Good comedy works when the powers of quirky observation are allied with brilliant execution. One also needs material that taps into current affairs while not forgetting life’s enduring truths: such as that people with bad breath always have a lot to say in your face, as MC Chris Spencer hilariously mused. It marked the start of a competently hosted show.
Spencer quickly put at ease any concerns one might have had about what a foreign MC could miss in the nuances of the local psyche. Apart from his frustration with limited channels on public television he kept his observations generic and universal, including classic takes by black people on white lives. He warmed the audience brilliantly and sustained the momentum between performances. His only limitation was struggling with the pronunciation of the names of some of the local acts. But then again, many local whites would have done the same.
The American comedians, Willie Brown and headliner Pierre, were worth their weight in mirth. They were the stars of the show. Brown as a ventriloquist — he says it’s French for gynaecologist — and Pierre brought the evening to a thrilling, if somewhat monothematic, shall we say, climax, with his idiosyncratic take on, well, sex.
They set a high but attainable standard for local acts Tshepo Mogale, Kagiso Lediga and David Kau — the people on trial in this show. It is from them that we expected to hear about the Hefer commission, the Rugby World Cup and what a decade of democracy might mean to millions of jobless South Africans. That would after all be what they need to address in order to sustain their new television series Pure Monate Show, popularly known as PMS.
Between the three of them they either did not tap into the groundswell of rich material or, when they did, they did not exploit it sufficiently. Mogale, for his part, did not even try, which is not a problem. His ‘black man in Cape Town” reminds us that — years after Marc Lottering sought to show us what an irreparably abnormal place Cape Town is — there is still room to poke fun at the city. First because of its ability to make a black person feel isolated and displaced as part of an artificial minority, or as ventriloquist Brown showed, the Mother City’s receptiveness to gay culture. Brown’s encounter in Cape Town with a gay pit bull terrier makes the vicious canine seem somewhat loveable.
Mogale’s brilliance lay in his execution, but his material needs to move up a gear. He has a week to rescue a rugby joke that sank like a lead balloon.
Lediga’s chronicle of a black childhood resonated with sections of the audience, but it is his observations on the future of our democracy that will take him places in the next year or so. On the night he was let down by his execution.
This is why we should be grateful that Kau is on form. He brought in the spy inquiry and the upcoming mooted release of poet Mzwakhe Mbuli, among other issues, to good effect. He finally uttered what many have long believed, that by building Moyo restaurant at the Market Theatre, Melrose Arch’s garish opulence is being transplanted to the austerity of the derelict, precinct under revival.
Kau has recently been attacked by a Sunday newspaper gossip columnist for using tired material. Some of what he is using now is material from his recent appearance at the Smirnoff International Comedy Festival. Like e-mail jokes, hearing the same material a second time doesn’t quite do it.
He needs to build a repertoire of material that always works. Think Stephen Wright’s famous incident of having déjà vu and amnesia at the same time, which prompts him to note: ‘I have forgotten this before.” It works whenever and wherever it is delivered. Kau, Lediga and Mogale will be sharpened by the pressure of delivering half an hour of humour on television every week. For now, they must work to match their established contemporaries.