Redefining humour

By Ted Malanda

Once every fortnight, an aspiring writer sends me an email requesting to contribute humour pieces for this magazine. The only problem is that nearly all of them want to be Wahome Mutahi aka Whispers.

But Whispers was not just a funny writer — he was an artist; a satirist who used village jokes as an excuse to blast the shenanigans of society in general and the people in power. Half the time, he wasn’t even cracking jokes.

Interestingly, Whispers eclipsed fellow humourists of his time to the extent that few seem to remember that at his finest, The Standard’s Benson Riungu was no pushover. His technical abilities were awesome; his prose sophisticated, his wit street-smart. Riungu tickled his bone uniquely, in his own inimitable manner.

Today, humour has yet to scale the feverish 1980s when Whispers almost single-handedly sold the newspaper and his weekly servings were discussed in pubs, barbershops and schools for the rest of the week.

Unfortunately, the reality is that Whispers, to borrow an expression popularised by the old wag, is past tense. He wrote for a different era, cut his teeth in different political and social times and created a unique brand: his own. Any writer who, therefore, attempts to recreate Whispers is wasting time. It cannot be done. It should not be done.

Just like Ernest Hemingway had thousands of imitators and no equal, no one will ever write the sort of stuff that Whispers did. In fact, the better way of putting it is that no one should.

That only makes sense when you examine the operations of Mwalimu King’ang’i, aka Churchill — arguably Kenya’s finest stand-up comedian. In the past few years, he has set up an academy of sorts to churn out clowns like Eric Omondi.

What Churchill — and therein lies his genius and greatness — is doing is that he is infusing dynamism into the industry; urging it to stand up, grow up with the times. To that end, his charges would disappoint if they kept revisiting the sort of humour that catapulted him to fame years ago. And so would young writers who attempt to recreate Whispers in this age.

In my view, the funniest people today are neither in stand-up comedy or the humour pages of your newspaper. They are the young faceless people (not the saliva drooling nutters who crawl all over the net) who crack silly jokes on social Internet sites. They lampooned and laughed at Justice Nancy Baraza. They are still laughing at Nyeri men. They laugh at anything and everything — in real time — and they do it with panache.

These creative boys and girls are redefining humour, blasting it into a new age. Anyone who aspires to write humour for a newspaper had better take heed.