Laughing at South Africa

The comedian inhabits a demilitarized zone of cultural exchange, where lethal observations are made without fear of reprisal. One of the most remarkable examples of comedic immunity in the world has to be Pieter-Durk Uys.

Uys is South African, and a self-conscious product of that glorious and sad country’s extraordinary paradoxes. For example: A country founded on a European emigre flight (as was America) in search of social and religious freedom is now ruled by one of the most repressive governments in the so-called Free World.

Everyone has known for years that South Africa is like some huge Texas-sized boiler ready to blow, and that the fallout from the explosion will rain down human bits whose race is indeterminate and sadly irrelevant. But nobody has been able to do anything about it. Into the breach steps Uys, who looks like a younger, bigger, but no less fey Derek Jacobi.

Uys is a satirist who takes aim at numerous South African targets, including Desmond Tutu (he didn’t want to do a black for fear of adding to their pressures, but claims the blacks asked him to do one of them because they didn’t want to be left out). In the film of his performance, “Across the Rubicon,” which recently aired on some local PBS stations, we saw not only footage of one of the most spectacularly beautiful countries on earth, but also Uys’ depictions of the white ruling class’s tragicomic insularity.

Uys crosses sexual as well as racial boundaries. We see an imperious female white supremacist, very well dressed and well placed, who waves away critics of apartheid like flies at a banquet. She greets her interviewer with icy Thatcheresque disdain and is so preposterously unaware of her boilerplate self-importance that we can only laugh. We see a wealthy Jewish housewife at her makeup table explaining why she’s lavishing so much on her maid’s Soweto house--when the revolution comes, she plans to move in.

The near-apoplectic South African President P. W. Botha gets a detailed and rousing sendup, and the birdlike perorations of Bishop Desmond Tutu are caught on the fly. A standard young-white-male-issue South African, guzzling beer and oblivious to the pot belly hanging like a tumor over his belt, belches his love of culture, punctuated by drunken expletives.

Uys seems aware that within the plumped-up breast of the ridiculously and even criminally self-inflated, there’s still a human heart. Every South African knows that his country is historically based on a siege mentality, and Uys takes that into account: It partly explains the ruling party’s current intransigence.

Aside from satirist and comedian, Uys, who is blond and fair, has an eloquent self-assurance that could have recommended him for a life as a politician or professional. Speaking to us from his dressing room, he doesn’t disguise himself. He’s a Jewish white South African who could’ve played on his connections. His grandmother sold her farm to start the National Party that now rules the country in a way that would surely have shamed her, and South Africa’s first prime minister was a blood relative.

Uys is a showman, and a satirical clown, but along with the footage of South Africa’s gorgeous natural topography (“The fairest cape in the circumference of the Earth”) juxtaposed with its brutal and brutalized citizenry, are his articulate asides: “The one single emotion that unites everyone is fear”; “We don’t have to practice apartheid, we have it down to a fine art”; “Hypocrisy is the Vaseline of political intercourse.”

The self-justifications of his gaudy creations would be easily recognizable in Beverly Hills and in numerous smaller city halls in America (our smarter pols are more adroit in concealing their prejudices). But Uys continually steps aside as a kind of domestic statesman to lament his country’s “constitutional lack of respect for human dignity.” “The government provides my material,” he tells us. “I couldn’t make this up.” He tells a joke about Tutu escaping a capsized boat by walking on water, a feat which the white press interprets as proof that blacks can’t swim. Later he wonders, “I wonder what people see out there? Is it all in the eye of the beholder?”

Uys talks of an Auschwitz survivor who confessed, “We told terrible jokes to stay alive,” and it’s in that spirit we see how he ridicules his surroundings in order to make them coherent and bearable. Late in Uys’ film, a number of actual leading South African politicians of different races and parties (though not Botha and not anyone from the outlawed African National Congress) step forward to praise him. Their remarks are summed up by the real Tutu, who says: “It is when people take themselves too seriously that disaster looms. When people think that what they are watching is theater, they let down their defenses . . . God bless him.”

Who would have thought that in such a deadlocked and tragic society the one figure who moves freely among suspicious and fearful factions, easing them all a bit, would be a comedian? In America, that would be inconceivable.