I have a strange affliction. I have this tendency to use the words "wedding" and "funeral" interchangeably. Both occasions probably reside in the same drawer in the mushy mess that is my whiskey-eroded brain. I suspect it's because both involve taking a full shower, applying roll-on deodorant and wearing decent clothes.
It is therefore bizarre that one of my favourite Hollywood movies of all time is Four Weddings and a Funeral. In this flick, the Charles character, played by Hugh Grant, delivers one of the wittiest speeches by a best man I have ever heard.
The timing is perfect as he displays false awkwardness in a halting voice while alluding to the fact that he once inadvertently told another wedding audience that the groom had slept with both the sister and mother of the bride.A close second to this speech was delivered by the best man at my wedding, Maswazi. He told everyone that my wife, Tebogo, was a brave woman because she'd found a ball of dung and, instead of discarding it, had pried it open and found a teensy lil' nugget of diamond in me. I thought that was as witty as it was classy.
Later, in the same movie, another character attempts to pull off a speech as great as Grant's, with disastrous consequences. He stumbles from one faux pas to the next, calling the groom's ex-girlfriends "dogs" and letting on that the groom's proposals had been rejected by several women.
These thoughts went through my mind last week as I followed the furore that erupted when former president Thabo Mbeki made comments about Winnie Madikizela-Mandela that did not sit well with her admirers.Mbeki's many fans defended him on the grounds that he was merely being his brutally honest self while being asked very direct questions. And that's more than just a fair point. The man was responding to extremely pointed questions. Except that, of course, he's a wily, veteran politician with the wherewithal to refuse to answer.
The incident prompted a very interesting conversation in the public arena about what is appropriate to say in the wake of someone passing on.
I know that my own funeral will have no effect on me because, you know, I'll be dead. Truth be told, if I had my way there wouldn't even be a funeral. I think it's just a waste of money that could be used to feed orphans, pay my kids' school fees or broken into R10 bills and shoved down strippers' crotches at the Summit Club in Hillbrow. You know: good causes.
But I'm also cognisant of the fact that funerals are not about the dead; they are about the living and how they choose to bid farewell. It is in their interests that I would never agree that my friend Nkanyezi "Blazza" Ngobese should speak at my funeral.Blazza is a very intelligent man. He is capable of extremely highbrow thoughts. But the filters between his brain and his mouth (or typing fingers) malfunction spectacularly. Until I started spending time with him I had never used the word ibhimbi (one who is pathologically inarticulate) as often as I do.
I tragically missed his brother Maqaphelo "Sdi" Ngobese's funeral. But I am reliably told that Blazza delivered an obituary of such galactically cringeworthy proportions that the wine on the altar turned back into water.
Apparently he invoked his brother's alcoholism during the speech and then shocked the traditional Zulu audience by declaring that the family had decided to burn his remains via cremation. In unrelated news, my friend Blazza is a distant relative of Mbeki.We don't call out people who make horrible speeches at weddings and funerals nearly enough.
This is how it came to pass that a few years ago in Richards Bay, an uncle of a recently departed friend ended up telling the mourners that my friend's marriage had ended because of the size of his willy.
I wish I was making this up. Afterwards, as we huddled inside the tent, someone tried to get us to confirm the uncle's assertion. We refused on the grounds that it is unAfrican to speak ill of the dead, irrespective of their size.
More importantly, we all started drawing up our lists of folks we don't want to ruin our respective memories with bad speeches after we shuffle off our respective mortal coils....