The @LelePons phenomenon: spontaneous combustion.

By Gonzalo López Martí       LMMIAMI.COM

• How & why did the @Lelepons juggernaut happen?
• How did she become possibly the most important Hispanic influenceleb in the country even before she could drive a car, vote or drink alcohol (let alone buy it)?
• You still don’t know who Lele Pons is?
• Well, she’s on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment / Disrupters list.
• The other one is Jessica Alba and there are no Hispanic males featured on the list.
• Ms. Pons is the first Vine user to have surpassed the 1 billion loop mark.
• Her account is Vine’s most looped of all time with over 6.7 billion loops.
• Her Vine feed ranks 8th in terms of followers, with over 8.2 million.
• On the side, Pons has two million Instagram followers.
• And her own app on Apple’s App Store.
• As I said, she is the most promising Hispanic influenceleb alive today.
• To some extent, more than Jorge Ramos or Sofía Vergara.
• Why & how?
• Let’s see.
• Eleonora “Lele” Pons was born in 1996 in Venezuela, moved to ‘Merica around the turn of the century and grew up in Miami Beach in a pretty comfortable socioeconomic environment.
• During her mid teens she began fooling around with her high school friends and shooting homemade videos to post on social media.
• On Vine, to be precise.
• Most Vine users post hastily made footage of irrelevant everyday events or impromptu selfie rants while they wait in line at the movies.
• Vine is to some extent an ocean of trivia, nonsense and non sequiturs.
• It just so happens that some Vine users put a little more artistic effort into their output.
• Namely Lele, who’s ouvre on Vine is pretty well thought out, possibly scripted.
• She pretty much writes, produces, directs, choreographs, lights, stars in, sound designs and post produces all of them, using her friends and family as supporting cast.
• Her uncanny ability to fly solo is critical and central to her enormous potential.
• She is not a manufactured product churned out of the usual showbiz machinery like, say, One Direction, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gómez, Menudo and so on and so forth.
• She’s 100% self made and social.
• She owes nobody nothing.
• There’s no Simon Cowell-type mega producer lurking in the background.
• By showbiz standards this is immensely disruptive and revolutionary.
• Not sure if she actually writes her scripts the old fashion way by typing them on a keyboard, but her storytelling technique tends to be very well thought out and quite accomplished: her Vines usually follow a fairly traditional yet flawlessly crafted narrative structure of setup, premise and punch line.
• She displays an uncanny socialgenic comedic timing, a purely intuitive talent if you ask me because, given her age and her background, it is unlikely that she has received any kind of formal training.
• She honed a signature pseudo slapstick acting style out of pure spontaneity.
• Yet most of her Vines seem to be thoroughly rehearsed.
• Her repertoire is chockfull of pratfalls and wacky stunts of demanding physical comedy, which she performs herself.
• Rumor has it, she ended up at the ER a few times due to stunt-related injuries.
• She puts her well-toned body literally on the line for her body of work.
• Her material is pretty topical (methinks this is one key to her success): a surprisingly insightful, self-deprecating take on the everyday life of an upper middle class teenager in a multicultural suburb of America.
• Multicultural American suburb is not an oxymoron anymore.
• She allows millions of people from around the country and the globe to take a peak at the pretty privileged, happy-go-lucky, borderline gaudy lifestyle of a pampered yet flawed and down-to-earth girl living her teenage years in, of all places, the MacMansions of Miami Beach.
• Plus, it don’t hurt that she is quite an accomplished dancer and a pretty attractive girl.
• When donning professional hair & makeup -which she will do more often since she moved to Hollywood to pursue a professional career- she is surprisingly hot, with a waist-long, dirt blonde mane.
• It was only a matter of time until some big shot agent spotted her and took her to LA.
• To be continued.