By the time I heard of the passing of renowned physicist and intellectual giant Stephen Hawking, I had already decided what to tackle in this week's column. Something had happened over the weekend that made me want to write about how people cope with painful episodes in their lives by using humour.
Hawking displayed an incredible sense of humour. Humour, he once said, "is what keeps me going".
What got me thinking about the power of humour was an incident with my father, "EB" Ngcobo, over the weekend. In December 2016 he was involved in a horrific head-on collision when a car coming from the opposite direction went into his lane and crashed into his Corsa van.He broke his tibia (lower leg) just below the knee and totally fractured his hip bone. The fracture to the hip was missed in the original diagnosis, which led to complications.
Long story short, he has basically been bed-bound for the past 15 months and only able to move using a walker. He recently had a total hip replacement and is well on his way to recovery. This past weekend I took the kids to see him in the Valley of a Thousand Hills. And he pulled a surprise on us. He got out of bed, stood up unaided and walked gingerly around the room!
We started clapping. This is when he turned to us and, with an impish grin, went, "Amayedw' umntwana!" I laughed so hard the juice I was drinking came out of my nose. Amayedw' umntwana! is a line Zulu folks have chanted for centuries when a baby stands up on its own for the first time. The chant literally means just that: "The baby is standing on its own!"The last 15 months have easily been the worst time of my dad's 77-year existence. He's been living with constant anxiety and excruciating pain. We have piled up thousands of miles zigzagging between Gauteng and KZN, attempting to offer support to him and my mom. And yet through all of it, he's always been ready with a hilarious joke on the spot.
He went through a temporary phase of incontinence as a side-effect of his medication, which meant he always had to keep a chamber pot nearby. While visiting us last year, he famously quipped, "Even baby larks are laughing and pointing at me, saying, 'I've got a larger bladder than him!'"I come from a family of notorious raconteurs. Especially when dealing with hardship. On both sides. My paternal gran, Crescentia MaMbhele Ngcobo, passed on in 1984. It became evident that she was terminally ill by early 1984. At some point, all her children converged on her hospital bed to basically bid her farewell. According to my dad, my aunt Busisiwe Clara Ngubane broke down and started sobbing. Apparently my gran looked at her and said, "Kanti uyisilima ngempela Busisiwe? Animbhekeni etetema!" ("Are you really this much of an idiot? Why are you wailing like this?") The translation doesn't capture the essence. Anyway, the moment eased the tension as everyone howled with laughter.
A similar thing happened when my maternal gran, Margaret Gwala, was also terminally ill, in 1998. My mom brought her to our house in her final days. One Sunday morning I wheeled her out to the patio to enjoy some sun. All of a sudden she's giggling, and my mom asks her what's so funny. She retorts, "Oh, I'm definitely leaving this earth now. Last night I had a vivid, colourful dream of me in a brand spanking new and shiny wedding gown. It was so beautiful!" This was the first time I knew that according to dream interpreters, dreaming of a wedding signals an impending death. She did pass on, a few days later.Humour is truly an effective coping mechanism in times of trouble. It doesn't take the notorious Black Twitter more than three minutes to come up with hilarious memes after a traumatic, painful experience.
And South Africans of every shape and form insist on laughing at themselves and others. In one of his comedy sets, Trevor Noah shares a story about an irate deaf guy who chastised him for not poking fun at deaf people.
To quote that beautiful mind, Stephen Hawking, "Life would be tragic if it weren't so funny."..