Dismantling Colonial Laughter: Tracing Emergent African Diaspora Stand-Up Comedy in French and German

Abstract

This study redirects attention from English-speaking African diaspora stand-up productions to French and German language expressions of purposively selected comedians with recent immigration history from Africa performing within mainland Europe. Through a socio-historical interrogation of specific colonial histories and joke themes, the paper comparatively explores the French language stage acts of Fary Lopez, Samia Orosemane (France) and Cécile Djunga (Belgium and France) and the German language works of Dave Davis (Germany), Charles Nguela (Switzerland), and Soso Mugiraneza (Austria). The aim is to show how the individuated colonial histories of the nations in which these comics reside and the chronicles of their relations with Africa(ns) and Black peoples feature in joke formulations and satiric jibes of the jokesters. Through these explorations, this essay studies how stand-up comedy’s transformative power challenges societal norms and attitudes using the backdrop of the concurrently heterogeneous and dissimilar colonial histories of the African continent and its diasporas. Moreover, through its focus on non-English expressions, it presents the unique intersections of language, “race,” ethnicity and colonial histories, as well as the geographic and linguistic spread of the African diaspora beyond European nations with direct colonial contact with the continent. Thus, the enquiry posits joke performances as platforms for cultural expression and critique as well as a site within which African peoples negotiate their presence in non-African environments.

Plain language summary

Examination of African diaspora stand-up comedy in German and French

The study explores African diaspora stand-up comedy performances outside the English-speaking areas of the West. It studies the acts of six comedians of African origin performing in Western Europe, with a view to showing how the co-opt the histories of marginalization and discrimination against Black peoples in commenting on present-day racializations going on in the world today.

What is in a Language?

The complex legacy of European colonialism in Africa is multi-dimensional. It is directly implicated in polarizing indigenous communities and age-long interrelationships as well as eternally reshaping the cultural, political, and economic landscape of the continent (Parashar & Schulz, 2021). Interestingly, even though the continent has over 2,000 languages, colonization instigated a whittling down and partitioning of Africa into the three European languages of English, French, and Portuguese. These and their creolized versions are the most spoken languages on the continent across diverse linguistic groups. This should be a good thing on the part of cross-cultural relations, but there is also the negative angle that the imposition of these languages created impenetrable boundaries between neighbors. This manifests in the comedy industry, for instance, in a specific manner that English-speaking Africa is generally oblivious to productions within the French-speaking parts (Iwata, 2020), and vice versa. In terms of emigrations from the continent, colonization instigated and defined patterns to the point that immigrants were hitherto mostly drawn to Western nations where the same European languages as in their homelands are spoken. For example, people from Francophone countries were drawn to France, Belgium, and Quebec, Canada, where French is spoken; and those from Lusophone and Anglophone nations, find themselves going for studies or work in nations that colonized them or others where Portuguese and English are spoken respectively. Recently, this trend has changed significantly as the African diaspora is now emerging and growing in nations with little or no history of colonial contact with the continent, thus extending its diaspora cultural expressions beyond English, French and Portuguese to comparatively discuss African diaspora stand-up comedy in French and Germany in the light of colonization and its bequests, with a view to presenting non-English African diaspora joke making to English-speaking readers.

Colonial languages brought a paradoxical legacy of harmonization and polarization of intra-African relations. On the one hand, they provided more common means of communication for the many disparate groups on the continent, whereas on the other hand, their imposition also meant that societies that share borders, even some who speak the same local languages, were divided by colonial national and linguistic borders. Thus, to answer the query of why language should matter, it is pertinent to go back to the French colonial policies of assimilation and association, which emerged from the colonialists’ belief that African cultures were inferior and as such need(ed) the French to “civilize” them. These colonial policies therefore worked actively to suppress and erode local identities, specifically engendering the annihilation and sublimation of Africa(ns) to the French desire for overseas territories. The aim was to create what Hanotaux describes as “many Frances,” as a way of protecting the French language, customs, and ideals, “in the face of furious competition from other races” (Betts, 2004, p. 28). Thus, French colonial intentions in their African colonies were not hidden. The goal was to create an extension of France and French people (Sarvan, 1985). On the other hand, for the relatively short time Germany maintained colonial territories in Africa, they first established a direct shipping link for the inflow of colonial “subjects” (Aitken & Rosenhaft, 2013), primarily to serve Germany’s socio-economic needs and not for the resettlement of colonized peoples. The Germans were high-handed and treated locals as serfs and second-class subjects (Linden, 2017, p. 181), resulting, for instance in the near extermination of the Herero and Nama tribes of Namibia for challenging the self-imposed German colonial administration (Patin, 2022). At the end of WWI, Germany was stripped of all its colonies and was occupied by the French who, for lack of adequate personnel, stationed French African soldiers on parts of Germany. From its colonial excursions till the present, Germany has had several conflicted relations with Black peoples both within and outside its borders. One significant African-German incident that continue to influence relations is the Nazi regime’s involuntary sterilization of children fathered by French African soldiers stationed in Germany after WWI (Schunka, 2016). This and many other encounters continue to define Germany’s relations with Africa(ns).

