Sass, p.25
Sass, page 25
The four comics featured in this chapter use humor to draw distinctions between Black and white people to highlight and celebrate their in-group status: Blackness. At Ntuli’s 2015 performance at Taboo, the white woman who went with me to the show, as mentioned above, became the butt of many jokes. At one point, Ntuli joked, “Hheyi [no], there is nothing like white people asking while you are in the middle of the groove. And they like, [awkwardly] ‘So so which leg comes first?’ Hhayibo [oh come on] move! You must ask for these instructions before we dance, not during. [Laughs to self.] Yes it happened to you [pointing to my friend], hhe? She feels very personal about this story; she’s like ‘Yesss!’” Under apartheid rules, a Black woman would never be able to openly ridicule white people, even less to subversively challenge their superiority the way Ntuli did in this joke. The audience embraced this small rebellion, which we can read as an enactment of sass given the way it illuminated the postapartheid fantasy of Black liberation and simultaneously disrupted the structures of white supremacy. Lihle Msimang performed at the venue The Box in Johannesburg and did a bit on Black versus white language: “I love studying the way people speak. When you are angry, English is the worst language to use. ’Cause you need a lot of words. [Affecting a prim English accent] ‘Stop it. Right now. Stop it, I’m warning you! Stop it!’ Whereas if you’re Black, you don’t need many words. In fact, you don’t even need words. You need to look at a person and go [raises eyebrows to a central point, gestures forward aggressively] ‘Hey!’ [Cut-eye.] Nxe [click with a curse word register]!”45
As Seirlis points out, stand-up in postapartheid South Africa is a site where old ideologies and social orders can be challenged and subverted, especially whiteness and white supremacy. “In the new dispensation, whiteness has in many ways been neutralized and neutered,” Seirlis argues. “If whiteness in its Afrikaner incarnation is set up as risible and outmoded, generic whiteness is rendered the ultimate unmarked category: dull and perhaps irrelevant.”46 This dullness and irrelevance are clear in the way white people are staged as dancers without rhythm, comically dry and verbose. Ntuli and Msimang use racial differentiation to disarm whiteness. The way they parody whiteness as awkward renders it wooden, dead—and Blackness as dynamic and enlivened. Blackness is celebrated as white people are cast as outsiders at best, useless relics at worst. These enactments of sass look different because the critique of power is in the context of diaspora culture. However, embodied gestures associated with sass—the cut-eye and click—are intimately proximate.
Self-deprecation is “an embodiment of the power of powerlessness,” Joanne Gilbert argues, and is one of the primary techniques of marginal humor.47 However, self-deprecatory humor can lead to the subversion of power; as Gilbert explains, “Capitalizing on their marginalized status is integral to the potentially subversive discourse these comics generate.”48 Tumi Morake opened her Netflix special saying, “I’m nervous. I’m an African fresh off the boat from Africa. On display in front of white people. And I’ve seen money exchanging hands. I’m a little nervous. It feels like déjà vu. Just putting it out there, it’s a little awkward.”49 Morake is speaking to a largely white audience, judging from the camera’s wide pans of the audience. Her joke calls up the Middle Passage, the journey Africans took from the continent to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade, using the “rhetoric of victimage” to signify her relationship of marginality vis-à-vis her audience.50
As such, Morake, even as a South African not directly affected by the legacy of this instantiation of white racial terror, nonetheless brings that terror to the surface. The joke subverts the idea that Black South Africans are different from Black North Americans who were subject to chattel slavery, and even if it is a Black South African woman standing before them, her joke conveys to the Canadian audience that they are also implicated in the legacy of white racial terror. Essentially, Morake marks herself as discursively Black (and not generically African), and her audience is whitened, with all the meanings and implications that whiteness holds. She offers a subtle subversion—Black people are clearly marked as formerly victims of white terror. White people are still racist.
