Abstract
Jokes concurrently produce humour and offence owing to differences in cultural considerations of funniness and taboo. With growing audience diversity and online dissemination of live events, stand-up comics are exposed to increased scrutiny for irreverent anecdotes. Yet, ‘punching up’ has become an acceptable form of benign transgression. This is more so in cross-cultural contexts where differences heighten offence, because jokes do not just make us laugh but also create discomfort, especially when the joke-teller is different from us; whether it is ‘up’ or ‘down’, a punch is still a punch. Using the stand-up acts of four African diaspora comedians – Andi Osho, Dave Davis, Urzila Carlson and Trevor Noah – this essay interrogates cross-cultural joke presentation mechanics, themes and performer–audience relations to determine how and why these jokesters variously utilize punch-up jokes. Queries guiding the study include, what performance specificities do humourists enact to mitigate offence while dealing with sensitive/volatile subjects and a more diverse, political correctness-conscious audience? What is/are the relationship(s) between identity, cultural representations and jokes? In answering these questions, the emphasis is on discussing how the selected comedians craftily erect pre-determined sets of values that establish the context(s) within which the offensiveness of their ‘punch(es)’ is/are mitigated.
What is in a ‘punch’?
Stand-up comedy is presently one of Africa’s most popular performances because it is increasingly widespread and has generated considerable intra-continental mobility, mostly within colonial language blocs (Anglophone, Francophone, Lusophone and Arabophone, especially in Egypt and Sudan). With incessant socio-economic brouhahas, Africans have been equally on the move, in the search for greener pastures, even when some of the routes (especially across the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean Sea), are so precarious given their ever-rising casualties in these sites (Black, 2023; Mantoo, 2022). Due to the increasing migrations, African diaspora stand-up and other humour creations have become a permanent feature in Western performance circuits to the point that it has been noted that if one wants ‘to see the cultural tapestry of America’, one should look ‘to her stand-up comedians’ (Baine, 2012). It is, therefore, the case that ‘without foreigners and foreign-ness, there would be far, far fewer jokes’, particularly due to how comedians ‘love to pick a regional, social or ethnic group to stereotype . . ., as a kind of shorthand for an undesirable character trait’ (Carr and Greeves, 2006: 191). These multicultural contributions undoubtedly deepen the diversity of jokes and joking in the West today, to the point that being different is a desired currency because humourists attain and leverage their difference in broaching certain subjects, eliciting specific jokes and typecasts, as well as deriding power. Consequently, the Western stand-up stage has become one in which minority and underrepresented groups deploy jokes and humour towards coping with, contesting, satirizing and disparaging stereotypes about themselves, their groups and others (Ervine, 2019: 3–4).
In this article, I describe joke-telling as a ‘punch’ (the satiric jab), and it could be a punch that is ‘up’ or ‘down’. To ‘punch up’ has been described as ‘deploying powerful techniques of criticism and rhetoric to critique and dismantle power structures, rather than to harm people disempowered relative to yourself’ (Anonymous, n.d.). It is a form of comedy performance wherein formerly or currently dispossessed peoples enact their oppositional and subversive positionalities to power, essentially using jokes to challenge power. Punching down, on its part, is detestable because it is now mostly associated with the ever-controversial ‘put down’ or ‘superiority’ humour (Gockel and Kerr, 2015; Morreall, 1987; Terrion and Ashforth, 2002). Punching up or down is thus a product of power relations: the less dominant/powerful are allowed to throw ‘punches’ at those who are more powerful, but such permissions are interestingly not always extended to more privileged individuals. 1 Thus, present-day punch-up/punch-down patterns are examples of an asymmetrical joking relationship (Radcliffe-Brown, 1940), which allows for a one-way permissiveness that hardly works in reverse like the symmetrical variant. Admittedly, this is a simplistic and overstretched description of the dichotomy of punching up or down, given the existence of other equally salient dimensions not limited to the frequency and the reality of intersectional identities. Frequency relates to the number of times an individual is targeted by a joke – such as the controversies surrounding Chris Rock, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett. Specifically, Rock has somewhat gradually lost the sympathy he garnered after Smith slapped him at the 2022 Oscars and has instead been accused of ‘misogynoir’ for continuing to jocularly assault Pinkett (Cohen, 2023; Wilde, 2023). In terms of blurring and/or altering identities, there is the case of the comedic characterizations of Bruce Jenner’s cross-dressing roles and her transitioning into a woman, Caitlyn. On one hand, there is the ‘punch-up’ dimension that targets her as ‘a person who is privileged or entitled or, in one obnoxious way or another, just asking for it’ (Schwartz, 2016: 134). On the other hand, as a transwoman, a minoritized person, she is not susceptible to the same ‘punch up’ ridicule she received as a white male, an identity and social position considered to be privileged.
