This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

25th April 2009

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We tend to think of the ancient Greeks as a serious bunch: bearded men in flowing robes engaged in earnest conversation about life, the universe and everything. This, certainly, is the image bequeathed to us by Italian Renaissance painters – Plato and Aristotle discussing philosophy at the Athenian Academy and so on.

But life in Athens had another side. The Greeks, like the Romans after them, preferred being entertained. In the theatre, comedies were written and staged more often than tragedies. While tragic tales of the suffering of noble individuals were depicted for moral or religious edification, the experiences of everyday citizens were portrayed comically. Moreover, commentary on current events was the terrain of comedy rather than tragedy.

So the Greeks took their humour very seriously indeed; or, to put it another way, they understood the value of addressing serious matters through humour. Indeed, ancient Greece saw the development of a third form of theatre – a hybrid of comedy and tragedy – known as “satyr” drama (so named because the plays commonly included a chorus of satyrs, the bawdy mythical beasts that were half-man and half-goat).

With a bit of imagination, you can discern the etymology of the word “satire”: a genre that combines wit and burlesque to mount an attack on someone or something through laughter.

Perhaps the best-known of the comic Greek playwrights was Aristophanes. In his satire The Frogs, Dionysus (a debauched hedonist of a god who was worshipped at a festival dominated by the performance of tragedies) becomes the chief source of ironic comedy in the play. Descending to the underworld, Dionysus arbitrates a dispute between the dead tragedians Aeschylus and Euripides as to which is the better artist.

After they have both had their plays assessed (and mocked), these two are forced to make a self-justifying declaration: when can a poet claim admiration? “If his art is true, and his counsel sound, and he brings help to the nation by making men better in some respect” is Euripides’s response; Aeschylus affirms that “Those poets have all been of practical use who have been supreme in their art.”

Aristophanes believed that in order to be “true” and “practical”, poets – a term the Greeks used to refer to writers and thespians alike – had to be controversial and challenging, and alert to political and social issues. The chorus in The Frogs frequently criticises “the robber of poets, the mere politician, who spites us with pitiful fines because we have made him suitably absurd”.

Aristophanes as poet-playwright occupied a privileged position: he was able to subvert authority and transgress social or political taboos. One of the aims of comedy, as the Greeks understood it, was opposition to conformity. Satire was part of their democracy.

Two thousand years later, in late-Medieval and early-Renaissance Europe, this freedom to criticise was granted to few, but there was at least one figure allowed to express disparagement: the court jester, whose irreverence was tolerated in the name of entertainment. Shakespeare’s plays contain various “all-licensed” fools who offer powerful commentaries on the monarchs they serve. The fool – wordsmith, entertainer, commentator – is a kind of poet-figure.

In southern Africa, the imbongi, or praise singer, traditionally fulfilled a similar function. The imbongi, as poet laureate, was not just a servile toady but had the prerogative to offer advice, issue warnings or even criticise the chief being praised.

Admittedly, none of these aspects were present amongst the litany of praises bestowed on Jacob Zuma before he spoke at the ANC’s “Siyanqoba” rally last weekend – not just by the designated imbongi, but by every one of those who took the microphone during a protracted display of bravado at Coca-Cola Park.

The monovocal voice of the ANC membership’s collective support for Zuma is not, of course, simply a manifestation of the kind of loyalty that is to be expected prior to elections. It has, unfortunately, become a truism that the Mbeki era entrenched a culture of deference (of “towing the party line”) within the ANC and therefore within government. Polokwane may have been the culmination of a growing resistance to the cult of “the big man”, but it resulted in little more than the creation of another “big man” in whose name all dissent is quashed.

If criticism from within the party is not tolerated, it hardly seems surprising that criticism from without – by civil society, by opposition politicians, by public intellectuals, by journalists, by artists – is invariably tagged as counter-revolutionary, reactionary or even racist.

The form of criticism received with the most vitriol, however, is often that which employs sardonic humour in making its point. It is evident from the number of people accused of defaming Jacob Zuma that those in power don’t like satire.

This, presumably, is what prompted the producers of Special Assignment to pose some awkward questions: “Are we too reverential of our politicians? Is a slow chilling effect taking hold of political humour in South Africa? Is political correctness leading to an erosion of free speech? What risks do political satirists run by ridiculing powerful figures?”

Such were the topics touted in the promotional material for the show before the SABC decided to cancel it, at short notice, in the week before the election. Unless the powers-that-be of Auckland Park reverse the decision that they took – at their legal team’s urging, we are led to believe – to can the episode, we may never know exactly what conclusions were reached by the Special Assignment team. But the mere fact of the cancellation provides fairly clear answers to their questions.

It may simply have been an overly cautious move on the SABC’s part to avoid litigation. The episode did, after all, contain excerpts from the pilot of Z News, a satirical puppet show (yet to find a broadcaster, although the SABC commissioned the pilot) based on the British series Spitting Image and co-produced by political cartoonist Zapiro. Given that Zapiro, under his formal appellation as Jonathan Shapiro, is facing two lawsuits indicating Zuma’s new courtroom role as plaintiff, the SABC ostensibly had grounds to fear similar legal action against Special Assignment.

It does not, however, require the neurosis of a conspiracy theorist to conjecture that the ever-problematic “public broadcaster” deemed it politically imprudent to air a show that would reflect poorly on the ruling party in the days leading up to an election. If this is the case, the cancellation represents nothing less than the clumsy action of self-appointed censors.