Just like the English language, French is spoken widely across the continent due to France’s sustained colonial presence there, but German took a back foot after WWI as it became supplanted by others. The same way that much of the cultural productions made within one linguistic bloc on the continent hardly gets to the others, much of what goes on within French- and German-speaking African diaspora are not easily available to the English-speaking parts. More recently, African stand-up artists have moved outside these colonial silos to now perform, not just in English and French, but also in German, in countries like Austria and Switzerland, which have had little or no colonial presence in Africa. The ability to speak these European languages fluently emboldens the humourists under study here to expose some of racist undertones and reconfigure these languages from the perspectives of formerly colonized peoples. Dave Davis, for instance, describes the German language as kompliziert—complicated, speaking specifically about its predominating use of articles before nouns and asking quite rhetorically why “die Banane” (banana) and “die Milch” (milk) are female due to the use of feminine article “die” for them (Kleine Affäre, 2022). He further tells German audiences in his other shows to be thankful they were born in Germany because if they were to learn the language as adults, the complications and confusions of their language may not allow them to gain any understanding of it. Charles Nguela takes another dimension by exposing how “schwarze”—“black” prefixes in German portend negativity and illegality, and for that reason he is refusing to call himself Black (Schweizer Radio und Fersehen, 2020). The capacity to satirize (with) these languages cannot be overemphasized because by their ability to express themselves quite proficiently in them, they take ownership which imbues these comics with the capacity and permission to comparatively explore the shortcomings, pretenses and misrepresentations of these languages.

Joke Performance Contexts

Select stage acts of three French-speaking African diaspora stand-up comedians, Samia Orosemena, Fary Lopes, and Cécile Djunga, are discussed in this essay. Orosemane and Lopes were born in France, and Djunga in Belgium, to parents who came originally from Tunisia, Cabo Verde, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), respectively. By no means does this trio represent the expansive range of comedic talents that abound in the French-speaking African diaspora. The three are however chosen here to underscore the inherent diversities of gender, faith, nationality/ethnicity, and appearance. Djunga is an actress, TV weather reporter, and stand-up artist, who started acting at age twelve, studied acting in Paris shortly after, and then gained recognition with her appearance on the Jamel Comedy Club stage (Laviolette, 2019, p. 135). Her stage jokes are replete with disparagements of racist stereotypes and prejudice against Black people. Lopes grew up in Saint-Maur-des-Fossés, a Parisian banlieue, where he affirms that he had first-hand experience of racism since people considered him either mixed-“race” or Arab (Fary, 2018). His jokes expose hidden and often-clouded discrimination lurking beneath the veneer of color-blind universalism preached by the French government (Amanpour, 2020). Orosemane, on her part, grew up in Clichy-sous-Bois in the Paris region, started out as a stage actress, but gave up at some point because she opted to wear a veil and thought that would deprive her of acting opportunities. Her stand-up acts are replete with explications on accent and dialect variations of the French language to characterize specific attitudes and embody stereotypes. She also discusses religion, especially Islam and the hijab, by co-opting prevalent negative labels with a view to satirizing them and countering Islamophobia.

