“Laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears” (Morrison, 113)
“Humour is paradoxically bound up with social suffering in Africa” (Obadare, 5)
In this paper, I reflect on three case studies which interlace death and laughter, through the use of popular music and dance to make commentary on three tragic moments in contemporary histories in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya. Drawing on Mikhail Bakthin’s work on the grotesque and the carnivalesque; and Achille Mbembe’s work on satirical laughter as a mode of engaging with state power, and James Scott’s notion of public transcripts, I am interested in the possibilities and limits of the critiques embodied by these humorous meditations on incidents of brutality and death. I am also interested in the ambivalent appeal of these musical tracks and dance moves as aesthetically pleasing, and in some instances, erotic; yet at the same time, offering sharp critiques of state complicity in bloodshed. I suggest that these comic texts respond to the respective public transcripts staged by Nigeria’s First Lady, the Kenyan police and South Africa’s ruling party in three ways: by remixing these public transcripts of political lip-service to unmask power’s pretensions; by deploying familiarity – both in the sense of intimate knowledge and in the sense of dethroning power from its haughty pretensions—; and through intertextual citations from a shared public memory.