In this article, select acts of four African diaspora stage humourists, namely, Andi Osho, Dave Davies, Urzila Carlson and Trevor Noah, are explored with a view to showing how each of them deploys joke ‘punches’ in ways that circumvent the pitfalls of political incorrectness and irritability. 2 These diaspora comedians place themselves at the intersection of the multiple identities they subscribe – nationality, sexuality, creed, body size/weight and skin colour. 3 I refer to these comedians as Africans due to the ways they foreground (their) Africanness in their acts to create contexts within which they can speak about the continent and its people. The double-edged nature of stand-up comedy requires them to first own up to or address stereotypes about their African and diaspora homes, respectively, before turning their jocular focus on others. By doing this, they become critically aware of their failings when they turn the ridicule on themselves, and also those of their groups.
Through performance analyses of the acts of these four afore-mentioned, this article explores how these jokesters adapt and reconfigure master narratives into personalized representations of their own identities, experiences and realities. Their stage acts are used here to X-ray cross-cultural joke presentation mechanics, themes and performer–audience relations, to exhibit how they craftily erect pre-determined sets of values to establish contexts that mitigate the offensiveness of their ‘punches’ within intercultural sites. As comedians with recent immigration backgrounds, they make contributions to how their personalities and identities are constructed both within their new homes in the West and the homeland. Subsequently, I discuss examples of joke punches within African diaspora renditions, which come in variegated forms such as mimicry and parodic juxtapositions, disparagement of self and others, outright insult or ridicule, as well as the use of stereotypes.
Humour, identity and the joke punch
Humour is universal (Bergen and Binsted, 2004; Chiaro, 2010; Guidi, 2017), but the matter and manner of its evocation differ from one culture to another. More significantly, something ‘may be explosively funny to one person, while to another it may be unfunny or even horrifying’ (Farb, 1981: 761). As such, every society has its jocular boundaries and limits so much so that even the most permissive and progressive localities have taboos and no-go areas where humour elicitation is concerned. Alongside these peculiarities, there also exist overgeneralizations and misconceptions in humour-making based on people’s appearances (Bowe and Martin, 2007: 87), self-identify and other categories. Labels emanating from such erroneous grouping of individuals disseminate and entrench notions about the ‘other’ (Watson, 2019: 129), casting them in the same (negative) mould irrespective of their individuated circumstances and realities (Vieira and Kelly, 1981; Zenner, 1970). Consequently, having a sense of humour or not relies entirely on disparate contextual factors, mostly dependent on the specificities of amusement and irritability within different communities. Suffice it to say that the funniness or otherwise of jokes is variously attributable to the audiences’ disposition and reception, which stem from permissions, socio-cultural limits of taboo and suspension of offence.
Humour research itself has become less condemnatory and more appreciative of the usefulness and saliency of jokes within society. This is evident in the postulation that humour research has been liberated ‘from the earlier tendentious and misleading analyses of jokes in terms of “stereotypes”’ (Davies, 2004: 373). With this release, jokes are no longer just about stereotypes or putting a victim down, but also, more importantly, about exploring the liminal moments of benign transgression, which serve entertainment, therapeutic and subversive purposes. African (diaspora) comedians seize such periods to discuss issues that affect them, by first foregrounding their African and other identities as a way of establishing the permission to speak about the continent and its people when performing to Western audiences. ‘Punch up, punch down o! All I know is there is punch’, a jocular rendering of the Biblical story of Jonah and how he was swallowed by a fish, is my recollection of an early Nigerian comedy on radio, used here to underscore the idea of the ‘punch’ in joke situations. 4 In the narrative relayed by an English-speaking preacher and a Pidgin English interpreter, the story deviates from the Biblical version at one point and the following exchange ensues between the two preachers:
And the fish swallowed Jonah!
Jonah come swallow de fish [Jonah swallowed the fish!]
(taps Interpreter slightly, speaks emphatically) And a big fish swallowed Jonah!
(stubbornly, emphatically also) Jonah come swallow de biiig fish! [Jonah swallowed the big fish!]
(in semi-whisper) It is the fish that swallowed Jonah, not . . .
