Now that apartheid has fallen, South Africans have seized a fundamental human right: to make fun of everyone – white and black – with impunity. It’s not that the country was completely bereft of humor. But like IBM computers at the height of sanctions, satire often had to be smuggled in because the homegrown variety didn’t always thrive. Laughing Stock, a monthly magazine conceived in the late 1980s as a cross between Mad magazine and National Lampoon, lasted all of 13 issues. Fortunately, there was dramatist Pieter-Dirk Uys. His plays featuring the character Evita Bezuidenhout, Pretoria’s ambassadress to the mythical black bantustan of Bapetikosweti, skewered the absurdities of apartheid. Meanwhile, the 1991 tongue-in-cheek best seller, ““It Takes Two to Toyi-Toyi: A Survival Guide to the New South Africa,’’ gave white readers tips on how to barbecue a giraffe and apologize properly to black domestics for 300 years of oppression.
But tweaking the African National Congress was much too politically incorrect – until the humorous travails of Gwen Anderson and her black maid Eve Sisulu began showing up in the left-of-center Weekly Mail in 1992. People of all colors couldn’t get enough of ““Madam & Eve.’’ Within a year it appeared in the middle-of-the-road Star newspaper of Johannesburg. And last Christmas the 119-page ““Madam and Eve Collection’’ hit No. 1 – proof that South Africans have learned to laugh at themselves. The national demand for comic relief has created some curious literary hybrids. ““We wrap our serious package in a joke,’’ says Martin Welz, founder of noseWEEK, a one-year-old investigative magazine that has produced cover images ridiculing white-supremacist leader Eugene Terre’Blanche and ANC firebrand Winnie Mandela. Says Welz: ““We’d all be in an insane asylum if we didn’t laugh at things that other people in more stable societies might not find that laughable.''
Now that apartheid’s dead, satirists will have to take aim at a different target. Hmmmm. How about all the mediocre loyalists whom Nelson Mandela has named to his cabinet? It may only be a matter of months before leading bookstores begin to stock ““101 Uses for ANC Deadwood.''
