The Cape Comedy Collective has prospered in a town notorious for fab ideas and feeble follow-through Guy Willoughby ‘Is South African comedy Joe Parker?” the question was raised unexpectedly by Sam Pearce, co-director with stand-up comic Mark Sampson of the year-old Cape Comedy Collective (CCC), during a hip-hop interview around the present/future of Kaapse laughter. The answer, dear readers, is a definite … maybe, maybe not. On the strength of a triumphal year of raising laughter awareness round the Cape Peninsula, it would seem that the CCC is moving local audiences on beyond the disaffected White Men Can Grump-style of Parker ho- ho humour, but it’s an uphill battle. True, the buoyant audiences of all shapes, sizes and ages at a variety of CCC-run venues twice weekly during the last crossover millennial year points to a comic renaissance. But is in necessarily an African one too? Let’s hand out the plaudits first. Amid the desert of local Cape humour – consisting largely of flying visits from upcountry comics: Mark Banks over Christmas and Pieter-Dirk Uys’s spreading Bezuidenhout family out at Darling – the CCC was launched with a cheery bang at the upbeat, downmarket Independent Armchair Theatre in trendy Obs on August 1 last year. Now, to celebrate exactly one year’s worth of the ever-rising cake of local laughter, the Comedy Collective is hosting this Sunday what promises to be a monster ho-ho bash: 15 rising stand-up stars who’ve perfected their patter at the CCC, hosted by caustic Cape-Flats comic Marc Lottering. On the bumper bill you’ll take in such supremos as woman’s wit Irit Noble; Muslim motor-mouth Riaad Moosa; lapsed, blapsed post-Catholic Chris McEvoy; black buppie Kagiso Lediga; rubber-limbed Jason Cope; and so on. As Sam assured me: “We’ll give ourselves a collective pat on the back for what we’ve achieved so far – and look ahead to another great year of topical, fresh, cutting-edge local comedy.” The brainchild of Pearce and Sampson, enthusiastic ex-Brits – “Yes, we can’t explain why it’s newcomers who make things happen in the Cape” – the Comedy Collective awoke an immediate and full- throated response from the Obsites who piled on to the quaintly eclectic seating arrangements of the well- named Armchair Theatre. Since that auspicious beginning, the CCC has garnered a swelling bunch of stand-ups, honed a lot more in the wings and for 52 consecutive weeks has continued to host the wildly popular Sunday-night line-ups at the Armchair Theatre, hosted by Mark Sampson and the irrepressible D Levinsohn. In addition, the collective now regularly leave their Observatory fastness to conquer surrounding territory: they host a weekly comic line-up called Lekker Local Laughs (ouch) at the Nico Theatre’s On the Side. CCC funny folk now regularly do their thang at venues from Guguletu via Brackenfell sports bars to nightclubs in vibey Athlone. Not bad for a town notorious for fab ideas and feeble follow-through. The CCC has prospered, it seems, where previous comic ventures in Cape Town have sputtered and died.
The reason? Firstly, timing – that greatest of comedians’ gifts, often sorely lacking in South African humour – and, secondly, tight management and marketing from a committed team. Managers Pearce and Sampson have kept the peninsula public awake with a bright series of media- grabbing events: TV coverage (on e.tv’s Evita: Live and Dangerous, a BBC documentary), and new comic programmes, such as the all-female Girls on Top evenings, the One City, Many Comics talent competition, the Easter Eggstravaganza, and so on. The collective’s timing, to repeat, is excellent. There’s no doubt that receptivity and awareness of new comedy, even in sleepy Cape Town, had grown by leaps and bounds in the last five years – fuelled by a general loosening of our old strait-laced South African stays since the 1994 democratic elections and five years’ worth of burgeoning annual stand-up activity at the National Arts Festival. For the last three years, the annual Comedy Festival at the Baxter Theatre has matched local laugh-makers with overseas comics – of uneven talent, it is true – and exposed steadily swelling audiences to newer comic styles and (gasp!) subject matter. Together, these forces have stimulated a comic thirst in the paying public which the CCC are in place to appease. I happily dropped into the Armchair last Sunday for night 52 – and a jolly crowd-pleasing night of comedy it was too. True, the audience was mainly composed of Obs’s undergrad bohemia, but hey, people who wear safety pins between their eyebrows can laugh too. It’s good to know that audiences as varied as the East Coast Caf’ harassed professionals, Athlone’s Galaxy clubbers and even Brackenfell’s Hypermarket shoppers chuckle at the CCC broes too. Dave Levinsohn, who as the “Agony Barman” will be on hand to answer your deepest questions at the birthday bash, compered the show with the kind of ingratiating aw-shucks charm the locals love. Actually, on night 52, perhaps swelled with pre- birthday fever, the CCC comics were loose to the point of near-unravelling: timing went out the crack- painted window as everybody from Levinsohn to Noble to Moosa milked the indulgent audience, played to the gallery (even though there isn’t one inside the modest-sized Armchair), and – ho-hum – allowed toilet seats and words like “knob” (Levinsohn’s fave) to keep the laughter rolling. Joe Parker, all is forgiven … Pearce was apologetic – “everybody was over time this evening” – but the real eye-opener, I think, is the audience; they indulged the poor workmanship on stage to the point of charity. Strikes me that even the youngest audience members let pass the kind of heterosexist attitudes and bum bottom jokes that should have gone out with the rinderpest.
Yet the comic scene that the CCC has opened up is by and large a cheery one: as Sampson attests, the best thing about the CCC is they are giving mic space to voices once unheard – Muslim, township, female – amid all that oh-so-familiar white-jock jawing. According to Pearce, “the Cape comedy audience is much more diversified than you’ll find in London, say, where black and white comics tend to play separate audiences. “Yes, some of our new black comics do adjust their material for white audiences – but this is changing as they gather confidence and assert themselves. Audiences are changing and adjusting too – just look where we are playing now!” Indeed, the most exciting and potentially fruitful aspect of the collective’s work is the free weekly comedy workshops held at the Laboratory in Woodstock – “a wonderful venue donated free by those incredibly community-orientated guys”. At a recent session, I was heartened by the quality and zest of a bevy of would-be performers from across the tired old gender, race and sex-orientation divides. The cut-and-thrust of commentary was great, no-holds- barred stuff. Here, on the cold wooden floor of the Lab, the true comic voice of tomorrow is clearing its throat. Watch out when it starts to roar. The Cape Comedy Collective birthday bash takes place at the Independent Armchair Theatre on July 30 at 8pm. Contact Justine on Tel: (021) 447E1023 for more details