(cuts in, loudly) Weda na fish swallow Jonah, abi na Jonah swallow fish, all I know is dat dere was swallow! [Whether the fish swallowed Jonah or Jonah swallowed the fish, all I know is that there is ‘swallow’!] 5
This interpreter has an important position as the intermediary between the audience and the Preacher, yet they refuse to be just a mouthpiece by querying the narrative. By emphasizing ‘swallow’ here, they displace the agencies of the personae and objects in favour of the action of swallowing, thus opening up this master narrative to newer possibilities and alternative interpretations. This subversive action at once questions and refocuses the audience’s attention to the deed, the action of ‘swallowing’ rather than on the personalities involved. One significant achievement of this Interpreter in this action of his is the localization of the narrative due to the numerous significations and allusions the word “swallow” excavates for Nigerian audiences. Without delving deeply into explications of how this narrative is Nigerianized, it is pertinent to note that ‘swallow’ here alludes to some of the country’s staple dishes which are not just eaten or chewed, but swallowed. Nevertheless, the comedic rendition in enlisted here to show how its reconfiguration (into being all about ‘swallow’) has become a joking pattern invoked by African diaspora comedians when performing for multicultural audiences. For instance, just like this interpreter’s querying of the Jonah and the fish story opens up the narrative to newer possibilities, this article discusses punching up and punching down in contemporary African diaspora joke-telling, with a view to understanding identity positionalities where humour elicitation, appreciation, and dissemination are concerned.
Similarly, in the consideration of punching up or down, this article refocuses attention on the action, especially with regard to being offensive or not and/or acceptable or repulsive. Pertinent questions arising therefrom include whether there is a gauge for measuring offence, specifically if one can convincingly say that a ‘punch down’ weighs much more on the less privileged/minorities than a ‘punch up’ on more advantaged groups. It is noteworthy though that due to the ambivalence of comedic ridicule, performers use several techniques to mitigate offence, specifically consciously guiding audiences away from irritation towards mirth. Many of the tools they deploy for this purpose are predicated on five major strategies: joking relationships, joke contexts, language, as well as personalized, and dramatized devices. How the components of each of these strategies are dependent on the materials being used and the jocular purpose of individual performers is shown in the subsequent discussions. It is noteworthy, nonetheless, that as the limits of permissiveness and violation become more pluralized, intricately tangled, and tenuous due to intercultural encounters, comedians variously employ these strategies to tackle the altering, cascading sensitivities today’s audiences bring into live and mediatized performance sites. Indubitably, online dissemination of these performances exposes them to decontextualized situations, which render them potentially offensive, thereby forcing jokesters to adopt newer and more efficient ways of mitigating joke irritability (Nwankwọ, 2022).
Aspects of joking relationships include exploiting the socio-cultural permissions and liminalities available within the traditions of comedy and satire, taking cognizance of taboos and other limits, being PC (political correctness) aware and conscious, and adapting to the sundry sensitivities of the immediate and the anticipated virtual audiences. Increasing interculturality evokes confusion in terms of joking patterns and relationships owing to disparities in (de)limitations of permissions and restrictions. Significantly, social and group categories which were hitherto more homogeneous have become blurred, even inexistent in the subsisting regime of globalization. In place of clearly defined, unwritten boundaries, the identity of the humourist takes pre-eminence in how jokes are perceived and received. Comedians no longer speak to limited, in-group audiences within fixed liminal periods, but to all people at all times when such performances are recorded and disseminated widely on new media platforms. With the growing clamour for a more liberal and progressive globalized society, at least in sections of the Global North, there is a little commensurate upsurge in jocular permissiveness, particularly owing to the uptake in censure and censorship owing to heightened sensitivities and consciousness of offence (Nwankwọ, 2019). This condition further complicates the ethical considerations related to the ‘politics of representation’ existing between satirical mockery and freedom of speech, particularly concerning whether such expressions could be tolerated or not (Mondal, 2018). As such, regardless of their originary identities, jokesters are constrained to invent newer ways of navigating the more diversified sensibilities and consciousness of offence, described as ‘shifting cognitions of offence’ (Nwankwọ, 2022), which is a designation of contemporary joke-telling settings as a site with a prevalence of highly diverse audiences, complete with sundry complexities and ambivalences.
African diaspora comedians ameliorate potential irritability by foregrounding their sets with specifically curated aspects of their national affiliations, personal traits and appearances. For being a historically disadvantaged group, they are allowed to punch up in specific ways, especially operationalizing their multiple identities. Andi Osho, born in the United Kingdom to Nigerian immigrant parents, for instance, variously prioritizes her Blackness, femininity and Africanness, depending on the joke representation she is making at any point in time. In an event in the United States, she starts by telling the audience that she is Black and British, adding quite cheekily, ‘See how straight my teeth are!’ to the amusement of the audience. She then continues to say that she likes having the British accent, especially in the United States, because she can get away from being booked by the police for running two stop signs just because of it (Late Late Show, 2021). Here, Osho fronts the stereotype of bad teeth as a way of signposting her British identity. In other examples, such as the one cited in the next section, she changes to highlighting her Nigerian parentage as a buffer for making satirical representations about Nigerians. Dave Davis, born in Germany to a couple who fled Uganda in the early 1970s, alternates between being Black German and African based largely on the specific permission requirements of individual jokes. Like Osho, he also bears jocular representations that are heavily dependent on stereotypes, and by centring specific identities, they are both able to sidestep causing repulsion other than amusement. It is safe to say therefore that, based on their ethnocultural identities, these artists grapple with an inexhaustible array of ‘me/you’ and ‘we/them’ dichotomies that allow them to exhibit omniscient, insider-outsider perspectives of all the communities and groups to which they are affiliated.
