Stand-up comedians from South Africa

A South African comic can change language inside a sentence and lose nobody. Trevor Noah uses English, Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Southern Sotho and Tswana, and made the arrangement itself into material, starting from the fact that his parents' relationship was illegal at the time he was born. Skhumbuzo Hlophe works in English, Zulu and Sotho, Loyiso Gola in English and Xhosa, and the room does its own sorting.

Satire here is older than the clubs. Pieter-Dirk Uys was performing one-man revues against government racial policy while those laws were still in force, and his Evita Bezuidenhout, an Afrikaner socialite who appointed herself ambassadress of an invented homeland, said in a wig what nobody was saying under their own name. Adapt or Dye ran 280 performances at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg from 1981, and much of his work was never censored, which says something about how the authorities read a man in a dress. After 1994 he took the same character into schools to talk about HIV.

The club circuit came afterwards, once apartheid censorship ended and the 1996 constitution guaranteed expression. Parker's Comedy and Jive opened in Johannesburg and the Cape Town Comedy Club on the Cape Town waterfront, and a first stand-up generation came up around them, Barry Hilton, David Kau and John Vlismas among them.

What grew on that base is several circuits rather than one. Schalk Bezuidenhout plays in Afrikaans to Afrikaans audiences and Afrikaans arts festivals, and has collected prizes from Afrikaans cultural bodies. Riaad Moosa, who grew up in Grassy Park, qualified as a doctor in Cape Town before comedy and works clean, from a Muslim and Indian South African position, on stereotype and racism. Conrad Koch does it through foam: Chester Missing, a puppet political commentator whose attacks on the singer Steve Hofmeyr in 2014 brought a court action that Hofmeyr lost.