On the German-speaking side, three African diaspora jokesters, Dave Davis, Charles Nguela, and Soso Mugiraneza interest us in this essay. Davis is a multi-talented artist, born in Germany after his parents, who fled Idi Amin’s reign of terror in Uganda, got political asylum there. His stand-up routines depict the “complications” of how people react to him as a Black German person, the complexities of the German language, as well as other socio-political issues pertaining to Africa(ns). He previously used a fictitious stage persona named Motombo Umbokko, an African immigrant, described as an “ambivalent character” for his many-sided re-presentations of the plight of people of African descent in Germany (Nwankwọ, 2023, p. 10). Nguela was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but his family fled to South Africa when he was five, and at fourteen, moved to Switzerland. He was first a YouTuber prior to becoming the face of Black comedy in Switzerland. He opens most of his set by unsettling his audience with outlandish statements before mitigating them with humorous punchlines (Helbling, 2021). In one of his shows, Helvetia’s Secret, he exposes what he dubs the intimate secrets of Swiss society, revealing things that people within that site only think particularly about Africa(ns) but hardly speak about. For instance, he tells the audience that when people asks where he is from, he believes it is Lenzburg, which is 20 min away, but by their follow-up questions, he understands that they are interested in his African rather than his Swiss origin (SRF Comedy, 2020). For Mugiraneza, he was born in Burundi, then came to Austria as a refugee, and like Nguela, learned and is now performing successfully in the German language. According to him, humor is therapeutic because it is “the African way” of tackling life’s frustrations (Mugiraneza, n.d.). At a performance in Berlin, he identifies as Austrian, the only one in the room, and proceeds to speak about his experiences in learning the language and Arabic too, pulling a humorous spin on words which sound similar in the two languages and their different meanings (Comedy Kollektiv, 2023). Like the two others, his jokes center on experiences of Black people in Europe, and he characteristically takes swipes at social structures which make it difficult for Black peoples to thrive in Europe.

It is pertinent to note how the French performers were all born in France because their parents emigrated there from their home nations, two of which were French colonies, while the German-speaking folks have an entirely different migration route—Nguela and Mugiraneza, came seeking asylum, just like Davis’ parents did well before their son was born in 1974. ¹ These biographical peculiarities constitute part of the positional contexts within which these humourists create their jokes, which in turn, inform the permissibility of their jocular characterizations and transgressions in the localities and audiences for which they perform. They might all be Black and/or Africans, but the peculiarities of their immigration history in terms of recency, type, and other identity affiliations like gender, religion, sexuality, and the likes, constitute the contexts and backdrops against which their largely European audiences read their jokes as less offensive. As a result, just like Horvath says, their use of various embodied representations, of “slang neologisms and [. . .] oral speech” imitations as well as “playfully overstating cliches and parodying mainstream discourses” are some of the performance traits they employ in their denunciations of “racial discrimination, colonial history and racial segregation” (Horvath, 2020, pp. 140–141). More importantly, portraying themselves as Africans affords them the leverage to co-opt the histories of enslavement and colonization of the African continent by Europeans in their creation of jokes that seek to redress past wrongs.

Furthermore, aside being African, for the French-speaking diaspora stand-up, two contradictory socio-cultural contexts exist and feature in varying doses in the jokes the artists create. The first is banlieue identity and the second is the French Assimilation policy. Banlieue, which refers to suburbs has gradually morphed into being the French equivalent of “ghetto.” As a rhetorical concept, it started in literature, primarily making people aware of social and cultural divisions within France (Mielusel, 2018, p. 18), featured also in cinema (Higbee, 2007; Tarr, 2005), but has scarcely been interrogated in stand-up comedy, at least in English language writing. Evoking banlieue identity is one way French artists with immigration background foreground their “otherness” in a society that seeks to suppress all forms of difference, which is where France’s Assimilation policy comes in. This policy, which is of colonial origin, was revived as lately as 2003, when over a 100,000 people who legally emigrated to France were made to sign what was called an “integration contract” on arrival in order to be eligible for residence permits (Zappi, 2003). The aim of this policy is to create what the government sees as One France, where all other forms of identity are sublimated to a homogenous Frenchness. In contrast to this therefore, banlieue mentality acknowledges, something that is also instrumental to its sustenance, inherent diversities, miscellanies, and dichotomies within France.

The tensions between the French government’s official policy and banlieue existence which contradicts and challenges it can be seen in some of the acts of the comics under study here. Fary Lopes, for instance, addressed the audience at the prestigious Molière awards, saying, “Salut les blancs!” (Hello, white people), which is an evident swipe at One-France policy where skin color should ordinarily not be acknowledge in any form. Fary’s opening statement here catches the audience unawares, thus causing a stir followed by a deluge of debates around cultural heterogeneity in France at the time (Logan, 2020). In a different scenario in the wake of the BLM agitations, Fary describes France as “fundamentally not antiracist,” in a social media post wherein he challenges his readers to come to terms with the realities of systemic racism in the country, saying, Tell the truth. I was born here, but you’re still terrified. (Cappelle, 2020).

Both acts by Fary sarcastically prod the deep cultural and ethnic divides within France, which are often glossed over by the one-France government policy. ² Performers like Orosemane, who is not Black, but is African and Muslim, instantiate the same banlieue concept as a way of underscoring her individuated identity affiliations as a French person. This is evident in one of her social media posts wherein she simulatenously deplores Islamophobia in the West and chides religious extremists who hide behind Islam to perpetrate evil. This one video has a conclusion that implores such fanatics to either “change religion” or do something else with their lives (TV5MONDE, 2015). Hence, the idea of banlieue is not just about class, but about being different in a society that professes and actively enforces oneness, uniformity of culture. One in which being French supersedes, if not obliterates all other a priori identities to which individuals are affiliated.

