The Grave World of Trevor Noah’s Serio-Comedy: Intersection between Apartheid Nuances and the Autobiographical

Abstract

In the past several years – two decades at the very least – the appetite for laughter in Africa has inspired the emergence of a fascinating artistic and business opportunity: the comedy industry. Consequently, standup comedy as a performed art has gained currency in Africa. Initially, the dominant designs of comedy on the continent’s performing arts landscape included mainly slapstick TV comedy, caricature and art by street jesters. Like any other form of performed art, standup comedy has invariably been appropriated to reflect (on) the triumphs, aspirations, dilemmas and struggles of the African people. This background has made scholarly inquiry into this genre of comedy necessary. As such, this paper seeks to investigate the work of a South African standup comedian, Trevor Noah, as serious (and beyond comedy art) that discourses over grave issues affecting his life and the lives of those within the immediate society in which he lived in apartheid South Africa and by extension, post-apartheid South Africa. The paper shall also examine how this comedian uses his art to find space in America as an emigrant. Noah’s work falls in the category of cultural productions that are referred to as the art of “the serio-comic” (Ruganda, 1996). The paper shall interrogate Noah’s presentation of, and commentary on the serious in a humourous way through the theoretical framework of the classical theories of humour, namely: superiority theory, incongruity theory and relief theory. The superiority theory shall be appropriated to read laughter as an expression of power and/or aggression over the other; the incongruity paradigm to read laughter as an act resulting out of discordance between two words, two sets of statements or ideas; and the relief theory to interpret laughter as a form of release of tension that builds up in the course of a humourous construction. This paper shall strive to examine how the foregoing functions of humour are used by the artist to make commentary on grave issues in his comedy. Finally, it will interrogate the various tropes of time and space that Trevor Noah uses to articulate his comedic truths.