Reading Mary Douglas’s thoughts on African comedy in the context of ‘Jokes’ immediately made me think of the Wakaliwood comedies, which gained notoriety in the mid-2010s with the release of ‘Who Killed Captain Alex?’. A Ugandan film made for a measly 200 dollars, it’s a pure passion project for Nabwana IGG, who has made many other zero-budget flicks in his own spare time. ‘Crazy World’ and ‘Bad Black’ are just as funny and creatively made, even if not as infamous as ‘Captain Alex’. Simply made for fun, the relative success of the film (8 million views on YouTube) was a shock to everyone involved.
Yet it’s the comedy of these films that I want to draw particular attention to, specifically in the context of Douglas’s comments on “the style of African joking”. The humour of Wakaliwood could rightly be described as a “crude scatology”, since it finds its humour in the obscenities of its environment. It is a comedy that revels in the inherent poverty from which it comes from, making its very identity endearing by being so primitively crafted. Though the jokes are not as interested in literal scatology, it nevertheless follows the same idea of “grotesque tricks” and “obscene insults” that Douglas seems to have identified as the core of African comedy. Taking Bergson’s ideas of comedy finding its place in the crossroads between life and machine, Douglas goes a step further by showing how comedy is generally speaking an act of exploiting the absurdities out of less than desirable situations (though stressing that there is no moral judgement to be made in this analysis), with Wakaliwood perhaps being the most extreme manifestation of this.
But I think more pertinent to what makes the humour of ‘Captain Alex’ work so well is the metacommentary, provided by VJ Emmie, who narrates over much of the film in the most perfect outbursts of spontaneity. It’s good enough for the film to have a bizarre style of comedy by itself, but the ‘video joker’ is who makes the film truly hilarious by providing an extra layer of comedy that heightens what’s being shown – such as affectionally nicknaming one of the characters Bruce U for his martial arts techniques. It only serves to prove how comedy finds its magic not by being particularly intelligent, but by appealing to the childish side in the audience, turning the crude images into sources of laughter by verbalising what is left unsaid and embedding the world of the film into the funny aspects of reality. At the very least, it makes me wonder how hilarious PlayTime might have been with VJ Emmie commenting throughout it!
When I was reading on Douglas’ conception of the joker, this was the first thing that came to my mind! Was really glad someone else did this, and gave Wakaliwood some recognition. I find that the Video Joker tradition is a very interesting descendant of Douglas’ interpretation of ‘the joker’ – the way they supplement low-budget films with commentary in order to ‘fill the gap’ is certainly an ingenious move, one that lets them further express their cultural background outside of just traditional filmmaking techniques – I’d go as far as saying they’ve definitely cemented themselves a unique genre in making these films. I was wandering however as to how this would perhaps develop over the years – if Wakaliwood had bigger opportunities with more investors, would they still choose to rely on VJs?