For the deutschsprachigen, German-speaking comics, one significant incident known by the “racist epithet” Schwarze Schmach am Rhein, in English, “black horror on the Rhine” (Roos, 2012), has influenced and shaped Germany’s relations with Africans, especially Black people over time. Following Germany’s WWI loss, Britain and France occupied German territories, with the French using about 25,000 soldiers from its African colonies, specifically Madagascar and Senegal. The fact that these were Black people angered the Weimar government at the time, and in a bid to get these soldiers off their land, a campaign of calumny against them was initiated, which cited allegations of rape and other sexual misconducts. This, in turn, fueled resentment toward the French occupation, particularly for its Black African soldiers, leading to dissent and attacks aimed at ending the presence of these people on German soil. Even though these soldiers were eventually taken off and the French occupation came to an end, the stereotype of the “Black horror on the Rhine” persisted for a while, culminating in the succeeding Nazi regime’s forceful sterilization of about 385 children in 1937 (Ayanbode, 2022; Weindling, 2022). These were known as “Mischlinge” (mixed) children, often referred to as “Rhineland bastards” (Mehring, 2009), a nomenclature that soon was appended to every Black-appearing individual with all its associated negative histories. This incident has attracted little or no interest, yet alongside historical contexts and imageries taken from other Western cultures, it is a central influence on Black relations and experiences of Germany. What is regrettable is that there is a general sense of “colonial amnesia,” which refers to denials and forgetfulness in public memory regarding the history of German colonialism (Zimmerer, 2013, p. 9). The implication is that the population may not be able to confront its past missteps and foibles to create a better understanding of their prejudices and overcome them.

The other German-speaking nations of Switzerland and Austria did not have direct colonial administration in Africa. ³ However, the Swiss nation has the unenviable reputation of being a haven for proceeds of treasury looting from Africa since the 1970s (Rowe, 2012). ⁴ Austria, on its part, has probably had the remotest relationship with the continent among the three. Some of these contacts span from the slavery era to the beginning of European colonization of Africa and extending to German rule and the succeeding pervasive problems of racial discrimination of African immigrants (Sauer, 2006, p. 150). Studies also show that the works of two Austrian explorers aided British colonial inquest into Sudan (Krobb, 2012). What is significant for this study is that Black Africans in both Switzerland and Austria grapple with the same problems of discrimination as their colleagues elsewhere in the West (Boulila, 2019). As one Black Swiss woman, for instance, rues on social media about having to repeatedly prove that she is Swiss even after presenting a Swiss passport (Stevens, 2021), we also have the unfortunate death of Nigerian asylum seeker, Marcus Omofuma who was shackled and strapped to a chair by the Austrian Federal Police while trying to forcefully put him on a plane back to Nigeria in May 1999, long before the George Floyd incident in the US. These historical details and others like them form the backdrop of African diaspora stand-up enactments in the German-speaking world. It is why a comedian like Charles Nguela, referred to as the “godfather of black Swiss comedy” (Kilchenmann, 2021), would describe himself as “optimally pigmented” and not “black” or “dark-skinned,” particularly going by the German language positioning of everything “black” as negative, unlawful, and/or evil (Fischer, 2020).

Curiously, African diaspora comedians re-embody these historical realities on the stand-up stage as a way of keeping present-day audiences in remembrance of the atrocities of the past (as well as those that are still happening), hopefully as a way of forestalling a repeat. With the qualifier, “African,” they encapsulate the entire gamut of past histories, both personal and otherwise, including the more general experiences of enslavement, colonization, and institutionalized racism, in creating their jokes. This can be seen, for instance, in Soso Mugiraneza advertising his stand-up show as Afrikanische Lachnacht auf Deutsch mit Soso Mugiraneza (African night of laughter in German, with Soso Mugiraneza) for Austrian audiences. With the term “African,” he evokes a wide range of historical repositories and more importantly, a wide range of permissions to be able to carry certain kinds of representations on stage.

Being their Authentic Selves?

