Exploring the Role of Humour in Self-Help South African Digital Content: A Critical Analysis of the Babu Dokotela TV Show on YouTube

Abstract

Scholarship on humour in the South African context has been dominated by a focus on stand-up comedy and its role in confronting dominant discourses of the time. There is a lacuna in the studies of humour and its deployment in digital content focussing on self-help. This paper focused on the content of the Babu Dokotela TV Show that is housed on YouTube and that has 63,600 subscribers with over 1300 videos uploaded to date. The show is helmed by a traditional healer who uses humour to address sombre issues of contemporary South Africa such as pain, suffering, and poverty. Jokes are made to induce laughter when various critical issues are discussed, and the humour is also evident with the cameraman, who is always chuckling in the background. Humour in this case is subversive and a form of resistance as the messages that are conveyed speak extensively to the subject of self-help and of overcoming adversity. The article posed the following questions: 1) What production conventions are used in the Babu Dokotela TV Show and how do they relate to self-help and humour? 2) In what way is humour deployed to convey and simplify the complexities of themes such as poverty, pain and suffering in the Babu Dokotela TV Show? Bakhtin's carnivalesque theorisation was applied as a theoretical and conceptual framework. The carnivalesque is centred on the lived experiences of ordinary people in relation to power and the status quo. A multimodal discourse analysis was conducted on ten (10) purposively selected episodes of the Babu Dokotela TV Show. The analysis focused on narratives and visuals that use humour to convey the unequal power dynamics in the present epoch.