South Africans have a funny way of dealing with life: we make a joke out of it.
It can happen in the middle of a serious conversation, in a family WhatsApp group or while complaining about something that was definitely not funny five minutes earlier.
A sentence can switch from English to Afrikaans, pick up some slang along the way and somehow end with everyone laughing.
For comedian Yaaseen Barnes, that instinct is not just part of being South African. It is part of the comedy.
The Magic Trick
Barnes’ humour often works by making you think you know where a sentence is going, only to take it somewhere completely unexpected.
“It’s like a magic trick,” he says of dry humour. “You’re thinking something and then suddenly it’s something else.”
His example is suitably bizarre: “It’s like I took my Black Cat for a walk and then the peanut butter in the cupboard.”
For South Africans, the Black Cat reference is likely to register immediately. He is not talking about a pet. He is talking about the peanut butter brand, which somehow makes the idea of taking it for a walk even funnier.
There is no big build-up or dramatic performance needed. Barnes lets the absurdity sit there until you catch up with it.
That is part of what makes his humour work. The joke can depend on something as ordinary as a brand sitting in a South African kitchen.
His comedy also draws heavily on something many South Africans use without giving it much thought: language.
The joke is often in the way we speak
“When I’m on stage I like to streamline the Coloured-ness, the Muslim-ness, South African-ness, the Cape Town-ness,” Barnes says.
That is a lot of identity to streamline, but Barnes does it through the way he speaks as much as what he says.
“Code-switching is how I speak all the time.”
For South Africans, switching between languages in the same conversation is hardly unusual. English can become Afrikaans halfway through a sentence, slang can replace an otherwise respectable word and a phrase that makes perfect sense to one group can leave everyone else staring blankly.
Barnes says that language can be crucial to making a joke land.
“The way we speak to make a joke land is optimal,” he says. “You’re thinking something and then suddenly it’s something else.”
The phrasing, tone and delivery can give an audience information about the person telling the joke and their relationship to the subject. Some jokes can travel beyond South Africa, but others rely so heavily on slang or cultural references that something gets lost when they are translated.
Take the language away and, sometimes, you take the punchline with it.
A single word can carry a neighbourhood, a family dynamic or an entire cultural reference. For the people who understand it, the joke lands before the comedian has even finished the sentence.
For everyone else, good luck.
Sometimes all you need is just jokes
That idea feeds into Barnes’ new stand-up show, "Just Jokes", which comes to the Homecoming Centre’s Star Theatre in District Six on 28 and 29 August.
The title is simple, but Barnes says the motivation behind the show comes from something many people are feeling.
“Every day we see sad stories, sad news, there’s always something to bring you down,” he says. “Sometimes all you need is just jokes.”
It is difficult to argue with that.
South Africans have become remarkably skilled at finding humour in the middle of chaos. We complain about traffic, petrol prices, politics and the cost of basically existing, then someone says something ridiculous and the mood changes.
Barnes wants "Just Jokes" to provide that breather.
“We often think we can’t talk about things or touch on certain subjects, but at the end of the day it’s just jokes.”
There is a difference between ignoring serious issues and allowing yourself to laugh for a moment. Comedy does not have to fix the problem to give people some relief from thinking about it.
Take yourself a little less seriously
Barnes says his earlier shows were partly about proving that he was funny.
“The other shows I kind of wanted to prove to others I’m funny,” he says. “But this show reminds people that they need to take themselves less seriously and have more fun.”
That shift is important to him.
"Just Jokes" is less about proving a point and more about giving people permission to switch off for a couple of hours.
Barnes describes the experience as “a holiday of a time”.
“Hol-e-day”. A “hol” is a bum. So, essentially, Barnes is promising audiences a bum day.
Not quite the holiday brochure you were expecting.
It is also a neat little example of what Barnes has been talking about all along: taking something ordinary, twisting it slightly and trusting the audience to come along for the ride.
South Africans already do this instinctively. We tease the people we love, turn embarrassing moments into stories and use humour to make even the most irritating parts of daily life slightly more bearable.
"Just Jokes" is not promising to fix the news, the economy or the pressures of everyday life. It is offering two hours in which those things can be set aside and taken a little less seriously.
For Barnes, the route to that lighter space runs through the things South Africans already understand: language, culture, shared references and the ability to laugh at ourselves.
There is value in that. Sometimes humour does not need to solve anything. It simply gives us a moment to step back from the seriousness of it all, find something to laugh about and remember that life can still be enjoyed.
bernelee.vollmer@nationalmg.co.za