Joke contexts refer to the environment (location, venue, audience constitution, surrounding jokes), which, in turn, inform the modalities and tenor of reactions and responses, including laughter, unlaughter (Billig, 2005), indifference and derision. The idea of tendentiousness in joking evokes a sense of victimhood, which sees performers as oppressors and audiences as hapless victims. However, the audience is not without some agency because comedians’ joke renditions are wholly dependent on their real-time responses, particularly their giving of laughter. For this reason, they butter audiences up, making them feel good about themselves and their societies by showing understanding and appreciation, before eventually turning up ridicule on them. Urzila Carlson, who is South African but now living in New Zealand, praises an Australian audience right before telling them that Australia has the best-mannered drivers in the world (ABC and iview, 2020). Yet, at another event in New Zealand, she says the same about New Zealand drivers (Jenks, 2014) in a bid to woo them. It does not matter which country has better drivers, the same line fed to different audiences exemplifies how comedians entice audiences before eventually finding ways to satirize them both collectively and individually. For most African diaspora comedians, the most important joke context (environmental and narration-wise) is how they erect a dual-pronged identity with which they oscillate between being insiders and outsiders, foreign or local in their joke-making.
They also make specific use of language by paying attention to their accents, inflexions, registers and performativities (things they do with words). Where Osho and Carlson use different English language accents, not just the British or New Zealand versions, but also co-opting more localized dialects to represent or embody specific personalities within their diaspora homes, Davis does the same with the German language. Noah, on his part, has a more diversified approach to the use of accent and language skills because he aims at a smorgasbord-kind of representation of speech mannerisms. For this reason, where the narrative voices of Osho and Carlson align with the accent and dialects of their diaspora home audiences, and Davis’s in German, Noah’s is determinedly fixed – not African, not European and not American – to allow him the liberty of enacting accents and dialects for specific purposes. Also for Noah, even when there could be doubts about the accuracy of his imitative accents for different groups, he avers that he patterns his mimicry to the speech mannerisms of people he knows rather than trying to imitate an entire group (The Daily Show, 2019); which is further proof of the artistic predilection of his speech imitations.
Dramatized devices refer to the intangible, embodied stage actions – gestures, movement (body and spatial variants), facial expressions, acts of imitation and mimicry – enacted for various purposes in joke narration. They also include storytelling patterns, voice alterations and modulations, use of songs, character parody and imitation, and the like. Comedians are like novelists who invent stories, but they are much more because jokes are hyperbolized, tweaked and told in ways that heighten their humour-elicitation capabilities. Like good storytellers, they incorporate ‘language skills, theory-of-mind, symbolism, abstract thinking, and social perception’, thereby making ‘humankind’s most complex cognitive attribute’ (Polimeni and Reiss, 2006). Like the stage performers they also are, jokesters deploy embodied acting and presentation skills with which they capture, retain as well as manipulate attention, and in turn, foster audiences’ receptivity (DeCamp, 2017). Such competencies consist of personalized performance patterns including dress, opening salutations, stage entry, interactions and relations with the audience, and are known as stage presence.
Andi Osho: of mimicry and parody
Tanya Agathocleous (2021) makes an interesting study of three different versions of Punch news publications – British, Anglo-Indian and Indian – by detailing how each of the publications deployed parody and mimicry in discussing the interrelationships between their three reading publics during India’s colonial period. In this article, the reference is to a different kind of punch, but one is still intrigued by the coincidence of those publications being named ‘Punch’ and also based on parody and mimicry. Defined as imitative acts that involve the original texts for the purpose of disparaging them and exposing their shortcomings and excesses (Hutcheon, 1978; Williams, 2011), parody and mimicry are defined variously, either as slightly different or similar in meaning. In this essay, I follow the trajectory of parody as an extended form of mimicry. Essentially, the parodic text is one that ‘plays off the original with some degree of repetition but also with a difference’, which like mimicry ‘is hybrid and ambiguous’ and ultimately aimed at ‘satirizing aspects of the prior text’ (Bakhtin, 1982: 76). Mimicry is thus highly recommended by anticolonialists for its capacity to engender ‘exaggerated copying’, which inadvertently induces a mockery of colonial structures (Bhabha, 1994: 122) and of misrepresentations of colonized peoples.
