To laugh or cry

TREVOR NOAH, the breakout star of South African comedy, does a cracking impression of a cheerily drunk Nelson Mandela. During a recent show in Johannesburg, his jokes about power outages, electric fences and a giggling, eye-rolling President Jacob Zuma (“he sounds like he’s downloading his speech as he’s reading it”, he tweeted recently) went down a storm with the crowd. Their whooping, Mr Noah joked, was unnerving for a black man because of its similarity to a police siren.

Mr Noah, 31, who was raised in Soweto, will next month take over from Jon Stewart as host of “The Daily Show”, an American satirical news programme. His new job will inevitably mean far fewer parodies involving obscure South African accents, but his countrymen will still find other sources of comic relief.

These are boom times for South African humour, with a growing number of young, talented comedians finding fresh audiences. New comedy clubs have opened, and stand-up artists (so much nicer than the stick-up variety) pack venues at casinos.

Many of the jokes focus on politics and race relations, skewering stubborn stereotypes and the otherwise unfunny legacy of apartheid. Mr Noah, who is of mixed race, jokes that he was “born a crime” and couldn’t legally walk with his parents. His father would stay on the other side of the road, and “wave at me from afar like a creepy paedophile.” His mother would walk with him, but if the police showed up, “she’d have to let go of me and drop me and pretend I wasn’t hers ... I felt like I was a bag of weed.”

Mr Noah has described himself as a “connoisseur of racism”, hailing from a country where bigotry is “export quality”. His willingness to talk about what couldn’t be discussed in past decades has attracted in particular the emerging black middle class.

Sometimes the South African news is absurd enough to need little embellishment. Few stand-up jokes are funnier than the government’s explanation for why it used taxpayers’ money to build a swimming pool at Mr Zuma’s private home: that it is a handy reservoir in case his house catches fire. Nor could many top the explanation for taxpayers funding an enclosure for Mr Zuma’s cattle: that it is “strategically located”. Some of the humourists on the public payroll could make a good living on stage.