How South Africa’s diverse comic traditions emerged from its acrimonious racial and cultural debates

Sometimes all you can do is laugh. From the raucous stages of Cape Town to the backroom watering holes of Sophiatown, Inevitable Satirists offers a groundbreaking look at the historical roots of South Africa’s comic tradition. It follows the intertwined careers of a multiracial, multilingual cohort of early- to mid-twentieth-century male humorists as they worked against a backdrop of mounting political repression. Making use of an eclectic array of Zulu, Afrikaans, and English sources, Robin K. Crigler shows how humor became central to drawing, contesting, and redrawing social boundaries in South Africa in ways that continue to powerfully influence the present. He shows how key figures like Stephen Black, R. R. R. and H. I. E. Dhlomo, Herman Charles Bosman, and Casey Motsisi used their humor to advance unique and contradictory visions of where South Africa was—and where it needed to go. Ultimately, Crigler argues, their efforts aided the construction of an establishment-friendly, male-gendered “mainstream” comic framework that partially transcended racial and ethnic lines while also feeding subversive currents of critique and protest that still reverberate today.