ZA News and the difference between satire and complaint

Is ZA News much needed political satire, or more tired fuel already smouldering fires?

ZA News, based on the UK’s Spitting Image from years back, is a new internet-only TV show that uses the cartoon images created by cartoonist Zapiro to inspire a bunch of beautifully built puppets of South Africa’s politicians and public figures. The debut episode has likenesses of Tim Modise, Julius Malema, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Jacob Zuma, to name a few bobbing around and waving their eerily realistic hands about as they allow us to laugh at the goings-on in the upper echelons of politics.

Or so the theory goes.

What’s good about the show is firstly that it exists. In a country with so much to satirise, there is precious little of the stuff to go around. And Zapiro is certainly as good a place to start as any being as he has been at the centre of questions about media freedom in the past year perhaps more than anyone else. The puppets are a wonder to behold, and the show is well-produced and crafted. Also the notion of an “internet-only” show is novel, if not unique, with the folks over at Zoopy producing their own far more serious news show on a daily basis.

That said, I found the content to be a lazy amalgam of over-used jokes and obvious caricatures of people too easy to poke fun at. The Desmond Tutu schtick makes no advance over what Pieter-Dirk Uys has been doing for 20 years, and the boo-oo-ring segment with Julius Malema adds absolutely nothing to the national debate about what this man means to the country, and to our future.

Satire in order to work needs to not only mirror real life, but add a twist which makes one think differently. It needs to show up those it shows off, otherwise it’s mere mimicry. That may be amusing for a few minutes but is also instantly tiresome. I lost interest in the show after less than a minute for this reason.

We are a nation inexperienced in satire, so perhaps this can be forgiven, but the worst parts of our style of humour are also the worst parts of our styles of debate. Rather than take issue with the issues, we tend to mock. Rather than deepen our understanding, we go for the cheap laughs.

It’s early days — and episode 1, so perhaps I am being too harsh. But I fear the pandering to the lowest common denominator, the kind of person who laughs at Leon Schuster because he puts shoe polish on his face and sells biryani. South Africans have a bad habit of imbuing this kind of asinine garbage with the moniker of “comedy”. And comedy it may well be, but of the lowest, stupidest order.

What we need is really smart satire, biting, dangerous, spiteful stuff that walks so close to cruelty it makes you cringe. That’s what the British do so well, and that’s what we need more of. I sometimes read articles on Hayibo that come close.

May the people writing ZA News get braver and smarter. Because we do need this stuff, but we also need it to be better.