Celeste Ntuli had the crowd cracking up at Taboo with her impressions of white people. “White girls, you know they want everything,” she started, the crowd already laughing. “[Nasally voice] ‘Oh hug me Jonathan. Come to my workplace. Tell me bedtime stories.’ [Laughter.] Uh-uh. Thina [us], we are not as needy. Just give us 40,000 and disappear for three weeks; we’ll be fine! [Applause.] We’ve been poor too long. We don’t mess around.” Ntuli’s parody creates an intersubjective community of insiders (and outsiders), and that is crucially important, even if ephemeral, in a South Africa where in 2015, 64 percent of Black people still lived in poverty.51 Stand-up can provide a sense of cathartic relief in laughter, but it can also generate solidarity among the most marginalized members of society around issues like entrenched poverty, capitalistic exploitation, and gender politics. Parody is an embodied expression of sass in the South African context of vernac comedy—it is a means by which the state is rendered ridiculous, ineffectual, and abject with the white targets as the stand-ins for the oppressive state and the institutions that undergird it.
Sass, Marginality, and the Carnivalesque
Ntuli and Morake use obscenity in their acts in ways that contribute to a mood of social transgression. An undated video on YouTube shows Celeste Ntuli in her younger days performing before a large arena-style audience, wearing a functional and not glamorous dress. It is clear from the video that she is at the beginning of her career. The person who translated and transcribed the bit for my analysis marked several instances of isiZulu and Afrikaans words and phrases that registered as obscenities. One joke featured an angry man exclaiming, “Eske nxa hhaga!” (Piss off) and “Tsek!” (Fuck off), expressions I would not have known without the aid of a native speaker.52
Susan Seizer has theorized obscenity in stand-up as a technique to communicate a relaxed mood, which “plays a large part in orienting audiences to the kind of playful communicative relationship that constitutes live stand-up comedy.”53 Ntuli showered her Taboo performances with obscenities in English, isiZulu, and some interesting (and funny) hybrids. In a bit about why Black folks do not engage in 50 Shades of Grey kinds of sexuality, Ntuli joked, “Don’t you dare give Dumisani a sjambok”—a leather whip with a thick, knobby handle—“these motherfuckers are angry!” Talking about women’s dating behavior, Ntuli pronounced, “Senza yonke ifucked up” (We do all these fucked up things). Getting much applause and laughter at the Comic’s Choice Awards, Tumi Morake started her routine, “It just pisses me off when Black women are in denial. ‘I’m fit, no, I’m fit! This is an African gut.’ No, you are fat. If you had an African body, you’d be a size zero ’cause Africa is starving, bitch!”54 Seizer points out the function of obscenity as a comedic technique that alerts the audience that the performer is authentically “one of them,” and they can feel like they are part of a conversation. Seizer simultaneously indexes the use of swear words as an expression of the carnivalesque, which relies on transgression of hegemonic norms, subversion of powerful ideas and positions, and the open celebration of excess. Seizer argues, “Obscenity in these performances serves to heighten and intensify the expression of the speaker’s perspective, affect, and experience. . . . Such use puts the audience at ease and makes this dialogic performance event feel like colloquial, quotidian talk. . . . Their use of swear words signals to the audience that any formality associated with public speech acts need not hold here, that just as strictures on the audience’s behavior are relaxed in the club setting, the comic too is hereby letting him or herself loose.”55
If Joanne Gilbert is correct and “marginal traditions of humor are inevitably linked to power dynamics,”56 then the carnivalesque is a useful frame to think about the way Black women comics in South Africa use humor to call into question those power dynamics and subvert or reorient dominant norms associated with Black womanhood, especially when it comes to discourses of the body. The carnivalesque evokes an atmosphere of freedom, Bakhtin theorizes, outside the strictures and rules of officialdom where an inversion of the bottom and top occurs in comic rites and rituals. It is no surprise that stand-up comedy is a site ripe for this kind of inversion and that Black women avail themselves of the techniques to partake in such inversion.
