The joke's on racism: South Africans are more likely to laugh at themselves

The pain of South Africa's past and present has triggered a positive side-effect: a superb sense of humour, reckons Niels Posthumus, a Dutch reporter in Joburg.

Stand-up comedian Loyiso Madinga recently visited Germany, where he was stunned by how few smiles he saw. "They all looked so serious," he told me before a recent show at Joe Parker's Comedy and Jive in Joburg. "Maybe it was the weather - it can't be easy to smile in that cold."

I've been living in South Africa for a while, and I have to agree: people here laugh a hell of a lot more than back home in Europe.

And at themselves, in particular. The writer Richard de Nooy, who grew up in Joburg but lives in Amsterdam, agrees with me. "Broadly speaking, South Africans are far more likely to laugh at themselves than the Dutch."

Before I came here, I expected South Africa's problems to be far too sensitive to joke about. But to make light of trauma can be a way of dealing with it, I soon learnt.

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I witnessed, for example, a great set by comedian Dusty Rich. He ridiculed his own upbringing. After the show he emphasised that all the jokes about his dad and family were real. Rich said. "The way I deal with this painful past is with humor. As a country we do the same."

So humour acts as a painkiller. But South African humour also signals a lack of control in the present, reckons De Nooy.

"The Dutch are accustomed to having control over their surroundings. If in the Netherlands a train is late, for instance, Dutch people, who impoldered about half of their country, would be more likely to say: 'We pushed back the bloody sea to take this land. How difficult can it be to run a train on time?' Whereas most South Africans would probably joke about the inadequacies of the railways, accepting that some things will just never change."

I think that's true. But what has also struck me is that the South African flair for self-ridicule is often rather politically incorrect, especially when it comes to race.

Some time ago I picked up a copy of Simon Kilpatrick's The Racist's Guide to the People of South Africa and wondered whether a book with such a title could ever become a success anywhere else.

I asked Kilpatrick, who lives in the US nowadays. And he said he wanted to publish a sequel over there - The Racist's Guide to the People of the USA. But he was forced to change the title to The People-Watcher's Guide to the United States Of America.

block_quotes_start Successful politically incorrect humor requires an actual interest in other cultures - plus a balancing dose of ridicule for one's own culture. block_quotes_end

"I think Americans in general think joking about race quickly causes things like racial hatred, oppression and genocide," he said. "But I disagree. I feel like joking about our differences, and celebrating them, actually helps to bring us together."

But even in South Africa, politically incorrect jokes have limits. They need to be genuinely funny, subtle and clever. White students in blackface do not qualify.

In the Netherlands, jokes about race might be less common, but there is a lot of "shock humour". The trick here is to deliver a premium of wit along with pure offence.

Dutch comedian Hans Teeuwen once did a sketch on stage in which he enacted having anal sex with the Dutch queen. Some disapproved, but most of the audience found it so funny they accepted it.

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Another Dutch comedian, Theo Maassen, however, was slammed for joking about removing the state's protection of right-wing politician Geert Wilders, whose life is threatened by radical Muslims, in order to make him watch his words a bit more carefully.

He had to explain on TV that it was just a joke - never a good sign with comedy.

"Dutch comedians are more inclined to ridicule others and often seem to want to outdo each other at playing hardball," said De Nooy, who said he preferred the self-effacing banter of the South African scene.

Still, comedian Maassen was applauded for French-kissing a statue of Christ on the cross on stage some years ago, while joking about the Messiah's great physique in rather homoerotic ways. The show won the most prestigious Dutch comedy prize that year. The Dutch just love to ridicule religion.

According to veteran comedian Joe Parker, religion is a very sensitive topic in South Africa, and comedians here do tend to steer clear of it.

Good comedy, Parker said, should try to touch a deeper, universal layer of human interaction. If it does, a joke will work everywhere, provocative or not.

The success of South Africa's Trevor Noah shows how far intelligent humour can go; it can jump across oceans.

A common argument is that Noah gets away with his race jokes fairly easily because he is of mixed race. In general, I often heard the argument that black comedians are allowed more leeway on race gags than white ones.

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Still, a white comedian such as Nik Rabinowitz shows the opposite. What it comes down to, I realised after seeing many clips of Rabinowitz and Noah on YouTube, is that successful politically incorrect humor requires an actual interest in other cultures - plus a balancing dose of ridicule for one's own culture.

Only a true effort to observe and understand other races produces clever race jokes. Noah and Rabinowitz share a fine ear for accents and dialects. They have properly studied them. And they don't spare themselves.

But when politically incorrect jokes express indifference or arrogance, they shift into offensiveness. And that's a shame, because intelligent comedy can be a major catalyst for important discussions needed everywhere, not least in South Africa.

Comedian Madinga agrees. "Sometimes it's just easier to say something with a joke. A joke makes discussions more accessible. It avoids that you immediately sound like an angry black person or a racist white one. And it creates a positive feeling: if we can laugh about it, we can deal with it."

No wonder then, that Kilpatrick and De Nooy both miss the flavour of humour in South Africa.

I'm sure I will too whenever I'm back in my home country - standing in the cold in Amsterdam, surrounded by glum faces, and bitching about the stupid train being three minutes late.