24 July 2012 Last updated at 10:31 ET

Article written by Andrew Harding Africa correspondent

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'No taboos' for Ugandan making South Africans laugh

 

David Kibuuka plays on his status as the outsider to critique South African society

A clammy, expectant silence gripped the audience. After half an hour of increasingly raucous laughter, the banter had just swung abruptly into what you might call emphatically awkward territory.

"So," said David Kibuuka, standing at the microphone with a raffish grin at a recent comedy night in a Johannesburg bar. "What if Nelson Mandela died right now?"

It takes a certain nerve for anyone to raise that particular subject in public in South Africa these days. The 94-year-old anti-apartheid icon's health is shrouded in a reverent, protective cloud of discretion.

But Mr Kibuuka, a 32-year-old Ugandan-born comedian, relishes the fine art of tightrope walking.

"Mandela dying? People are just going 'please let this be funny so you don't offend my soul'. And I like that feeling," said Mr Kibuuka, relaxing over a coffee a few days later, having swung his audience back onside with accomplished ease.

"That's the thing about comedy - you can say the craziest things and put a laugh at the end and [the audience] can't do anything."

South Africa's turbulent past, enduring racial complexities, and gaffe-prone political elites offer plenty of raw material for satire and and comedy, as well as plenty of opportunities to cause offence.

And Mr Kibuuka - the only, he believes, foreign African comedian in the country - often likes to play on his outsider status to hold a mirror up to his adoptive nation and make jokes about things that other comics might ignore or avoid.

Not that he's making a big deal of it. "Basically, whatever's funny…" But he insists there are "no taboos".

"Comedy is the one [thing] that allows us to do the racial thing. That's why comedy here is so race based. It's the only outlet where people can legitimately laugh without being taken to court," he said.

"But I'm not antagonistic. Even in life. I want people to have a good time. That's why I'm 'Dave' on stage - like, 'Dave the neighbour - can I borrow your lawn mower?'"

Ranting foreign correspondent

David's father, a gynaecologist, brought the family from Kampala, Uganda, to South Africa in the early 1980s.

"I was coming from Idi Amin to apartheid, so it was going to be a chaotic time," he said.

But after endless moves, to new countries and new schools, "things stabilised, like the history of this place stabilised," and soon the head boy had become a financial studies graduate and, with indecent speed, a successful stand-up comedian - "I've never had a job. I've earned all my income from comedy."

Someone walks past our table, recognises Mr Kibuuka and gives him a "hey man".

"That's from the TV," Mr Kibuuka explained after the fan was out of earshot.

He now has a regular spot as a roving, often ranting, foreign correspondent on South Africa's loose approximation of the US satirical news show The Daily Show.

The show allows Mr Kibuuka to play on various regional stereotypes - thieving Nigerians for example - in a country that remains all too preoccupied with itself and often startlingly ignorant about the rest of the continent. Oh yes, and he invariably has to take a swipe at South Africa too.

"Our leaders are not convinced this nation is great. Our guys are the wrong guys," he said to me, before launching into a graphic joke about the disgraced former ANC Youth League leader defecating on a dinner table, then lecturing everybody in the restaurant about how that's "not a thing guests should do".

Mr Kibuuka can see South African "going either way".

But he hates it "when people frame it like they don't have a say. The worst thing is when people give up in the middle of a game of football - I sometimes write them off personally.

"Don't get stressed out about where we are…. Focus on where we want to be. Don't be passive. Decide. And don't get stressed out. Chill," he said with his trademark delivery - quick-fire and rambling and not unlike one of his heroes, the British comedian Eddie Izzard.

"I love Izzard, and Seinfeld, and Mel Brookes, and Eddie Murphy," he said.

"Initially people used to say I had a very white sense of comedy. No. It's my sense of comedy. I like to talk about my view of the world."

And with that, he slips on his sunglasses and heads back to put the finishing touches to the comedy feature film he's starring in, called "Blits Patrollie" [Flying Squad] about two incompetent Johannesburg policemen.

"When we're talking about the script, everyone is going on about Bunuel and classics and stuff. Me, I keep going back to Rocky. I love that film. And Woody Allen - he's prolific."