Shapiro condemns the “spineless bosses” at the SABC who are “frantically trying to stay in favour with the ANC faction in power”, but despite his outrage he identifies the “wonderful irony” of a boardroom situation in which SABC lawyers were threatening to sue an SABC programme for including footage from a pilot show commissioned by the SABC. “It’s the kind of absurdity that could only be found in such a Kafkaesque organisation,” he notes – but adds that, based on his experience of pitching Z News to e-tv, there are similar “issues of control” at the free-to-air alternative.

Author and journalist Lauren Beukes, part of the Z News writing team, believes that the SABC’s decision hails “a new golden age of 80s-style political censorship”. Such descriptions sting, because nothing upsets members of the present government more than when they are likened to their apartheid forebears.

Someone who is well-placed to make such comparisons is theatre satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys, who was interviewed for the cancelled Special Assignment programme. Uys was a prominent lampooner of the National Party but, since the advent of democracy, he has trained his sights on targets in the ANC.

When asked about the kind of work that satirists such as Zapiro and he produce, Uys insists that a careful balance must be maintained: “It’s 49% anger and 51% laughter. My characters have their anchor in anger, and largely anger at government.”

Not all of those within the ruling party return the antagonism – ANC spokesperson Jessie Duarte, who was also due to appear on Special Assignment, is often tasked with explaining moderately what her colleagues have expressed hysterically – but the knee-jerk response of both party and state to satirists’ anger-in-laughter is typically righteous indignation.

Government is not alone in being hypersensitive. Applying the imbongi paradigm, one might say that corporate “chiefs” have also attempted to punish those who choose not to sing praise songs.

A few years ago, SAB Miller took iconoclastic entrepreneur Justin Nurse to court over a T-shirt that appropriated the logo of Black Label beer in order to make a provocative socio-economic statement: “Black Labour, White Guilt”. The case went all the way to the Constitutional Court, where it was found in Nurse’s favour.

Arguably, if the brewery had won, whatever brand consolidation it achieved would have been undermined by a temporary decline in public sympathy for the company. Those who decried SAB’s litigious approach maintained that the T-shirt was not actually targeting the company or its product.

Shapiro points out that SAB was an indirect or “secondary” object of satire (insofar as it is one of the big South African corporations that, the T-shirt implied, profited from cheap labour) but admits that he is often surprised by the “breathtakingly weird” responses his own work elicits.

When members of a society – whether corporations or politicians or private citizens – are too quick to take offence, it often results in a misunderstanding of what is actually being satirised.

Curiously, Zapiro’s cartoon depicting Lady Justice (previously raped by Zuma and his cohort in the image that resulted in the second lawsuit against Shapiro) being crucified on a cross while the NPA’s Willie Hofmeyr and Mokotedi Mpshe washed their hands under Zuma’s shower-head, raised the ire not of the “Zuma-ites” but of certain members of the Christian community.

Shapiro makes it clear that he is “unconcerned” about religious sensitivities because he believes religion is too often “treated with kid gloves”. Nevertheless, the cartoon (published over Easter) was clearly not intended to offend Christians, even if it appropriated a Christian symbol. Yet it elicited some religiose complaints.

The SABC may have a crystal ball that facilitates pre-emptive decisions such as the Special Assignment cancellation, but for the most part it is difficult to predict public responses to satirical phenomena. Some satirists simply escape censure.

No-one seemed to mind Mike van Graan’s plays Bafana Republic or Mirror, Mirror – the latter a UCT student production with a cast including the daughter of a cabinet member – as much as some have minded Uys’s recent shows. Likewise, it’s fair to say that there are a number of cartoonists who have produced images that are as confrontational as Zapiro’s, but who have not been sued.

Brett Murray’s recent exhibition at the Goodman Gallery, “Crocodile Tears”, derided both Mbeki and Zuma but did not result in Murray receiving a lawyer’s letter. The extremely funny and very astute writers who produce satirical news website www.hayibo.com have outraged many readers but have, thus far, stayed out of court.

Often, the extent of the offence taken is predicated on the medium of satire. TV programmes, cartoons in newspapers and even theatre shows attract more attention than art installations and “literary” pieces. Perhaps artists and wordsmiths who veil their messages in heavy irony or more obscure critiques are considered less of a threat. Or perhaps these latter-day jesters, working in media that consumers expect to be “daring” or “experimental”, are simply given more slack.

The allusion by Aristophanes in The Frogs to “fines” imposed on poets by politicians who have been exposed as “absurd” suggests that satirists have always been threatened with punitive measures by those in power. But Shapiro is adamant that he “won’t be intimidated” by the lawsuits against him. Zuma, he believes, “doesn’t fully comprehend aspects of satire such as hyperbole and the hypothetical. Exaggeration is a satirist’s tool, used to pose ‘What if ...?’ questions.”

In twenty-first century South Africa, it is vital that satire is allowed to flourish. If not, we run the risk of making Ambrose Pierce’s devilish assertion about satire in America true of our own society: “In this country satire never had more than a sickly and uncertain existence, for the soul of it is wit, wherein we are dolefully deficient ... although we are ‘endowed by our Creator’ with abundant vice and folly, it is not generally known that these are reprehensible qualities, wherefore the satirist is popularly regarded as a sour-spirited knave, and his every victim’s outcry for codefendants evokes a national assent.”