Styling herself as Black, female, and British as well as Nigerian, Andi Osho builds her jokes in ways that allow her to draw parallels and describe the complications and similarities of her two national identities. As British, she is not unaware of her minority status as a Black person bearing the colonizer’s identity and yet still immured in the history of being colonized. In one of her sets, she describes the form of arrogance with which the British sometimes mispronounce African names, and then inverts the situation to show how it would appear when Africans do the same for British names. According to her, she called into a phone-in radio programme at the age of 11, gave her name as ‘Yewande’, and the presenter offered to call her ‘Joe’ because he could not be bothered to learn to say her name correctly. She then imaginatively transposes that experience to a Nigerian setting: a British kid calls into a Nigerian radio programme, and because the presenter is not able to pronounce his name, ‘Charles’, offers to first render it as ‘cheese’, before eventually deciding on calling him ‘Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’ (Hutchinson, 2017). This is a form of mimicry with which Osho mocks the sense of colonizer superiority that the British radio presenter had. By reimagining it, Osho creates a juxtaposed situation that exposes the underlying ludicrousness of the original situation. In the first instance, ‘Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’ is a longer and more difficult name to pronounce than ‘Charles’. Performed at the height of the furore surrounding the infamous would-be ‘underwear suicide bomber’ who was overpowered by passengers as he tried to detonate an explosive device on a US-bound plane in 2009, replacing Charles (perhaps an allusion to the British crown prince, now King) with the name of a convicted terrorist, Osho no doubt evoked laughter at the moment of rendition. In retrospect, however, where Osho punches up (for being ethnically different and belonging to a historically oppressed population), the offensiveness of this form of comparison is not lost on the British. It is understandable that she aims at incongruity (unbalanced comparison) and shock, but for a white British person, one would think that replacing Charles with a would-be suicide bomber’s name is possibly overreaching.
Invariably, through these characterizations, Osho evokes compelling imageries of how offensive it actually is when someone’s name is easily discarded because another person filled with colonizer mentality does not want to put in the work of saying the name properly. People react differently to their names being mispronounced, and as such it is therefore pertinent that people exact care when trying to say other people’s names. Suggesting ‘easier’ alternatives, like this British radio present does in Osho’s narrative, is reminiscent of colonial exertion of conquest and domination, where long-existing places were renamed without recourse to what local peoples who owned those places called them long before European incursion. Osho uses this substitution of a British kid’s name with that of a convicted terrorist to underscore the scandalous nature of name replacement for the convenience of privileged people. She thus uses her Britishness to question and problematize British colonial history, especially the age-long mistreatment of Africans and people who bear the same skin colour as her. This is a salient example of punch up humour. Yet, at other times, Osho privileges her Britishness such as performing bits about having an accent that is at variance with how she looks. This, she says, is because people read her appearance in a certain way, but when she speaks, they are forced to reconsider their summations about her identity (Late Late Show, 2021). She even says somewhere else, to her US audience, as if responding to their chagrin at her British accent, ‘There are black people in England. (Pause) Not anymore because I am here!’ (Just For Laughs, 2020).
From the preceding examples, it is evident that her ridicule sometimes turns inwards on herself. For instance, she talks about getting into online dating and not doing it beyond 10 days because she considers it ‘the biggest online hoax since Nigeria got email’ (ArseRaptor, 2013). Unlike the other audience who also caught up with the Abdulmutallab-Charles juxtaposition in the previous example, this group immediately recognized the stereotype of scam mail often put on Nigerians, which Osho characterizes, as shown by its tumultous response. This audience recognizes this stereotype even before Osho adds that ‘online dating is a scam’ to solidify her juxtaposition of online dating as a hoax and Nigeria getting emails as being equally a ruse. Elsewhere she speaks about ‘gay men’ and the use of Grindr. Being uncharted territory for her, she navigates quite successfully towards humour other than derision by stating that these men are the only group that has succeeded in making online dating worth its while. These are the many ways Osho makes representations, knowing when to satirize excessively, punch up, and when to retract and make veiled or no ridicule at all. Note how she ridicules Britishness (from the position of a marginalized Briton), and Nigerianness (using her African parentage), but when it gets to queer people, especially gay men, she tones her ridicule down by rendering a commendation rather than judgement. This indicates that how comedians navigate their subjects is dependent on their personality, location, their audience and how they self-identify.
