‘Punch up, punch down o! All I know is there is punch’: Jokes about Africa(ns) in cross-cultural contexts

Jokes concurrently produce humour and offence owing to differences in cultural considerations of funniness and taboo. With growing audience diversity and online dissemination of live events, stand-up comics are exposed to increased scrutiny for irreverent anecdotes. Yet, ‘punching up’ has become an acceptable form of benign transgression. This is more so in cross-cultural contexts where differences heighten offence, because jokes do not just make us laugh but also create discomfort, especially when the joke-teller is different from us; whether it is ‘up’ or ‘down’, a punch is still a punch. Using the stand-up acts of four African diaspora comedians – Andi Osho, Dave Davis, Urzila Carlson and Trevor Noah – this essay interrogates cross-cultural joke presentation mechanics, themes and performer–audience relations to determine how and why these jokesters variously utilize punch-up jokes. Queries guiding the study include, what performance specificities do humourists enact to mitigate offence while dealing with sensitive/volatile subjects and a more diverse, political correctness-conscious audience? What is/are the relationship(s) between identity, cultural representations and jokes? In answering these questions, the emphasis is on discussing how the selected comedians craftily erect pre-determined sets of values that establish the context(s) within which the offensiveness of their ‘punch(es)’ is/are mitigated.