Place your humour in the dock and check your privilege
As a result of my column about snipping the offspring pipeline two weeks ago, I’ve found myself being asked to comment on vasectomies a lot. I’ve had to explain to people that just because Minister Mbalula is the most famous Xhosa initiate in the history of the ulwaluko practice, that doesn’t make him an expert. All I did there was get a shot, go under and voila, my tadpoles were quarantined.
In any case, I recently posted a conversation between a friend of mine and a “friend with benefits” from a few years ago. She told him she’d missed her period two cycles in a row, and had gone and got a home pregnancy test. She attached the test kit with two lines. His response was “Congratulations!
Who is the father?” accompanied by a picture of a hospital wrist tag with his initials, a date from two years before and the procedure name.
There was a long, awkward silence for half a day. When he tried to follow up, he discovered she had blocked him on SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram and all pigeon and raven services. They never spoke again.
Nowadays, there is a bus that is never late on social media platforms. Mussolini would be chuffed at its promptness. In no time, I get a looong text in my private messages from an enraged Facebook friend. Apparently, I had posted this joke to cast the woman in question as a villain in a story about misattributed paternity from the lofty heights of my male privilege.
I wanted to point out that I’m extremely aware of my male privilege but that it had no bearing on me sharing the story. It was just a lighthearted anecdote about awkwardness within the larger context of the procedure. But, at my age, I have learnt that you can’t win these arguments because, in this era of woke keyboard activists and cancel culture, whoever is more outraged or offended wins the argument. So, I apologised, logged off and made myself a cup of rooibos to calm my nerves.
It is hard writing a humour column in 2022. I have many comedian friends and they lament the same thing. On the whole, I actually believe that the advent of the whole “woke” movement is a positive development. We all need to be more cognisant of the balance of social and economic power and treat each other more equitably. Absolutely. But while the necessary swing of the social needle on this pendulum is in full effect, it is inevitable that it will overshoot the sweet spot. And those who peddle jokes for a living are the Addo Elephant Park grass that gets trampled when two bulls fight for dominance.
Some of the “rules” being enforced make very little sense. Apparently, you can’t joke about death, violence, loss, poverty, religious beliefs, murder, racism, gender-based violence, rape, suicide, mental health or any other social aspect of human suffering. And this is where the point of humour is missed. The bulk of humour actually has its genesis specifically in human suffering, as a coping mechanism to lighten the intrinsic pain.
There is nothing funny about suicide. At all. But what if a man decides to end it all, goes and lies down on a rail track, hoping to be run over by a train? After two hours no trains come that way because he’s forgotten that it’s a public holiday. What if he gets up, walks into the deli at the train station, yelling, “Please give me a bottle of water and a big bag of biltong before I die of dehydration and starvation out there?” Context. It is everything.
And if you think about it, the most innocuous joke has the potential to offend and “trigger” someone. A knock-knock joke could potentially offend someone if they were homeless. Or if they were an amputee. “Why did the chicken cross the road” jokes? Well, maybe you should check your privilege because someone grew up in a remote village with no roads. Or, they could trigger someone whose dad bought a chicken at KwaMnyandu Station in Umlazi and was hit by a bus while chasing the chicken across the road.
I think humorists need their own category among the vulnerable. Juggling all these considerations leaves you hopping from one foot to another like a hot-coal walker. So, if you read a bit of a sucky column from me, check your privilege.
The most innocuous joke has the potential to ‘trigger’ someone. A knock-knock joke could potentially offend someone if they were homeless. Or if they were an amputee