Editorial: Humour in South African Literatures and Cultures from Apartheid to the Present

Abstract

Different theorists of humour have attempted to define humour with very little success. In fact, the more they have sought to define it, the more humour evaded definition, technically poking fun at all those seeking to fix it to a definition. This probably explains why French philosopher, Henry Bergson (1900: 3) refused to define humour arguing that “we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition” because it is “a living thing”. In Bergson’s formulation, humour was “a living thing” conterminous with human ontology itself. This idea is latter picked up by Russian linguist, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984: 66) who insisted that “certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter”, elevating laughter from the domain of entertainment to that of reason and intellectual enquiry. Bakhtin’s idea of the carnival demonstrates not only the power of cultural performances and texts to subvert, interject and interrupt power but also the ambivalent relationship between official and popular discourses. Most philosophers of humour from Aristotle to Freud have theorized it as a mode of power and aggression. The question that this special issue seeks to tease out is how South African literatures and cultures have deployed humour as an aesthetic and/or narrative framework over the years, from apartheid to contemporary times. Since humour is usually associated with entertainment, there is an assumption that pain and suffering are anti-thetical to humour. In his book On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe (2001) has suggested that the laughter of the oppressed is not necessarily a form of resistance since it takes place within the confines of a world created and sanctioned by the oppressor. How would South African literatures and cultures respond to this conclusion?