The carnivalesque relies on transgression or subversion of norms and an open celebration of that which, for Black women, has been framed as excessive or grotesque. “The transgressive behaviour and ideologies which characterise this space mean that we are always challenging the meanings attached to being Blackwomen,” Gqola argues.57 Black women employ carnivalesque aesthetics to question and move beyond ideals, especially when it comes to those pertaining to beauty and the body, a paradoxical site of repulsion and desire. Kathleen Rowe theorizes representations of the unruly woman, “an ambivalent figure of female outrageousness and transgression with roots in the narrative forms of comedy and the social practices of carnival.”58 The unruly woman in this case signifies the comedic power of subversion in which the excessive and grotesque function to (often visibly) challenge gendered social norms. Onstage, this looks like Black women exceeding the frame of legible Black womanhood; they are doing the most. As Janell Hobson has maintained, “Black women artists . . . who wish to gesture toward an aesthetic of the black female body find themselves in need of an oppositional stance,” and this aesthetic “must challenge dominant culture’s discourse of the black body grotesque and articulate a black liberation discourse on the black body beautiful.”59 When they deploy carnivalesque aesthetics onstage, Black women stand-ups openly celebrate their experiences, their bodies, and their capacity to speak and be heard in contexts where they have often been silenced at best.
Celeste Ntuli is particularly adept at transgressing norms in carnivalesque form, especially those of sexual propriety. At Taboo, Ntuli entered the stage dancing and proclaimed, “Yah . . . hello sengiya-twerka phela [Yeah . . . hello I twerk these days]. Sizama ukuyothola ama bhonasi, baholile abafana nathi siyo twerka int’engapheli [We are going to try to spend their bonuses, the guys got paid and we are going to be twerking non-stop].” Again, Ntuli makes use of a Black American colloquialism, “twerking,” to fit her needs in the moment. Ntuli establishes for her audience that she is comfortable and confident in her voluptuous embodiment, that she can and will publicly move in sexually suggestive ways, despite norms of femininity that bind sex and sexuality to the private realm. Ntuli instrumentalizes men and men’s sexuality in this joke, setting them up as a foil to the notion that women are simply objects of the male gaze.
The joke earlier about the police officer who could not stop gawking at her body is also a joke that transgresses norms of feminine propriety, Ntuli’s way of using sexually themed humor to embody the unruly Black woman. Her transgressions reflect that she is in fact already out of place; she stages a space where Black women are in control of their bodies, sexualities, and desires and make productive use of them, too. Her comedic transgressions of racialized gender norms reflect a broader lens through which we can see the ways Black women’s sass travels—how Black women regard themselves as sexual subjects and their bodies as autonomous and claim their right to speak and be heard, regardless of social consequences.
Khanyisa Bunu’s political transgressiveness is also interesting given how difficult it is for most Black women in South Africa to have an audience for their political speech. In an article about Bunu’s career and style of comedy, a reporter referred to a joke Bunu performed in a city that strongly supported South Africa’s ruling party, the African National Congress (ANC), where she offered the audience a scathing satire of the party’s secretary-general at the time, Gwede Mantashe. “You know Gwede would walk in here and say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen! I’m going to kill all of you—not directly, but through hunger, unemployment and corruption!’ Yay! Gwede! Yay!”60 Here, Bunu refuses to let off the hook neither the corrup members of the ANC government nor the people who perennially vote them into office, even knowing about the corruption, nepotism, and greed that has kept the masses of South Africans in poverty and landless.
Bunu contravenes norms of that which is sayable to the state because of the mood of the carnivalesque her comedic transgression inspires. As Seirlis maintains, “Comedy in South Africa is a compelling demonstration of the shift from the anger of political protest under the severe strictures of apartheid to the possibility of enjoyment in the freedoms promised by democracy,”61 and Bunu’s political satire is a relatively new freedom to be enjoyed publicly, an act of transgression that signifies Bunu’s statement that when it comes to her comedy, “irreverence rules.” Ntuli’s and Bunu’s security in their transgressive speech indexes that they are unconcerned about approval when it comes to their material and destabilizes the idea that Black women are to be seen, not heard. As Jacqueline Bobo has put it, “Black women’s challenge to cultural domination is part of an activist movement that works to improve the conditions of their lives.”62
“Before I go I want to share my problem with you,” Bunu began her set on The Bantu Hour show. “I’m sure you have noticed. I’m battling with weight. I’ve tried so many things. . . . There is one ad that caught my attention. An ad for Herbix. I wanted to try Herbix, but I could not. There was this guy who . . . was two times bigger than I am. And he walked in front of the TV and filled the whole screen. . . . I lost 100 kilograms . . . so after six months, I disappear!”63 Bunu’s seeming unhappiness with her body is symptomatic of the way Black women’s bodies have been represented and discursively produced in popular culture across the continent and in the diaspora as unruly and in need of being disciplined and controlled.