Just like Omofume’s death galvanized sympathies and attracted attention for the plight of immigrants in Austria (Krzyżanowski & Wodak, 2009; Weichselbaumer, 2017), Djunga’s viral Facebook post about being harassed repeatedly for her skin color achieved the same purpose in her native Belgium. In the video, Djunga speaks about the one-too-many calls that come into her workplace asking that she be taken off weather reporting because she was “too dark for television” (Guardian News, 2018). Djunga expressed disgust at how she is constantly treated as an outsider due to her skin color, informing all “racists” that she is Belgian and as such has no other nation to which she must return. Her outburst sparked a national debate about racism in Belgium, stirring political leaders to make promises of tackling the problem (Boffey, 2018). Before this, Djunga had numerous hurdles on her path to stand-up success. She tried futilely to get into theater or cinema acting and made the switch to stand-up. This experience forms part of her stand-up routines, recounting in one instance how she wanted to play classical theater roles but was made to realize that because she is Black, she can only act as a housekeeper, prostitute, or a homeless person (Surquin, 2022, p. 6), regardless of how talented she is.

Hence, as a female, Black Belgian, Djunga is faced, first, with the challenge of gaining a footing in a male-dominated space; second, by how Belgians are teased within France and considered less French, to the point that they and the Swiss are often mocked for their supposed stupidity, among other things (Davies, 2002, p. 9); and third, by how within Belgium itself, because the French-speaking Wallonia region has been in economic decline in comparison to the Dutch-speaking Flanders and Brussels areas (Robinson, 2015). She is considered peripheral as a French-speaking Belgian. All these are further complicated by the fourth which is how Black people, especially Africans are inferiorized and mischaracterized in French humor for various reasons, mostly for being “incompetent speakers of” the language (Vigouroux, 2017, p. 9). In her Presque Célèbre (Almost Famous) renditions which toured Belgium and France in 2018, Djunga dramatically re-enacts the challenges she faced as a female, Black Belgian in her quest to attain artistic relevance. In the show, she sings, tells tales, sells bananas, goes for stage and television role castings, becomes a model, footballer, and both, and eventually turns out as Miss Weather. This autobiographical rendition re-embodies Djunga’s predicaments as a Black female person of African origin in France and Belgium, trying to become an artist. The work re-presents the multi-layered discriminations she experienced due to her appearance, specifically, the tangled whorls of (not-)belonging which her nationalities—being Belgian and African, physical appearance—being Black, gender—being female, and accent (not necessarily how she speaks, but how her appearance make her words sound) evoke.

Like Djunga rails against racism, Fary satirizes and questions the pretentiousness of French monoculturalism, the so-called “colourblind universalism” (Amanpour, 2020), for its inadvertent whitewashing of racism and marginalization of non-white French peoples. His comedy practice commenced from his imitations of Jamel Debbouze for smaller, private audiences at the age of eleven. ⁵ Since then, his art has progressed to his opening a comedy club in Paris and producing the first Netflix stand-up special in France, in the French language. Fary’s comedy club, “Madame Sarfati,” is also a restaurant and a bar, with lots of contemporary art built into its décor and structure to cater to the artistic tastes of a wide variety of people. Fary insists that he created this space, “not to make a Fary Comedy Club, a place centered on me,” but to “create a house of artists” where comedians are “paid by the fee, and not by the hat, as is traditionally done in stand-up scenes” (Talabot, 2019). ⁶ The club is named after “one of the most famous characters in French comedy: The parody of a Jewish mother played by Élie Kakou” and is modeled “after North American clubs” to offer “near-daily performance opportunities for French comedians” (Cappelle, 2020). Creating a house of artists, as Fary claims, is one way of countering some of the challenges that Djunga faced, as itemized above, because artists will be paid and reckoned with by their talents rather than by their appearance. They do not have to go through gatekeepers who would determine what roles they should play or not, and how they are going to be presented to the world. Moreover, with his Netflix special, Fary enabled a more globalized distribution of his French content (with English language subtitles); with the implication that the non-French speaking world becomes conversant with what used to be peripheral comedies in France.

In his Netflix special, Fary pushes the limits of “immigrant joke” in France particularly by disparaging the French homogenization policy and how it conditions people to change their names just to become more French. He starts by rhetorically asking the audience if they know what his stepfather’s name is. Fary characterizes his stepfather as a Chinese man who believes his name is Jacques because his French ID says so. He tells it thus:

His name is Jacques Dong (audience laughter). When your name is Dong, you can go to work wearing a kimono. Nobody will say anything. Your name already sounds like a bell. It doesn’t matter! (Audience laughter and applause). (Fary, 2018)

