Ignatius Chukwumah, ed., Joke-Performance in Africa: Mode, Media & Meaning

Summary

As E. B. White famously remarked: ‘Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.’ Fortunately, Ignatius Chukwumah (English, Federal University, Nigeria) has edited a volume that is interesting, and no frogs die, either literally or metaphorically. Instead, a good deal of scholarly light is shown upon an underrepresented area in the academy, even in African studies: comedy in Africa.

Fourteen essays are offered in five sections: ‘Joking about the government’, Traditional forms and (post)modern contexts’, ‘Street jokes’, ‘Gender and sex’, and ‘Stand-up comedy’. As always, some cultures remain better represented than others. Nigeria and Kenya have four essays each, Egypt three, and Morocco, Malawi and Zambia are represented in one essay each.

The introduction provides context and theory, offering both personal anecdote and larger discussions of joke culture throughout Africa. As Chukwumah also notes, a recurring theme through the volume ‘is that contemporary performance-oriented African jokes embody the anxieties of the day’ (15). While that statement could be true of any culture, it is important to remember in the larger framework of the volume. It also shares the other major themes of the volume: these essays are concerned with joke-performance, not literary jokes or written humour and the focus is on the contemporary – even traditional joke forms are considered only so far as contemporary performance.

The essays collectively follow the same structure, roughly: an introduction, a survey of related literature, description of methodology, analysis of the specific joke-performance, and conclusion. The three essays in section one, ‘Joking about the government’, display considerable overlap between nations, culture and media. When we mock leaders, there are numerous similarities, regardless of specific circumstance. Remmy Shiundu Barasa opens the section analysing The XYZ Show, a Spitting Image-type satire in Kenya that creates humour by imagining the private lives of Kenya's leaders, a scenario matched by Morocco's The School of the Naughty, analysed by Zakariae Bouhmala. The former presents a series of vignettes mocking the president and parliament, the latter imagines the Moroccan government as a classroom. In both cases, the source of humour is in robbing the elite of their dignity.