ARTicles vol. 6 i.3b: Fighting Words

Sticks and stones break bones, but words hurt most. Through words, satire can topple regimes. Satire bubbles up from anger. Disguised as comedy, satire uses laughter as a weapon. Satirists candy coat their barbs in the hopes of effecting change. Although a symptom of rage, satire remains humorous. Finding the balance between jokes and venom, satire treads a thin line. Dip too far in one direction and the satire fails. Maintaining this equilibrium can prove difficult because satire takes serious problems for its subjects.

Pieter-Dirk Uys is an angry South African with a serious agenda. As a privileged white Afrikaner, he wondered why apartheid was accepted. He got angrier and angrier until he just had to laugh. In his memoir, Elections and Erections, Uys writes of his mission: “[I]t became my aim in life to make [the government] so angry with humour, to drive them so crazy with laughter, that they had heart attacks and died…Fighting…political madness with humour has been my way of life since the 1970s. For Uys, nothing is funnier or sadder than the absurdities of his country: “The democratic government for which I voted is doing me proud. Never a dull moment … Careless government has turned South Africa into my favourite funny fair!”

To point out absurdities, Uys used a common tool of satirists. He created an outlandish character. Evita Bezuidenhout, his alter ego, is the ambassadress to the fantasy nation of Bapetikosweti. Much to Uys s surprise, South Africa embraced a drag queen as its most famous white woman. Uys repeats over and over that performing Evita allowed him more freedom than he could have imagined. When he performed as himself, some people found it difficult to separate the performer from the character. Uys, staunchly progressive, and Evita, comically conservative, must not be confused. So he invented a persona as far removed from his own Puckish self as possible. With her loud outfits, gaudy jewelry, bright lipstick, and carefully coiffed black wig, Evita looks every inch a grande dame. Evita makes suggestions like how to bring back apartheid through Jim Crow shenanigans. Coming from Evita these suggestions seem at first sight laughable, on second, chillingly accurate.

To write satire, the satirist must have a yardstick by which to judge his society. In every satire there exists an implicit ideal that lies within reach. The satirist uses his wit to nudge his audience towards this goal. To do so, the satirist identifies the chief obstacles that keep society from progressing. He then proceeds to reduce these obstacles to the absurd, hoping to laugh them into oblivion.

Uys used satire to push his country towards democracy. He wanted to live in a country in which everyone had equal rights, so he directed all his energy towards fighting apartheid. Uys used Evita to get his message across. Evitas naive promotion of apartheid made democracy seem the only sane choice.

Though Uys thought he might retire Evita after apartheid fell, the new democracy quickly provided him with fresh material: a President who denied that HIV leads to AIDS and his sidekick, the Minister of Health, who thinks sick people should find the solution themselves. So Uys brought Evita out of her box again, and Uys set off, a new target in sight. Traveling to schools in South Africa to educate students on AIDS prevention, Uys uses humor to reach young people at first dismissive of AIDS presentations. Having proved that satire can impact governments, Uys sets out to see what it can do against a virus. Perhaps laughter is the best medicine.

Sarah Ollove is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

Articles issue as 6_3