Dave Davis: punching up through disparagement
Dave Davis is one of the few African diaspora jokesters performing in European languages with little or no presence on the African continent. Performing for German audiences in the German language, Davis enacts characterizations that toe the line of Osho’s work, in which they posit themselves as Black Europeans. Davis refers to himself as der schwarze Deutsche (the Black German man), an identity that provides him with the latitude of an insider/outsider view of German society and tradition. Even though his parents came originally from Uganda, Davis characteristically reminds audiences that he is native to Cologne. Like Osho, he uses this positionality to counter the contradiction presented by his ethnic difference from people historically considered native to Germany and also to normalize the presence of people who look like him in such sites. He is adept at replicating various German dialects, especially depicting people from different parts of Germany, aptly replicating their speech inflections, bodily mannerisms and recognizable demeanour. One of his most frequent disparagements is that of the German language and how complicated it is. He often qualifies this statement with examples to show the language’s inconsistencies and superfluities, particularly when compared with the English language (Kleine Affäre, 2020). This form of disparaging exposure reveals the limitations and vulnerabilities of colonial languages. Also, as an evidently ex-colonized person performing for European audiences, Davis’ rendition here is evidently a kind of punch-up humour. He is also more particular about specific regions of Germany, particularly his native Cologne. For instance, he remarks in one set that people from the ‘beautiful Rhineland area of Cologne’ are good people in a special way, before delving into humorous replications of the mannerisms and stereotypes of the area, imbuing his stage persona with the specific dialect of that part of Germany (MySpass.com, 2014). Davis’ proficiency in speaking and acting out the language and other traits of the German society variously grants him the position of a local and earns him permission to speak about the nation, its language, society and his native Cologne.
Davis often uses the term, ‘we Germans’, which is his way of including himself within a home demography that often seeks to exclude him. This is Davis’s way of reiterating the fact that everyone, regardless of where they were born, how they identify, or whatever historical encounters they may have had, has the potential to excel but the only thing that can hold them down is how they are viewed and treated by society, especially by those in the majority. One significant part of his stage persona is the role of the toilet man, Motombo Umbokko from the fictitious African nation of Nfuddu. This is an ambivalent character, which, on one hand, represents the seedy, menial kind of jobs African immigrants are often subjected to in Germany, and on the other, is one that knows all the dirty linens and skeletons in the cupboard. As Umbokko, Davis speaks about pretensions and all the faultlines of German society, particularly as they affect Black people. Coming from his lips, these representations are punch-up joke forms derived from disparagement and laughter comes from the outsider-insider perspective he presents. Just like other African diaspora humourists, Davis does not let up on using the advantage of that side of his identity to appropriate well-known stereotypes for his joke enactments.
Urzila Carlson: punching up with outright insults
In traditional African societies, there was always the willingness to use outright abuse (Olukotun, 2002), while in contemporary times, jokesters devise inventive modules to incorporate them in ways that evoke laughter other than offence (Nwankwọ, 2019: 103). In Western spaces, this kind of jocular punch can be problematic due to how confrontational it can be. There are glaring examples with the use of invectives and swearwords, ones that come in the form of in-your-face kind of ridicule where the comedian is less considerate about the words and examples they use. However, there are also more subtle examples such as Urzila Carlson tacitly referring to South Africans as thieves. In this example, she begins by asking if anyone in the audience is from South Africa and then proceeds to flatly advise them to be careful with their personal belongings because ‘We (South Africans) steal’ (TheMelbComedyFest, 2014). Elsewhere, she refers to a section of her audience as people seated on the ‘wank bank’, because they were part of the few that indicated knowing Charlize Theron, but not necessarily that she is originally South African like Carlson (LiveNationOzNz, 2014). In each of these two examples, Carlson uses her being South African to directly insult people in the audience for fun.
Her jokes centre on being female, lesbian and ‘non-regular’ African in Australasia, drawing on stereotypes about her native South Africa. 6 Carlson is part of the third group of African diaspora humourists, made up of people who moved out of the continent as adults, she having migrated to New Zealand in 2006. She tells stories of her native South Africa, speaking about the good and the bad of her land of birth while also ridiculing the eccentricities of New Zealanders and Australians, especially in their relations with Aboriginals and other people. These are examples of jocular punches executed on the premise of her diversified identities as a born South African and naturalized New Zealander. Aside from this ridiculing of national identities, Carlson has also serially disparaged body weight and same-sex relations. In a set where she mocks the notion of widespread hunger in Africa, she particularly ridicules the suggestion that Africans feed solely from food donations from Western households. Then came her jocular assertion that the leftover food sent from the West to Africa is the reason she got ‘overfed’ and is ‘fat’ (TheMelbComedyFest, 2014). On the lips of someone else, the term ‘fat’ would instigate derision other than mirth since that would be considered outright body shaming. In referring to herself as ‘fat’, Carlson vocalizes one term that has a newly accumulated offensive connotation, especially given that there is almost no politically correct term for referring to people living with obesity (Pausé, 2019). Nonetheless, Carlson’s emphasis here is not on her body weight but on satirizing the recurrent ‘hungry African children’ mantra of the Western media and donor agencies. She is also able to enact this joke to punch up against Western stereotypes of Africa as a hunger-ridden continent that requires handouts from elsewhere.
