CHRIS ROPER: Party animal of the people

A colleague in Rome sent me a WhatsApp last week with the message “This landed in Italy”, and a link to La Stampa’s Instagram account.

The account has over a million followers, and La Stampa is one of the oldest newspapers in Italy. The Instagram video showed an eccentric woman in a garish pink swimming cap and bright yellow diving mask and snorkel, splashing about like a rabid retiree seal in a hole full of muddy water. The caption read, in part, “La candidata sindaca di Johannesburg per l’Alleanza Democratica, Helen Zille”.

Google translated the full caption as: “Johannesburg Democratic Alliance mayoral candidate Helen Zille posted a video of herself swimming in a deep, water-filled hole in Douglasdale, a residential suburb northwest of the city. The unusual footage was created to highlight the poor service and deterioration of Johannesburg’s infrastructure.”

This video isn’t a one-off. Another shows her fishing, beginning with a close-up of her in a chair holding a fishing rod. There’s a fulsome voiceover about the perfect fishing weather and the rich biodiversity of Johannesburg. “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe what I’m seeing here. It’s algae, tadpoles, I think, and there’s a plastic bottle flirting with a tyre.” As the camera pans back and noses around, you see an abandoned public swimming pool, full of garbage and rancid green water.

A lot of people are giving Zille praise for this manoeuvre. Not only has she managed to get a country laughing at itself (not that South Africa is exactly short of opportunities to do that), she’s also been able to get an extremely local political issue a worldwide audience. But all of that pales into insignificance when we look at her real achievement here, which is that she’s won over some dyed-in-the-wool DA sceptics.

Take, for example, the Daily Maverick’s cynical realist Richard Poplak, who tweeted: “I’m sorry, but credit where credit is due: Gogo is killing it. Since she stopped blathering about woke this and woke that, her politics is reaching genius levels.”

This is not to say that Zille’s critics have lost all sense of proportion. Ryan Cummings, a director at Signal Risk, a company that specialises in risk management in Africa, tweeted: “After swimming in a Johannesburg pothole, Zille should go play a game of cops and robbers on the Cape Flats”, to which Poplak replied: “Then there’s this. The Cape Flats have never been a priority for the DA, who are less a white party (and that they are) than they are a bourgeois party.”

But still, Zille has managed to get herself, and by extension (and it always seems to be by extension) the DA, viewed in a more sympathetic light, as the party that understands the absurdity of being South African.

Rather than claiming ad nauseam to be a party of the people, which is the self-evidently untrue claim of all the others, Zille has cleverly demonstrated that she has the same sense of dark humour shared by many people. The party animal of the people, one might say.

The Zille message is that rather than fulminating about a better future for all, she’s living in the present and getting stuff done. The day after Zille’s swim, Joburg Water moved in to fix the hole. But this isn’t just about scoring points ahead of the municipal elections; it’s about fighting voter apathy. Responses on TikTok highlight this. Carlien, for example, wrote: “Well done, girl. I’m not affiliated with any political party, mainly because I feel unrepresented, but this caught my attention. Fixing from the ground up.”

Dada Morero, the current mayor of Joburg, responded with a video of his own. His spin was so desperate, he managed to turn a pothole into a whirlpool. He claimed that Zille’s swim risks “encouraging children in the townships to swim when there’s work being done on the burst pipes, and we’ve seen in the past where children died as a result of swimming in manholes or where a burst pipe has been repaired. So we want to request to her that it is not a good example.”

Now that is some spin. Zille, that blithe killer of children, might be the sort of mayor who can get your pipes fixed, but do you really want to risk your children’s lives? No, if you love children, rather vote ANC again.

Breathtakingly — if that’s not too pointed a word — Morero manages to forget that children are dying in open water trenches not because they follow Zille on TikTok but because the government can’t be bothered to repair those excavations in a timely manner.

If politicians are telling you a knock-knock joke, you’d better be damn sure you really do ask who’s there

And standing in front of a hastily covered hole that you couldn’t bother repairing for three years is not the best look to try and deflect attention away from your abject performance and onto an alleged child killer. But top marks for this bald-faced lie from Morero: “I don’t think I’m here about political campaigning, it’s to set the record straight.” Sure, buddy. Sure.

There is, of course, another political party that is using humour to humanise its political messaging, and that is the laugh-a-minute Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Through an intermediary called Explosive News, who told The New Yorker they’re an independent “student-led media team with a background in social activism”, they have taken to releasing satirical, AI-generated videos featuring Lego-style characters.

Not all of these are intended to be funny. One of the first ones, aired on Iranian TV, opens with Lego‑style Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu sitting with a devil figure, leafing through a file labelled “Epstein file”, then pressing a red button to launch a missile at a girls’ school in Iran. After the blast, only a pink schoolbag and shoes are left, referencing the US bombing of an Iranian school that killed 168 people, including over 100 children.

Other videos, though, “lean into absurdity”, as NPR puts it. In one, “a Trump-like character appears as a Teletubby in an American flag-themed outfit, sitting in the Oval Office and playing with toy fighter jets over a map of the Middle East”. In another, which cleverly turns US culture back against itself, a rap diss track calls Trump a loser and Netanyahu’s puppet, sung over images of missile strikes, coffins and stock market sell-offs.

And no opportunity is missed to mention the conspiracy theory that suggests Trump launched the Iran war so as to distract the public from headlines related to the Epstein investigation.

As you can imagine, a large part of the internet has rapturously acclaimed this use of humour to undermine US aggression. Who knew the same party that carries out mass killings of protesters and that tortures its citizens by use of sexual violence, waterboarding and suspending them from ceilings could be so funny! And therein lies the problem with laughing along with politicians, or with states. If chortling at their sense of humour humanises them, you need to work even harder to retain your sense of perspective.

There’s a massive difference between the supreme leader of Iran and the supreme leader of the DA, to be sure. For one, the Iranian videos aren’t aimed at the country’s citizens, but rather at an external audience. Zille’s videos are very much speaking to her constituency, both current and potential.

And despite the ANC’s recent allegations of encouraging infanticide, the DA has a rather more enlightened take on constitutional rights. But the underlying lesson here is the same. If politicians are telling you a knock-knock joke, you’d better be damn sure you really do ask who’s there.

There’s also the tricky bit about laughing at and laughing with, and the difference between absurd humour and batshit crazy.

I learnt a new word from The Guardian this week: “dysphemism”, which is the opposite of “euphemism”.

Dysphemism is giving a name to something that makes it sound maximally horrible. Take Trump’s latest post on “Truth” Social. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell — JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Not a shred of humour there, nor a trace of humanity. But a lot of material for the Iranian Revolutionary Standup Comedians to work with, that’s for sure.