In his introduction to one of Dave Barry’s books, PJ O’Rourke writes, ‘We would call him ‘beloved’ if only he were older and had a fatal disease.” The same could reasonably be said of Mark Sampson.
When I first met Sampson I didn’t think much of him at all. I was making a documentary on the emergence of the Cape Town comedy scene at the time. Oh, here we go, I thought, another Brit expat come to impart his infinite wisdom to the local stumblebums. I took exception to his peroxided dreadlocks; I didn’t particularly like his knee-jerk stereo-typical jokes about Capetonians.
Furthermore, he was running The Lab, a comedy workshop for aspiring comedians, and would encourage his charges to stay away from sexist and racist jokes. It struck me as censorship of the most egregious kind. The name of his company, The Cape Comedy Collective, did little to assuage my doubts. It was far too Stalinist for my likes. Nor did I particularly care for the slogan: ‘Comedy — For the People, By the People!”, which Sampson insisted audiences chant at shows as though it were some radical political mass meeting for some sector of the disempowered.
Nevertheless, it is not yanking truth’s arm to say that without the Cape Comedy Collective there would be no Cape Town comedy scene. Sure, it might have evolved in time, but Sampson and Sam Pearce, his wife and manager, were the catalysts. Prior to their involvement there had been Pieter-Dirk Uys, Marc Lottering and, um … no one, really. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say there would be no Stuart Taylor, no Cokey Falkow, no Riaad Moosa, no Kurt Schoonraad had it not been for the Collective.
During the shooting of my documentary I got to know Sampson, and found him to be a genuine, decent chap. I developed a profound respect for him, but at the same time grew more irritated with him. It wasn’t so much that he was selling his audience short as much as he was selling himself short. The stock gestures and throwaway jokes had begun to rankle me so much that I started to turn the cameras off when he went on stage. It was the biggest mistake I made. One evening Sampson was phenomenal. He was trying out a new routine about the trials of being a new father. It was hilarious — better than that, it was heartfelt.
After the performance I bounded up to him and enthusiastically told him it was the best thing I’d ever seen him do. I enthused at length and encouraged him to do a one-man show. Sampson stared at me gloomily. We had a beer and went our separate ways.
Fast-forward about 18 months — I’m eating a steak-and-kidney pie when Pearce calls me — Sampson’s done it, and I’m to take some of the blame for the hell Pearce has gone through in the past six months he’s been writing it. If indeed this is true, it is certainly one of my better blunders. The resulting show, Missing Links, is fantastic — both hilarious and heartfelt.
Not to labour the obvious, but humour generally has a victim, someone at whom the finger points. It is, in many respects, a threatening experience to both speaker and audience in that we are never more helpless than when laughing hysterically. As such it is always those with the most affection for their ‘victim” with whom we feel most comfortable. This, I think, accounts for much of Sampson’s popularity — in the very best instances there is a comedian’s preoccupation with morality and an obligation to do good. In Sampson’s case this goes back to Wilhelm von Schlegel’s comment that ‘comedy is intended to sharpen our powers of discrimination, both of persons and situations; to make us shrewder; and this is its true and only possible morality.”
I don’t think I’d fully understood Sampson’s motivation before reading that comment, but if I was in any doubt, the point was hammered home during a night of filming at the short-lived Comedy Warehouse in Green Point. Several heavy hitters from Jo’burg had flown down for the evening. They went down like lead in a river. The reason — and for this I believe Sampson must get the credit — was that Cape Town audiences had been reared on an idealistic brand of comedy. The ‘dom darkies and dumb blonde” jokes fell on deaf ears. It was a beautiful silence. The most telling of the audience comments we filmed was: ‘Don’t they realise we’ve moved on? It’s not 1990 anymore.”
It is somewhat fitting, then, that Sampson’s first one-man show should be about evolution, and that its first major run should be in Sterkfontein, the Cradle of Humankind, where about 30% of the world’s hominid fossils were discovered. The message of the show is not that we’re all Africans, but rather that we’re all humans. As he says: ‘Evolution is not so much survival of the fittest as it is the death of the dumbest.”
There is a fine Latin phrase, which, translated, amounts to: ‘In seeking to evaluate a jest, we must consider who speaks, in what cause, before whom, against whom, and to what effect.”
In Sampson’s case it comes not from the bitter chambers of the heart, but rather the optimistic soils. The most poignant line of the show, appropriately, is the last. ‘I’m just another boy from Sterkfontein who’s come home.”