A Country Laughing at Itself: Malawian Humour in the Digital Age

Abstract

The Ivorian writer, Gérard AkéLoba, once stated that Africans laugh when they are happy, angry or unlucky. This hints at the psychological role of laughter in African contexts. This paper focuses specifically on Malawian humour with the aim of appreciating how Malawians portray themselves in everyday contemporary jokes. Our main focus is on what we term contemporary Malawian humour in the digital age, by which we refer to humour such as comic videos and internet memes whose production and circulation has been aided by technology. More specifically, our study draws on humour that Malawians share through social media and other forms of digital circulation. Drawing on insights from debates on Malawian humour initiated by Steve Chimombo and Enoch Timpuza-Mvula as well as on the discourse on humour and self-esteem especially as espoused by Stefan Stieger, Anton Kormann and Christoph Burger, among others, we observe that Malawian humour is often self-directed. While we appreciate that making fun of oneself may be one way of coping with whatever adversaries one is facing, we argue that these self-derogatory comments tend to demean, devalue and underrate anything Malawian. As such, what is perpetuated in the long run is an inferiority complex which reiterates colonial structures of meaning.

Keywords:

• humour
• jokes
• memes
• self-denigration
• digital media
• Malawi

ORCID

Ken Junior Lipenga http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8592-8999

Notes

1 We would like to acknowledge that most of the memes in circulation in Malawi at the moment are not necessarily created by Malawians. Indeed, most of these memes can be found in other countries and have just been reformulated to suit a Malawian context and audience. Additionally, the memes we analyse in this paper went viral on Whatsapp especially in 2017 and have no clear mark of authorship.

2 It should be noted, however, that ‘zachizungu’ can be an expression either of veneration or of repulsion’ (Molande 311).