Staff Photographer
Niren Tolsi asks Anthony Pascoe of Hayibo! and Justin Nurse of Laugh It Off if South Africans have lost their humour and whether local satire is in danger of extinction
The SABC has twice pulled a Special Assignment documentary on satire off the air.
Julius Malema, the ANC Youth League president, displayed the humour of a rogered chicken straight out of the novel Down Second Avenue when responding to a recent Nando’s advert depicting him as an idiot puppet.
This while President Jacob Zuma is seeking R7-million from cartoonist Zapiro for defamation and damage to his character after a cartoon published in the Sunday Times depicted Zuma about to rape Lady Justice.
As a humorist is there anything sacred for you?
Anthony Pascoe: ‘Sacred” is an interesting word. It usually means ‘beyond criticism because it’s holy”, so perhaps the best answer is that we’re political and cultural atheists. But, yes, there are limits, like bad personal situations. We’re not scared of offending people but we don’t want to be glib.
Justin Nurse: I haven’t come across anything yet. When Madiba dies, I’ll go there. I’ll be watching it in Qunu, ready to make fun, next to the SABC cameras that Mandla Mandela sold the funeral rights to.
Do South Africans have a sense of humour?
AP: South Africans have many different senses of humour. We laugh a lot as a country. We’re always cackling away. There is no such thing as a ‘South African” sense of humour, though. The closest we’ve got is probably a Schusteresque form of slapstick.
JN: South Africans have a wonderful sense of humour. I think we appreciate humour when it places the shit that is going on around us in context and humbles us by reminding each of us that we live in [this] home to the miracle of democracy. We need more than just the 15cm2 space that Zapiro is afforded to make social and political comment. From bona fide satirists such as Laugh it Off (I say bona fide because our Constitutional Court victory has lent us an aura of credibility in some people’s eyes … and that is not to say my own) to graffiti artists, cartoonists and comedians, the space that we have to play in and have our say is becoming increasingly marginalised.
What is your sense of how political leaders in this country respond to humour and to being lampooned themselves?
AP: It’s likely that many of them have good senses of humour and enjoy a joke in private, but they are part of a paranoid political machine that cannot tolerate individual quirks. Politicians are also part of a system designed to make them feel important, so vanity plays a big part in their inability to poke fun at themselves in public.
JN: There’s the recent perceived value of brand — be it self or business — and the idea that humour which attacks can bring that value tumbling down. Politicians need to develop thicker skins and corporations need to cut ties with their patent lawyers who are getting a retainer just for soeking kak to begin with. I suppose it’s also fair to say that we are an arrogant people: ready to laugh at others; indignant when it is at our own personal expense.
Is satire, and consequently irony, parody, diatribe, exaggeration, burlesque and suchlike, misunderstood in this country? If so, why?
AP: We’ve come out of 400 years of ‘Ja Baas”, which makes comedic anarchy (however gentle it may be) very alien. A lot of stand-up comedians are currently enjoying sheltered employment: they can say ‘fuck” and people fall around laughing, mainly because we’re very unsophisticated when it comes to teasing mainstream tastes and ideas. We’ve also never got away from our national penchant for kowtowing before Big Men. Satire tries to reveal the small brat in every Big Man and perhaps that makes South Africans feel uncomfortable.
JN: I’d say that understanding humour sometimes requires having a decent education, particularly for us with regard to the savvy ways of advertising. So perhaps the majority of uneducated South Africans don’t quite get the difference between a piece of satire and a piece of advertising. Then again, you don’t need a doctorate in marketing to know that drinking beer doesn’t make you more of a man, no matter how many billboards in your township tell you otherwise.
If you were to give Julius Malema a course in humour, where would you start? And end?
AP: We can’t teach Julius Malema anything about being funny. The guy is a laugh a minute.
JN: I’d start with a course at Nando’s, then eat some of McD’s sacred cows, while showing him a few episodes of South Park and explaining the lengths that humorists can go to show someone or something up. Then I’d flagellate him to thicken his skin.
Recent events, such as the SABC pulling the satire documentary and political reactions to satire, suggest the development of a humourless, totalitarian state. Please comment.
AP: The political left has always been profoundly humourless. The Soviet Union: great ballet, very good at organising purges, but not so much with the comedy. Humour is almost always a reactionary energy, tempered with a kind of empathy for the individual that is alien to the left, which thinks in collective terms. It’s interesting how often the great comedians or comic acts are bourgeois white boys who meet at university in Latin class.
JN: Humour is a great warning buzzer in South Africa. When it sounds we have to start paying attention. When it is silenced we have to start getting worried. I’d say that the ANC is trying to redress the balance for all the flak that JZ received regarding the shower saga. It should level out and we can all go about our business, but the truth is that we need far more avenues for funny self-expression, not fewer. And with the corporations owning the media by and large, it’s a case of choosing your battles each and every day.