As a woman, Carlson punches up against men too. In one joke setup built around her being an ambassador for a breast cancer prevention organization, she asks women in the audience who cannot feel their breasts for a lump because they are too shy to do so, to consult their ‘local lesbian’ for help. She then turns on the men to rebuke those of them who feel that having themselves checked is invasive. She adds emphatically, ‘Let me talk you through a smear’, and then proceeds to reel out graphic details of how people – trainee doctors, a group of school children, plumbers, other hospital staff and even people in the waiting room – happen to look into the room when a woman spreadeagled, with her legs ‘tied close to her ears’ is not even able to see all of these people looking into her vagina during the procedure because her ‘legs are in the way’. After mentioning these embarrassing encounters, she concludes her set by telling men that they are equally susceptible to getting breast cancer, summarizing with a bit of advice to men, ‘So, maybe tomorrow morning, when you are in the shower, just for a split second, take your hands off your balls and just feel your chest’ (TheMelbComedyFest, 2018).
Carlson often refers to herself as a ‘Lesbytarian’ (alluding to her being lesbian and a Presbyterian), thus leveraging a conflation of her sexuality and faith to underscore her multiple personalities. Though she hardly makes joke characterizations about her religion, she does not shy away from speaking about her sexual orientation, and often in humorous ways. The following is an example of some of her disparaging jokes about queer relations: And quite frankly, I think, if you look at lesbians, we are a little tougher than the rest of you. ’Cause when you look at us, oh, we really want to put a jam. But we don’t really have the strength to get into the jar (she mimics fruitless efforts to get into a jar; audience laughter). (TheMelbComedyFest, 2017)
To show that her jokes exist on the borderline of offence and amusement, Carlson adds that people find ‘toast and jam’ in the breakfast menu of some fancy restaurant and wonder aloud: ‘Who the fuck wants that?’, and answers emphatically, ‘Lesbians!’ (TheMelbComedyFest, 2017). What is significant in these examples is that Carlson can evoke laughter through sensitive subjects and stereotypes, specifically about body weight, Africans, and lesbians by first establishing and claiming her belongingness to these identities. Additionally, she performs New Zealander identity by rendering her jokes with Kiwi inflection and mannerism, characterizing the nation’s ‘every day’, and using these to gain permission to ridicule and most especially punch up. This is also true of her caricature of men because as a woman, she has earned the permission to do so due to centuries of oppression of women by men. However, Carlson’s capacity to punch up is limited by her being white and for this reason, she does have one no-go area which is that of characterizing Black experiences under apartheid South Africa. For being white, Carlson is visibly part of the oppressive apartheid structure and as such cannot convincingly bear representations of Black suppression in her native land. This is why in the set where she avers that South Africans steal, she does not mention the delineating racial dimension attached to this assumption.
Trevor Noah: reconfiguring stereotypes
Given that joke-telling does not explicitly state its purpose due to its privileging of doublespeak, it is characteristically deployed towards countering, challenging and even pulverizing stereotypes, which are almost always present. Where jokes can be ‘indeterminate and open’, foregrounding ‘alternative perspectives, representing competing senses that yield laughter from the absurdity in juxtaposed circumstance’ (Jarmon, 2020: 552), stereotypes have the potential to evoke group disparagement (Koszałkowska and Wróbel, 2019; Zillmann, 1983) and are mostly negative, sometimes with dire consequences for the people involved (Barron, 1950; Berlyne, 1968; Kan, 2004). Stereotypes can also be positive based on how they are used (Argüello Gutiérrez et al., 2018; Dobai and Hopkins, 2019; Zenner, 1970). Like jokes, they are double-edged, if not multivalent, and their meanings as well as usefulness are context-dependent. For the simple fact that jokes thrive on the economy of words to make the most impact, comedians often depend on them to avoid employing many explanatory words that would belabour their narratives. Being common knowledge, comedians adapt them as group trait assignation shortcuts for joke setups. Since jokesters mostly speak about the underside and shortcomings of societies, it often does appear as if jokes mostly perpetuate negative stereotypes. What they actually do is engage stereotypes in less offensive ways, but this does not mean that they do not invariably discomfit and unsettle those they target.
