There is a question that is being discussed among President Mnangagwa’s legion of ardent supporters and loyalists; should the President abandon humour as a device for engaging his audience? Not everyone agrees with this sentiment.
The opposite group feels those that subscribe to this thinking are yielding to the whims of an uptight and tense clique of critics who will attack the President regardless of what he does or says. Even if he were to declare that God is good, this pack of detractors will find fault in it.
Therefore, this group of supporters doesn’t feel that it is right for President Mnangagwa to change his style of engaging just because some deliberately miss the essence of his jokes.
President Mnangagwa has been criticised for making a joke about vegetables. This was a joke replete with a serious message. But was he wrong? This writer does not believe that there was anything controversial about that joke. In fact, there was a very serious health message to the jocular delivery. Having heard and seen what’s trending about beef, today many are considering the options he was suggesting.
This is also in line with the worldwide dietary drift towards cutting down on the consumption of red meat. This writer has been on once a week red meat diet for the past seven years.
So in that vegetables and potato joke there was an underlying serious dietary message. Then there was the joke on hygiene enforcers/policemen which also had an underlying serious message about the need to exercise good domestic hygiene in order to get rid of disease-carrying domestic pests. If you go back a little bit one would find that President Mnangagwa employs levity as a device to engage his audience and sometimes to broach a difficult subject such as death. Levity is defined as the treatment of a serious matter with humour or lack of due respect.
It is a beautiful device. Sometimes he uses dark humour to drive a point home or even to debunk a hitherto taboo subject. Some define “dark humour” as a form of humour involving a twist or joke that is sometimes seen as offensive, harsh or even horrid. Yet the joke is still funny to those that get it.
Probably the most apt definition is the one that says dark humour is a more or less explicit and sacrilegious representation of humour that has its aim of making fun of situations usually regarded as tragic such as death, sickness or depression.
But some people take themselves too serious for nothing to the extent that they choose pettiness on the outside but their insides are very ugly. They are a pretentious and sanctimonious lot whose favourite pastime are dissecting jokes instead of laughing. Sad gits. So we have the same activists pushing very hard for freedom of speech on one hand and on another hand trying to curtail one of the artistic expressions of that freedom; humour.
Repressing laughter is dehumanising the human race. Laughter is one thing that separates us from animals in that most animals do all what human beings do except to laugh. Not even a hyena. It just makes a laughing sound but that is not a laugh. So those who want to repress the President’s humour, are you not trying to dehumanise him? If we followed your thinking, where will this end?
This will turn the whole world into a pensive order of monastic uptight monks. Thinkers like Descartes posited that laughter accompanies three of the six basic human emotions of wonder, love, (mild) hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. Should we then advocate for a wooden and scripted President with no sense of humour?
There is internal turmoil and psychological conflict within some in the
in that vegetables and potato joke there was an underlying serious dietary message. Then there was the joke on hygiene enforcers/policemen which also had an underlying serious message about the need to exercise good domestic hygiene in order to get rid of disease-carrying domestic pests. If you go back a little bit one would find that President Mnangagwa employs levity as a device to engage his audience and sometimes to broach a difficult subject such as death. Levity is defined as the treatment of a serious matter with humour or lack of due respe