Here, the first metaphor is the contradiction that foreign surnames evoke when mentioned alongside a borrowed French name, such as Jacques. The addition Dong as surname causes all suggestions of Frenchness dissipate. The second is the metaphor of the sound, dong, the sound of a bell. Though intended to be Chinese, the allegory of the bell here depicts ringing—the way the surname rings out its foreignness regardless of the French first name. The bell metaphor here points to how the individual is ratted out by their non-French surnames. This is what Fary means by “your name already sounds like a bell.” There is also, for English speakers, the connotation of the male genitalia, which has also been referred to colloquially as “dong,” perhaps also because it does have a swinging movement like traditional bells. Third is the wrong ascription of kimono wearing, which is Japanese, for a Chinese man. This is a replication of ways in which dominant cultures homogenize otherness, such as instances where Africa is one country, Africans are all the same regardless of their inherent differences, and, as in this case, the dress pattern of the Japanese is what every Asian wears.

It is not evident from this rendition whether Fary is aware of these complexities and has invented or repurposed a real name for joking purposes. What is important to note is that in comedy, incongruously mismatching things and people is a stock-in-trade. Thus, by putting this characterization on his step-father—of course, due to his looks, he cannot convincingly claim a biological Asian affiliation—Fary personalizes and takes ownership of the story, thus imbuing it with a form of authenticity that permits him to carry a representation that would ordinarily be offensive. Whether he has a stepfather who is Asian or not, or one that also bears the name Jacques Dong or not is immaterial here. This is because comedians also tell fictitious tales like novelists, poets, playwrights, and other artists. What is important is the understanding that speaking about their authentic selves does not imply telling truthful stories alone, but that jokesters often personalize jocular narratives for the dual purposes of making them believable and less offensive. In this way, audiences see such eye-witness jocular perspectives as personal stories, and as such, authentic, which means they cannot be easily refuted or dismissed for being implausible. This belief in the veracity of a joke is requisite for humor evocation.

Orosemane adds another dimension of difference which is the religious diversity of the African diaspora in France. Her stage peculiarity depends on her talent at building convincing representations of attitudes and speech mannerisms of a wide range of African peoples through the deployment of accents, demeanours, eccentricities, and stereotypes. She builds her acts around her Arab origin, but equally demonstrates a deep knowledge and connections with the rest of the African continent. Like Djunga and Fary, Orosemane employs autobiographical details. In one of her sets, for instance, she discusses mixed marriages, citing how her mother opposed her engagement to her then boyfriend, who is from Martinique and was not Muslim at the time. She satirizes her mother’s statement, wherein she avers that a drunk North African is better than a Black person who does not drink (Sire, 2017), for its racist suggestions. ⁷ Here it is evident that just like in her social media post mentioned previously, Orosemane’s comedy is two-faced due to how it satirizes both Westerners and Arabs for racist tendencies. In the post, she castigates both non-Muslims who are Islamophobes and Muslims who are terrorists. Here, she highlights her mother’s dislike for this man due to his origin and physical appearance and not just because he is not Muslim. Moreover, it is pertinent to note how she operationalizes her marriage to a Black man from Martinique the same way that Fary does with his stepfather. These personal details invoke authentication while also working as an inclusivity tool with which comedians carry representations that would be impossible for them. In Orosemane’s case, she is African but not Black, and as such cannot convincingly embody demeanours from sub-Saharan Africa. But she makes this effort by foregrounding her jokes with her marital affiliation or by through other Black acquaintances such as neighbors, friends, acquaintances, and in-laws.

In her Femmes de couleur (“Women of colour” 2017), Orosemane discusses taboos around the hijab as her contribution to discourses around the French veil ban. She comes on stage wearing an all-black veil, which covers much of her dress, and says to the audience: “I am your mother.” This is an endearing and empowering act, because by assuming this maternal figure role, Orosemane positions herself in the mold of care and guidance for the audience, and by extension, the society. True to this persona, she asks the audience whether they are afraid of her veil and goes on to assure them that they have nothing to fear because it is convertible. To support this motherly disposition of one who cares for their children, Orosemane removes the black veil to reveal a bright colored dress. Interestingly, in her other events, Orosemane prefers turbans, equally made from bright and colorful clothes that she characteristically adorns. Concerning her dress sense, she proclaims:

Some people say my turban is not as good as a real scarf because my earlobes still show, and it’s too sexy. I want to tell them the same thing a comedian told me, “On stage, you’re supposed to be naked, how are you going to do that with a scarf on your head?” But it’s part of who I am, it’s as if I told you I don’t like your haircut. I am here to make people laugh, not to get caught in religious discourse. My job is to be a comedian, and right now I think I do my job well. (Sire, 2017)

Hence, Orosemane is quick to reiterate her liberty to make personal choices about how she wants to appear in public. She castigates pretentiousness among Muslims, on the one hand, and the overtly antagonistic policies of the French toward people who look, speak, or pray differently. Orosemane thus uses her understanding of the different peoples and cultures of the African diaspora in France to a great advantage, weaving in and out of personalities and groups, eliciting laughter primarily by her true-to-life depictions.