Louise Vincent surveyed and coded several years of discourse around obesity in English-language periodicals in South Africa and found that “in this coverage the fat body is overwhelmingly framed as diseased—to be fat is to be ill and therefore the legitimate subject of the intense gaze of a range of medical ‘experts.’”64 Bunu’s joke counters the logic of the dominant discourse around fat Black bodies, and the supplement Herbix becomes the force threatening to do Bunu in, not her weight. “Reminiscent of the parading of Sara Baartman’s flesh in European ‘human zoos,’” Vincent contends, “the fat Black body re-emerges in post-colonial South Africa as the legitimate object of the (westernized) medical gaze, to be prodded, measured, callipered and trained to better meet the requirements of ‘civilization.’”65 However, Bunu locates the medical gaze and instruments of training the fat body as a potential site where she, like Baartman, might be violated and disappeared.
Tumi Morake, like Celeste Ntuli, has publicly discussed her process of weight loss and uses this aspect of her life as part of her act. In her Netflix special Morake joked, “I’ve lost a little bit of weight. . . . I’m thick now. I used to be fat.”66 Morake’s joke on the surface seems to be “subsumed within the logic of the dominant, overarching frame”67 of fat as a negative attribute, but her use of the word “thick”—which is a colloquial term in Black American speech with a positive signification ascribed to Black women with large frames in ways that connote sexiness and health—is a subversive if incomplete means by which to convey to her audience that she has agency in the cultivation and training of her body, and even if that body is still outside of hegemonic standards of health and beauty, it is nevertheless a site of celebration. Morake uses self-deprecation to locate the big Black female body as a site of adoration, encouraging her audience to find ways to get positive affirmation as well. She implored Black women on a late-night talk show, “I want to just send this message to the big girls out there. Big girls: please, love yourself. If you don’t feel good about yourself, find the nearest taxi rank and you will feel like the sexiest woman on earth.”68
Celeste Ntuli has some of the most subversive and celebratory discourse about the Black female body. Her body and norms around Black women’s bodies in general is a well-trod topic for Ntuli, who jokes often about her weight and skin tone. At the 2017 Johannesburg International Comedy Festival, Ntuli aggressively joked, “I know South Africans don’t want me ’cause I’m dark. Apparently. That’s how you know apartheid went down; men are fucked. He could be navy. ‘I want a yellowbone.’ ‘But what about your mother?!’” This joke exudes sass and the carnivalesque. Ntuli has skewered the anti-Black racial politics of apartheid—not only the political arrangement itself but its legacy of self-hatred among Black people as well. “Navy” is a euphemism for a Black person’s skin that is the darkest tone; in Black American culture there is a saying that some people are so Black they look blue. I believe Ntuli is using the same metaphor here.
This joke cuts like a knife at the heart of anti-Black racism, even and especially among Black people. “I want a yellowbone,” the Black man says, another term borrowed from Black American culture that signifies an extremely light-skinned person. Ntuli symbolically punishes the man, putting him in his place—with his (dark) Black mother, the ancestral body he disavows in his desire for a light-skinned woman. In a sense, we can say that in this scene of inversion—in the proverbial Black “your mama!” moment—Ntuli subverts the man’s position (and any self-hating Black man who refuses to date dark-skinned Black women), effectively becoming his mother. “Yellowbone” is the materialization of white supremacy—or colorism, the proximity to whiteness—across the diaspora. Comedically calling out colorism and disarming it—“But what about your mother?!”—are part of diaspora culture and the circulation of the discourse of Black women’s sass across time and space.
