No Laughing Matter? Humour and the performance of South Africa

Despite the contemporary prominence of cartoonists and stand-up comedians in South Africa, woefully little scholarship exists on the history of South African humour. In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, humour has been a key medium through which ‘South African-ness’ has been represented – perhaps most successfully and controversially in the comedy films of Leon Schuster. This article demonstrates the value of further inquiry into humour history by comparing Schuster’s lucrative films Mr. Bones and There’s a Zulu On My Stoep to the work of Stephen Black, a journalist and playwright of the early Union Period (1910s–1920s), whose humorous works use strikingly similar tactics to represent the nation amid a much earlier – and sorely neglected – nation-building effort.