Rod Mackenzie

The Pope and Julius Malema are on the same stage in front of a huge crowd. The Pope leans towards Julius and says, “Do you know that with one little wave of my hand I can make every person in this crowd go wild with joy? This joy will not be a momentary display, like that of your followers, but go deep into their hearts and they’ll forever speak of this day and rejoice!”

Julius replied, “I seriously doubt that. With one little wave of your hand? Show me.”

So the Pope slapped him.

Agh, I wish I could claim authorship for the above crack but I can’t. It’s been doing the email rounds. But it got me thinking about the different reactions to jokes, who to tell various jokes, and who to most definitely not tell those jokes, “racial”, “ethnic”, “religiously improper” or otherwise. Would the politically correct turn their noses at the above quip? I don’t know as I am not good at being politically correct; to me a spade is a spade and I prefer honesty. The joke itself has nothing to do with honesty or dishonesty; the listener’s reaction to the joke is perhaps honest, and certainly telling. Incidentally, I cannot write dishonestly. In writing my memoir about living in China (Cracking China, due out in early 2010) and now the sequel, I have discovered I cannot be dishonest; it completely stifles my creativity. In other words, if I decide to add a little bit to an actual humorous event that occurred in China, my inspiration goes out the window. In fact, I wouldn’t have even got this far in this blog if I had pretended ownership of the above joke. Hope that’s food for thought.

Certainly some people would be offended by the above joke (hint: they are just maybe members of the ANCYL). I am sure they would be quick to type “just another racist” or whatever in the commentary. What I like about humour is that it helps us not to take ourselves too seriously. Laughter is certainly the best medicine. Here’s another joke, and it is apparently a real incident that happened to this very witty, burly Englishman, Chris, that I knew in Jo’burg. Chris walked into a pub in East End, London, which was run by black bartenders and he ordered a beer. The bartender looked suspiciously at his white face and got the beer. On returning, he asked, “Are you racist?” “Of course not,” Chris cried, looking around the pub that had no white people in it. “Well, we are, so finish that beer and sod off.”

I burst out laughing when I heard that last line. It was also the way Chris told the joke with that cynical, wicked grin of his.

In turn I told the joke to a white South African in a pub on Witkoppen Road a few days later. His face froze on the punch line and his nose wrinkled. “That’s not funny,” he said. I was most surprised. But it got me to thinking. Jokes can really be tests for what I would like to call people’s RCQ’s (Racist Quotients, as there is already a Readiness Quotient). It also tells you if they take themselves and their identities too seriously or are prepared to have a good laugh in an open-minded way. Whenever I told the anecdote to Britons, I noticed they laughed. Not bent over and slapping their thighs, but they laughed. A typical retort was, “Well at least the bartender was honest.”

When the last days of apartheid were starting to come to an end I was teaching in a black township school, Langa High, just outside Cape Town. Virtually all the teachers were Xhosa. One bloke, a very witty chap, Mamatu, told me the good news and the bad news. “The bad news, Rod? The whites are going to have to move into the townships as the Group Areas Act is going to be abolished. The good news? All your stolen TV sets and music centres will be waiting for you in the townships. Don’t you worry about that.” The whole group standing in the circle, including me, the only whitey, cackled with glee and did the Xhosa thing whenever there was a good chirp and shook one another’s hands. Correct me if it is not a Xhosa thing, maybe it was a Langa thing, but I loved that moment, the sense of community, ubuntu: getting over our hidebound identities. I can assure you old Du Toit, the white deputy principal at Langa High, who was most verkrampt, would not have liked that joke very much. Ja, jokes and how we handle them can tell us a lot about ourselves. So how’s your RCQ when you read jokes like this?