Are South Africans too good at laughing? Faced with the consequences of lockdowns, blackouts, femicide and ubiquitous decay, it sometimes feels like everything is a joke. They say you laugh to keep from crying, but whether you’re laughing or crying, if you go on for too long your ribs start to hurt.
For three days last week, a group of scholars (including me) from around the world met in the Agulhas Room of the Beach Hotel in Gqeberha to consider “The Power of Humour”. The conference was held at the invitation of Dr Andrea Hurst, Nelson Mandela University’s chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa (ISCIA). The proceedings of the conference got me thinking about this question.
A diverse array of papers was presented, hailing from a variety of different disciplines. On the first day of the conference, philosopher Lydia Amir of Tufts University proposed the concept of homo risibilis (“the ridiculous human being”) as a starting point towards a secular ethic rooted in the recognition of one’s own absurdity. The University of Abuja’s Lawrence Ugwu Anyi’s address focused on the Igbo comedic tradition of njakiri, while Ian Buchanan of the University of Wollongong used Deleuze’s discussion of the difference between tools and weapons to understand the cruel humour of online disinformation. There were several papers that touched on Donald Trump in some way. Oddly, only one paper focused on humour in direct relation to gender or sexuality.
Some presentations were highly local. For my own paper, I zeroed in on a section from the book I’m writing on the history of South African humour in the early twentieth century, while Frederick Botha of Sol Plaatje University explored post-traumatic humour in Afrikaans literature after 1994. Nelson Mandela undergraduate Zinhle Ndlovu examined the importance of humour to African communities, while Stellenbosch’s Aletta Simpson broke down the postcolonial laughter of Trevor Noah’s Born a crime. Among the most intriguing papers of the conference was a critique of South African Indian comedy offered by Nelson Mandela University gender scholar Simran Juglal, which drew intriguing comparisons between South African comedy legend Riaad Moosa and the Indian-American comedian Hasan Minhaj in navigating the sometimes contradictory incentives of pursuing national fame within South Asian diaspora communities.
It was Dr Amir’s address that really got me thinking about South Africa’s predicament. As the founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Humor, Amir has devoted much of her career to the question of how humour contributes to “the good life”. Drawing from the writings of philosophers like Democritus and Montaigne, she argues that we are constantly encountering both tragic oppositions and comic incongruities in daily life, and our inability to resolve the tension between the two – to convert one into the other – is what makes us ridiculous. According to Amir, “the more ridiculous I am, the more human I am” – and this understanding she holds can help us along the path to the good life.
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It’s true that an attitude of good humour can ease the difficulties of everyday life, at least on an individual level. But does humour offer us anything more than that – an individual escape?
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It’s true that an attitude of good humour can ease the difficulties of everyday life, at least on an individual level. But does humour offer us anything more than that – an individual escape?
Here’s a comic incongruity: I’m in Makhanda at the National Arts Festival right now, and walking back to my cottage to work on this article I passed a municipal office with a slogan in the window: “Makhanda … a good place to be”. Some wag used a permanent marker on the window, so it now reads, “Makhanda … is not a good place to be”. This is funny. I’m sure those who spend time in Makhanda can vouch for this.
Here’s a tragic opposition: a dear friend of mine has a family member who suffered a terrible brain injury. He was recovering well after surgery in a public hospital in North West, and was then transferred to another hospital to continue his recovery with speech and physical therapy. The second hospital was negligent with this man to the point of almost killing him – they ignored a worsening post-ICU infection and sent him, flagging, back to a near comatose state.
Luckily, my friend has an advanced degree and multiple connections. She eventually won the ear of someone at the Department of Health, who had him transferred back to the first hospital. At that time, it came to light that in addition to their abuse of this helpless man, the second hospital didn’t even have a speech therapist on staff in the first place.
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Assuming that this humanness is the same or similar to ubuntu, this kind of laughter might just make angels out of us all.
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Dr Amir is right on this count: I can’t resolve these things. The jokes South Africans constantly make about crumbling public infrastructure in this country definitely help with coping, but the bottom line is that this stuff kills people. Potholes on the roads kill people. Dark robots during loadshedding kill people. Cholera-infected water kills people. Worst of all, public hospitals kill people – or try their best to, it seems.
If we joke about our collective helplessness amid all this, this should heighten our sense of mutual humanness, according to Dr Amir. Assuming that this humanness is the same or similar to ubuntu, this kind of laughter might just make angels out of us all.
To be fair, I saw a glimmer of this at the conference gala dinner on the second day. At the gala, Kim Adonis masterfully performed Mike van Graan’s newest satirical cabaret, My fellow South Africans, in front of a large audience at the Radisson Blu Hotel. With the help of a projected backdrop of Zapiro cartoons, in My fellow South Africans Van Graan skewers all sides of the national situation, indicting everything from capitalism to wokeness to Afrophobia to garden variety racism. Everyone I spoke to, from the self-declared Pan-Africanist revolutionary sitting next to me to the middle-class, white academics across the table, said they were riveted by the evening. So, I think you do find ubuntu – maybe it’s latent ubuntu – as a result of humour.
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Make jokes – but if you can afford it, build a higher fence. Make jokes – but if you’re eligible, get that foreign passport.
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In contemporary South Africa, however, social cohesion has become an empty phrase. It’s deployed mostly by those of the elite, who are already in power, so they really couldn’t care less about whether it actually improves. South African humour, from Leon Schuster movies in the 1990s to Black Twitter memes in the 2020s, has eased the pain of this contradiction for many. But people still draw their own individualistic plans. Make jokes – but if you can afford it, build a higher fence. Make jokes – but if you’re eligible, get that foreign passport.
You can get all the ubuntu you can handle at a comedy show on Saturday, but it means nothing at a public hospital on Sunday.
In his address to the conference on the second day, Dr Ugwuanyi made an association between humour and courage. Njakiri, a genre of ritualised comedic teasing practised among Igbo men, is an important non-violent means of building courage. When does it take courage to joke? When does it take courage to laugh? The problem with seeing yourself as ridiculous is that it lowers your expectations. It prevents you from demanding anything besides what you already have.
South Africans need much, much more than what they have.
- Robin K Crigler, Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study, Dickinson College