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Identity and Humour:Negotiating the Notion of Pleasure in South African Situation
Comedy
Introduction
Humour has been conceptualised as a communication process where the building of a
communication model with a sender, message and receiver can transfer the information in the
message in such a way that the message generates laughter (Berger,1980:151). The creation of
laughter is directly involved with an understanding related to the class and cultural position or
gender of the audience who negotiates its own meaning from that event.
This paper discusses how the identity of various groups of women from multicultural backgrounds
emerged through laughter patterns in their reception of two locally produced South African
situation comedies, Suburban Bliss (SB) and Going Up III (GU III). The study began after the
1994 democratic election in South Africa. The methodology for the research included the analysis
of answers from a total of thirteen focus groups after viewing SB (nine groups)and GU III (four
groups) plus interviews with the production teams responsible for the sitcoms. In this research an
ethnographic discourse analysis traces discussions among Zulu, Hindu and Afrikaans and
English-speaking women (Hammersley & Atkinson,1993:126). The extent to which laughter was
stimulated by each sitcom was recorded on a laughter table (Sample from SB, Appendix ). Power
relationships in the family of the participants are examined and the women’s social position in
South African society interpreted according to those values now inherent in the new Constitution
in the Bill of Rights (1996, Section 16, 1b & 1c ) of South Africa. The interviews were not
intended to be representative of the entire South African society but to serve as a benchmark for
the women’s perception of their situation since the democratic election of 1994. In the meeting
between the focus groups and the text, another discourse emerged, created by the groups’ differing
cultural, education and institutional practices.
The new political order in South Africa has already been established by the electorate so the
characters in the television texts are depicted in the process of cultural integration. Both
production teams have attempted to encode certain cultural and ideological information into the
texts, not necessarily as a conscious process, but the sitcom genre becomes an agreed code to link
the expectations of the producer and the audience (Tomaselli and van Zyl,1992:398). How
humour is constituted in the creation of new programmes in South Africa, and how the notion of
pleasure is found in the comprehension of humour by the focus groups is explored.
Suburban Bliss (SB) utilises humour to narrate the trials and tribulations of one black and one
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Convention