Creative Freedom and Identity

Germany’s Dave Davis stands out for his characterizations of the experiences of Black Germans. His stage character, Umbokko Motombo, a refugee in Germany, originally from the fictional African country of Nfuddu, is exposed to all the everyday racism that African immigrants encounter and is ultimately faced with deportation from Germany. His problems are further complicated by the challenges of learning the German language. Dubbed the “toilet man,” Motombo bears all the tell-tale significations of the roles Africans are subjected to in Western spaces, specifically being on the lowest rung of the social ladder, yet he bears innumerable representations, which can be divvied up into negatives and positives. He is usually dressed in a white lab coat and a white bonnet, while armed with a long-handle cleaning brush and sometimes a plunger. By this appearance and how Davis presents him, Motombo is responsible for cleaning and unclogging the drains of society. As one who is also responsible for collecting and doing away with society’s excrement and washing out dirty linens, he is portrayed as a person who is conversant with where the bodies are buried and the cupboards that contain skeletons. Buoyed up by his wit and satire, which extricate him from pity and lowliness, Motombo possesses the capacity for querying, problematizing, and exposing the underside of pretentious and vainglorious existence. For these and the many more roles he plays, Motombo is presented as a moral barometer of sorts to the society. By his own account, Davis avers that with his Motombo persona, he is able “to reach people with gags that [he] wouldn’t get to otherwise.” He continues that at one time while playing the role “in front of 1,500 police officers,” his first sentence was: “Hi, before I start, some info: I’m black. Please don’t shoot out of reflex” (Worring, 2022). This is a direct allusion to the Omofume, Floyd, and other Black individuals who met their untimely death in the hands of police officers across the world. Suffice it to say that in the garb of Motombo, Davis can characterize the experiences of African immigrants to Europe, especially regarding discrimination and myriad racializations.

Despite the incredulity of this persona, Davis has used it sparsely since 2014. As someone born in Germany, even though his parents came originally from Uganda, he cannot convincingly bear the same portraitures that Motombo has. In recent times, Davis has performed mostly as himself, an Afro-German stand-up comedian, presenting satirical tales of how his Blackness is read by the majority within the country of his birth. It is worth noting how being black and referring to himself as German, puncture preconceived notions of Germanness, which hitherto occluded dark-skinned peoples. With hindsight of the peculiar relations between Germany and Blackness explicated previously, Davis’ claims of Germanness evokes a certain amount of awkwardness, if not discomfort due to the histories it elicits. Playing as himself, his jokes center mostly on comparisons and juxtapositions of the speech and cultural mannerisms of people from various parts of Germany, such as comparatively dramatizing how people from Bayern or his native Rhine region speak or behave (WDR Comedy & Satire, 2022). These peculiarities of his stage acts point to his ingenuous use of artistic creativity to reify his identities as German and Black regardless of the accounts of subjugation and marginalization people like him have experienced in Germany.

Swiss comedian, Charles Nguela satirizes variegated forms of social discrimination also. He speaks about gender pay disparity, for instance, wherein he wonders how such an injustice exists in a society as “civilized” as Switzerland (Gloor, 2019). Gender pay disparity is part of the newer themes Nguela has been discussing in his jokes as he gradually transitioned from being solely concerned with issues pertaining to Black people, particularly how they are treated in Europe, to speaking about other more localized injustices in Switzerland. By embodying these newer forms of jocular agitation, Nguela posits himself as one that has become embedded in the social systems of his diaspora home, thus living out his Swiss identity, which does not make him less African because he still talks about racial discrimination. In one of his sets, he creates an Oscar-type award ceremony event for COVID-19, wherein he describes “how coronavirus walks the red carpet and is besieged by journalists. How his mentor—in a lion’s coat and with gold rings—massages his back shortly before the award ceremony: Ebola pats Corona on the shoulder and calls: ‘Go out and get all the white people!’” (Bächtold, 2020). This narrative alludes to the racialized discrepancy between how the West responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and to the Ebola virus epidemic. With Ebola, there was outright travel ban so much so that even people from nations least impacted by the virus were subjected to additional screening and quarantine at airports in the Global North (Ali et al., 2016; Monson, 2017), simply because they were Black people and/or were from Africa. Yet, with the Coronavirus which was more widespread and took a heavier human toll, such high-handed measures were not imposed except for when the Omicron strain emerged and was somehow tied to South Africa, and a no-fly list immediately materialized for African travelers (Najjar & Gadzo, 2021; Schermerhorn et al., 2022). Even though Nguela’s characterization here is built on the pedestal of sympathy for the horrendous loss of lives to the Covid-19 pandemic in Europe and elsewhere in 2020 especially, he still infuses a ridicule of the inconsistencies in responses to two of the major public heath challenges the world has known in recent history. By placing these incidents side by side, he lays bare to his audience the form of politics that fuels entrenched cases of racism which people of African origin like him experience daily. It is pertinent to note that Nguela did not make this narrative about himself, but about the way the world mistreats Africa(ns).