Trevor Noah does not have the same restrictions as Carlson when it comes to depicting race-related jokes. Like Carlson’s move to New Zealand, Noah emigrated to the United States as an adult, but unlike her, does have strong roots in their native South Africa through the comedy shows and other events he regularly organizes. He deploys his experiences and knowledge of the racist antics of South Africa’s apartheid government in his jocular commentaries on race relations in the United States and is presently one of Africa’s most internationally acclaimed English-speaking African comedians. 7 His peculiarity comes from his deep insight into world affairs and his ability to render his observations intelligently and humorously. He is adept at alternating between different accents, mimicry and embodied representations to convey hilarious narratives, especially concerning race, the negative effects of colonialism, and intercultural encounters (Tunca and Nwankwọ, 2022). Noah uses numerous joke-telling modes for humour evocation. Like other African diaspora comedians, he reconfigures Western stereotypes about Africa(ns) and other historically oppressed groups. Osho’s ‘bad teeth’ characterization as well as Carlson’s example concerning ‘hungry children in Africa’, are both great samples of how jokesters repurpose stereotypes and deploy them towards discrediting those who propagate them. By inverting these typecasts in this way, the ridicule is now on those who believe and use them freely.
In one of Noah’s examples, he narrates that when travelling in and out of the United States, he prefers taking Middle Eastern airlines because the likelihood of such airlines being attacked by terrorists is slim. He claims that if such flights are threatened, there is the possibility that at least one passenger would understand Arabic and Islam well enough to be able to talk the would-be terrorists out of carrying out their mission. Though this is not where this tale ends, it is evident that it is built around common stereotypes drawn out of Islamophobia. For being neither Muslim nor Arab, the discomfort surrounding this rendition is palpable because it does already read like a punch-down gag. Nevertheless, Noah succeeds in making this narrative humorous even at this point by how he tells it and also by positioning himself as a hapless victim of a ‘threat’, ensuring that he concentrates on his own insecurities rather than on the stereotype surrounding Islam and its adherents. Also, he extricates himself from the white, American or European angle, those who are supposedly the target of terrorist angst, by placing himself as an innocent African caught up in the middle of ideological differences between the West and the ‘Middle East’. Yet again, even casting his powerlessness in this way does not exonerate this narrative from being a punch-down joke because of its Islamophobic ring. Noah defeats this sense of unease by stating at the end how it is that when acts of terrorism happen in America and the culprit is a ‘white male’, the media reports the incident as being the act of ‘a troubled lone gunman, possibly working alone, with no ties to terrorism’. But when someone else is involved, it is declared an act of terrorism, and media houses will go haywire finding links and connections to jihadist groups or local activists like Black Lives Matter.
Concluding remarks
The preceding examples show how comedians with immigrant backgrounds work punch-up humour into their stage acts. They foreground their acts with their African and diaspora identities, alternating between them to take on specific representations. They mostly punch up in their jokes and are, by the dictates of their African identity, the only ones ‘permitted’ to speak about or co-opt Western stereotypes of Africa(ns) in their renditions and still be considered politically correct. As diaspora peoples, they are equally permitted to speak about the nations of their birth with a high level of permissibility. Osho and Davis, for instance, use their English and German identities quite appropriately, while Noah and Carlson foreground their long residences in the United States and New Zealand to be able to bear specific jocular representations pertaining to those nations. One other thing that is evident in the preceding samples is that in spite of the multi-varied identities which each of the jokesters discussed possess, they do have their limitations – Carlson cannot speak about Blackness and Noah has to be careful about jokes concerning Islam and Arabs. As such, every jocular punch has its limits.
Indubitably, the determining complexities of offence-taking and permissiveness emerge more profoundly within cross-cultural environments, especially in African diaspora comedy performances in the West. Returning to the opening story about Jonah and the fish, just like the interpreter asserts, ‘Whether Jonah swallowed the fish or the fish swallowed Jonah, all I know is that there was swallow’; it is also the case that a jocular punch is a punch regardless of whether it is up or down. The interpreter here is an archetypical persona that encapsulates the tenor of ongoing decolonization efforts, and more importantly, how hitherto master narratives are retold and colonial languages and artefacts reconfigured, reappropriated and adapted to local uses. Jokesters also do this kind of work – using jokes to confront disproportionate power structures and histories. Just like parody and mimicry, jokes serve the salient function of exposing the excesses and eccentricities of power, especially through punch-up humour. Nevertheless, the fact that limits exist suggests that when comedians miscalculate or venture carelessly into uncharted territories outside their remit of permission, the possibility of offence is heightened.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thanks to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its support during my postdoctoral research in Germany where the first drafts of this paper were written.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I acknowledge fundings from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (AvH), Cultural Entrepreneurship and Digital Transformation in Africa and Asia (CEDITRAA), and Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien (IFEAS) of the Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany.