years: 1973-1979, 1980-1992

Profesor Inocencio Jirafales is the school teacher. Highly educated but naïve, although he carries on a ludicrously innocent relationship with Doña Florinda and patiently teaches his way above the heads of his students. He is a teacher with lots of patience and professionally ethical. When angered, he shouts "Ta-ta-ta-taaaaa-TAH!!!". His last name is a reference to the actor's 198 centimeters of height ("jirafa" is Spanish for giraffe; the closest English equivalent would be Giraffald). The children (and sometimes adults, most notably Don Ramón) refer to him as "Maistro Longaniza" (being "maistro" a mispronounced form of "maestro", an alternative for "professor", both meaning "teacher", and "longaniza" a long kind of sausage). Although he appears throughout all the series (almost 20 years) having a romance with Dona Florinda, by the time it finished, neither one suggested the possibility of going beyond that idillic relation - there's an in-joke among the series production that statizes his full name to be "Inocencio Jirafales", being "Inocencio" both a real-life name in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries and a play on "innocence", thus adding to the "innocently" way he treats his relationship towards Doña Florinda. Even though he claims to have a strong hatered of violence, Jirafales is more than willing to beat up Don Ramón if he does something stupid or that leaves him outraged (in the episode in which Don Ramón teaches El Chavo some basic boxing classes and even lends his boxing gloves to the kid, Jirafales has beaten him so violently that even Doña Florinda displayed disgust over it).

In the English dub version of the animated series, he is known as Professor Girafalde (a pun on the word giraffe) or nicknamed Professor Sausage (Maistro Longaniza) or Professor Firehose (in the Fireman episode) by El Chavo (sometimes called "Professor Girafalges" by non-marketing teams) and is voiced by Bob Buchholz. In Brazil his name is written on a few occasions Professor Girafales.