Stand-up comedians from Zimbabwe

Comedy from Zimbabwe has travelled from records to phone screens. Wrex Tarr, born in 1934 in Southern Rhodesia, was a news reader for the Rhodesian Broadcasting Corporation before he became a popular comedian, and his best-known records were Futi Chilapalapa and Cream of Chilapalapa. Chilapalapa is the Zimbabwean variety of Fanagalo, a lingua franca based mainly on Zulu, and it carries Shona influence. After the country became Zimbabwe in 1980, Tarr represented it in archery at the 1988 Olympics. He later settled in South Africa and died in East London in 2006, while entertaining at a bowls tournament.

The performers who came after built their audiences online. Madam Boss grew up in Madziva village, where she started out as a maid, and released a gospel album before comedy skits in which she played a maid circulated on social media; in 2021 she won the African Social Star award at the E! People's Choice Awards. Samantha Kureya took her stage name, Gonyeti, from her first skit, after a Shona slang term for a type of large truck. In 2015 she joined the online comedy channel PO Box TV, later renamed Bustop TV, where the sketch show Drama Queens brought her together with Madam Boss and other performers, and in 2017 she became the first woman nominated for Outstanding Comedian at the National Arts Merit Awards.

Kureya is known for political satire. In February 2019 she and a fellow cast member were arrested and fined for wearing police uniforms in a comedy video made in 2016, and in August 2019 she was abducted by masked, armed men who identified themselves as police officers. The same year the Southern Africa Human Rights Defender Network gave her its Human Rights Defender of the Year award. English, Shona and Ndebele are the most common of Zimbabwe's 16 official languages; the sources used here do not say which of them each comic performs in, although both Gonyeti and Chilapalapa bring Shona into the picture.