This article first appeared in THE SUNDAY INDEPENDENT

20th April 2008

View online here

City living isn’t easy; and sometimes, after yet another day of battling with the perils of the urban jungle, even the most ardent aesthete-intellectual can be so tangled in a knot of tension that the last thing he or she feels like is an intense engagement with ethical or philosophical problems. As stress levels continue to rise (along with interest rates), “serious theatre” types like yours truly find it increasingly difficult to achieve transcendence, or catharsis, or jouissance, or whatever it is that we expect “serious theatre” to offer. So it’s good just to sit back and enjoy some art lite – to laugh at ourselves, at others like us and, more often than not, at those who are entirely unlike us.

I was reminded of this when, feeling tired and grumpy and utterly without enthusiasm for an evening show, I was forced to cheer up by that irascibly good-natured and fun-loving guy, Stuart Taylor.

Taylor has brought his “Techni-coloured” comedy show back to Johannesburg after repeat runs in Cape Town and elsewhere over the last couple of years. Even though he is well-known to TV viewers across the country as one of the adventurers on Going Nowhere Slowly, the South African comedy scene is still fairly regionalised and Taylor has yet to establish a loyal following in Gauteng. This is not helped by the fact that, as he joked to a small crowd a few nights after opening, the good folk at Computicket don’t seem to know that he is performing at the moment.

Nevertheless, given the enthusiastic responses of my fellow audience-members, word is sure to spread.

As the title of the show indicates, much of Taylor’s material is linked to his “identity crisis” as a coloured person, but he resists the stereotyping associated with “coloured humour”. This is made explicit from the start, as he appears onstage in the regalia of a Kaapse klops, only to strip it all off and don a dapper evening jacket with techni-coloured lining. It doesn’t, of course, mean that he’s averse to abusing the odd ethnic generalisation – such as when, describing how he is enthralled by the dashboard displays of luxury vehicles or the chrome hubcaps of old jalopies, he blames his Khoisan heritage: “We coloured people can’t help it. We’re just intrigued by shiny kak. Why do you think we fell for all those trinkets Van Riebeeck brought?” 

The show’s satirical scope is broad, ranging from the unenviable task of the highly paid Carlos Parreira (“give him the money, he’ll be unemployable after 2010”) to TV show 7de Laan (which invokes Taylor’s ire for suggesting that “white Afrikaans girls in their twenties don’t pomp” and that “only coloured girls have children out of wedlock”).

Some of his material is dated: it hardly seems funny to claim that “Graham Smith hasn’t scored anything decent since Minki van der Westhuizen” when the national cricket captain is one of many Proteas who have enjoyed success with the bat in the recent past.

On the whole, however, Taylor’s quirky observations are comically astute. After a lengthy paean to the joys of Verimark products, he envisions a new product that will remove rolls of fat at the back of the neck – and who better to endorse this revolutionary invention than Jacob Zuma himself? After all, as Taylor points out, the ANC president often looks like he’s “baking bread back there” and struggles to look skywards because “he can’t move his head back more than 30°!”

Taylor also lampoons himself, applying a disarming (albeit exaggerated) honesty to mocking descriptions of his boyhood and teenage self. He re-enacts his early attempts to impress his mom and dad with magic tricks, including an impersonation of David Copperfield – with a hairdryer to create the dramatic wind effect and a “lovely assistant” in the form of the longsuffering Rocky the Racoon. Similarly, Taylor gets plenty of mileage out of his awkardness as a shy adolescent who couldn’t dance and was ignored by all the girls.

As is the case with most comedians, Taylor has plenty to say about the battle of the sexes. He ingratiated himself with some of the women in the crowd by calling for photographs of “real women” on the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine, before descending into hyperbole: “I want a fat, greasy, pimply, disgusting woman on fashion magazine covers ... yes, I want Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma on the front of Cosmo!” Then it was the turn of the married men, who were offered a raft of advice from his “Learner’s Manual” for getting a husband’s licence.

Taylor has an easy rapport with his audience, and is actually funniest when he deviates from the material that he has written and rehearsed. But he can be forgiven for sticking to the script; between Telkom and Eskom, the ANC and the K-53, there’s just so much in South Africa today that our comedians are obliged to rip off.