For Soso Mugiraneza, focus is on creating laughter and making people happy. He states in one interview that Africans are often portrayed in the media as people with problems, either as beggars or as criminals. In his view, people who go to the continent see laughing people rather than the hungry children with flies all over their bodies. He creates jokes that show the ridiculousness of racism rather than one that portrays him and other Africans as hapless victims (Talkaccino, 2020). In one of his sets, he introduces himself as a model who has worked for CARITAS and UNICEF as one of the children featured in those “hungry African children with flies on their faces” videos; adding jeeringly that he was sacked from the job because he “gained weight” (MySpass Stand-up, 2018). This is an interesting take from Mugiraneza given how this narrative personalizes what comedians have been saying about how Africa is portrayed negatively in Western media. By positing himself in this manner, Mugiraneza successfully embodies and then disparages the savior-mentality posture of the West which perpetuates these forms of negative view of the continent. Put more vividly, by saying that he was sacked because he gained weight, Mugiraneza inadvertently underscores a form of hypocrisy that alludes to the perpetuation of African impoverishment through tacit actions of the West. Elsewhere, in a more confrontational rendition, he shakes the hand of a member of audience in the front row and asks why he has not been laughing at his jokes. Without waiting for an answer, he tells the rest of the audience that White people have an overwhelming sense of discomfort when they meet Africans because they feel that Africans are either drug dealers or have Ebola (MySpass Stand-up, 2016).

Mugiraneza discusses numerous topics including taboo and politically incorrect ones, using humor to douse irritation and keep audiences at ease. As is the case with much of his German-speaking cohorts, he is often the only dark-skinned person in the room whenever he performs. Yet, this does not deter him from satirizing Austrians, especially by calling them out on racist behaviors and more frequently comparing their attitudes against Germans. In one event, he describes the German language as the most difficult for most non-natives while at the same time caricaturing the difficulties German speakers face when trying to express themselves in English. He draws an example from long distance trains and the effort announcers make when calling out different cities on the train’s route in English. He dramatizes the heightened intake and exhalation of breath in making such announcements, pointing out how such heavily accented expressions are still understood by non-German speaking passengers (FS1—Community Television Salzburg, 2020). One of his most outlandish joke characterizations is in a performance where he mentioned that when Austrians want to become popular, they go to Germany. The audience laughs, and then he adds the next line as an afterthought—just like Hitler who also went to Germany to become popular (Sosomugiraneza, 2022). These examples show that Mugiraneza’s joke narratives are graphic and confrontational just like those of Davis and Nguela, and that regardless of their marginal positions as minorities in their respective diaspora societies, these comedians confront present-day mistreatments of Africans across the Global North through their jokes.

Conclusion

From the few joke themes explicated above, it is evident that the two sets of comics discussed here, who belong to two distinct colonial histories, exude similar concerns with contemporary issues. They individually dismantle colonial pretenses and laughters in their own ways and replace them with agentive ones that memorialize the past and give Africans permissions to do all sorts of socio-cultural usurpatory work with their jokes. Alongside using humor elicitation as a means of coping with the challenges of being part of a marginalized group in their non-African abodes, diaspora African jokesters aim at disrupting dominant narratives that have historically suppressed and disregarded them. African diaspora stand-up is shown to be a lush and disparate field that echoes the encounters, struggles, and accomplishments of a colorful and multidimensional community against the history of European domination and subjugation. With its seemingly untethered confrontation of the inequities in relations between Africa(ns) and Europe(ans), they influence our considerations and engagements with issues pertaining to identity, belonging, and agency. The comics themselves can connect with multifarious audiences and cultivate a sense of community and belonging, both within their own diaspora neighborhoods and beyond. As seen from the discussions above, African diaspora is diverse in both its geographical and linguistic spread as well as in multiple identity affiliations.