Laughing all the way to freedom?: Contemporary stand-up comedy and democracy in South Africa
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Julia Katherine Seirlis
Abstract
Stand-up comedy raises questions about the quality of and limits to democracy in post-apartheid South Africa. It does so by telling a before democracy and after apartheid story in the mushrooming of comedians and comedy venues and in the generational differences between comedians and their approaches to comedy since 1994. This before-and-after story marks out boundaries between the old puritanical strictures and censorship of the National Party's apartheid and the new possibilities for freedom and enjoyment in a democracy riddled with profound social and political problems of extreme violence and poverty — and run by the ANC, a ruling party with a strong sense of entitlement to State power.
© 2011 Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- “Double-speak” at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of bisociation in conversational laughter-talk
- The use of humor in the foreign language classroom: Funny and effective?
- Do women seek humorousness in men because it signals intelligence? A cross-cultural test
- The Chinese ambivalence to humor: Views from undergraduates in Hong Kong and China
- “You're lying to Jesus!”: Humor and play in a discussion about homelessness
- Laughing all the way to freedom?: Contemporary stand-up comedy and democracy in South Africa
- Book reviews
Articles in the same Issue
- “Double-speak” at the White House: A corpus-assisted study of bisociation in conversational laughter-talk
- The use of humor in the foreign language classroom: Funny and effective?
- Do women seek humorousness in men because it signals intelligence? A cross-cultural test
- The Chinese ambivalence to humor: Views from undergraduates in Hong Kong and China
- “You're lying to Jesus!”: Humor and play in a discussion about homelessness
- Laughing all the way to freedom?: Contemporary stand-up comedy and democracy in South Africa
- Book reviews
