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How local poetry, comedy can get a new lease of life

In recent years, Ugandan comedy and poetry have taken a beating. Audiences for both art forms, as rendered in English, are dwindling. And this precarious situation has ensured the two reflect the dim shine of diamonds in the rough.

Their appeal is preciously scarce, leading to rough times for their practitioners.
Ugandan comedy was once feted as the wave of the future. Today, English-speaking comedians have retreated, with Ugandan jokesters declaring they make more money from paying audiences abroad. Not because Ugandan audiences pay considerably less, but because, in many cases, they do not pay at all.

“Despite the growth in performers, comedy spaces largely remained stagnant, with little or barely any new venues opening up. Shows like Africa Laughs were absent [in 2024] and while Kenya played host to comedians like Dave Chappelle and a plethora of other international acts, we could only get hold of Sabinus and should-already-have-a-Ugandan-passport-by-now, Eric Omondi,” says premier Ugandan stand-up comedian Timothy Nyanzi, by way of explanation.

“Creativity struggled. Comedians faced challenges with political correctness and woke culture, for instance Mariachi with Tenge Tenge. While some still relied on old material, others introduced fresh content. 2024 was largely a year of more of the same, with hardly any new faces emerging on the scene,” he adds.

Nyanzi blames much of comedy’s decline on insufficient government support. “While other countries like Australia and South Africa fund large comedy festivals, Uganda lacks such initiatives. The Uganda Comedians Association, which was established to improve working conditions and professionalise the industry, has suffered from low membership and internal diversions, which have hindered its progress.”

However, many would-be comedy audiences in Uganda say Ugandan comedians rely on profanity instead of creativity, joke repetition as opposed to jocular inventiveness. It has got so bad that audiences have been treated to applause lines, not punchlines. Comedic material is predictable, routinised towards the insipid instead of the inspired. That’s why more and more comedians are showing up as performers at poetry shows, as well as integrating poetry into their showcases.

Power of storytelling

It is like 2014 all over again. That’s the year Kwivuga Poetry Session was at its acme, featuring comedians who piggybacked on poetry’s burgeoning popularity. However, this is not necessarily a backward step. Comedy and poetry are Janus-faced genres which interpenetrate and cross-pollinate, if given the chance.
To be executed effectively, stand-up comedy and spoken word poetry specifically require a microphone, a stage, a performer or performers and, increasingly, the occasional prop or roadie.

Most importantly, both art forms hold up a mirror to society. In this vein, they reflect the world in its primary colours. That is why they are disruptive arts, exposing humankind, stark and naked. This inevitably leads to tension.
Robert Frost’s poem, I Had a Lover’s Quarrel with the World, partly explores the conflict inherent in such tension. It expresses the complexities of human relationships. Thus, the disjunction between art and society is thrown into sharp relief.

Again, spoken word poetry and stand-up comedy are largely based on storytelling. The two may employ varying verbal devices but, at heart, they relate the human condition through commentary and narration.
Storytelling is the fulcrum of the human experience. It is how we communicate. And how we communicate is how we connect. Stories, Heather V MacArthur writes in Forbes, “fulfil a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living—not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience. Sharing stories helps humanise the tactical side of what we’re hoping to accomplish.”

Confessions
All told, confessional poetry is the very bedrock of spoken word poetry. It also plays an overarching role in stand-up comedy. American comedian Bo Burnham’s Inside, a variety of songs and sketches about his day-to-day life indoors, uses confessional elements to depict the artistic side of his life. This is also the case with American comic Dave Chappelle’s highly digestible comedic confessionals.
According to the American Academy of Poets, “confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or “I.” This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and WD Snodgrass.

Lowell’s book, Life Studies, was a highly personal account of his life and familial ties and had a significant impact on American poetry. Plath and Sexton were both students of Lowell and note that his work influenced their own writing.”

It adds: “The confessional poetry of the mid-20th century dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry. Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression, and relationships were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner.”
The two art forms of poetry and comedy allow the narrator to connect with the audience. Hence they can overlap and interface to make a story more engaging and relatable. Comedy makes you laugh and poetry helps you feel and think. Taken together, poetry and comedy invoke experiences which probe the depths of the human psyche.

It is this depth that strikes a chord with audiences, at the very core of their humanity. This can be parlayed into sensibilities that not only explain the human condition but cogitate it in ways which homogenise our responses to a shared appreciation of the verbal arts with respect to comedy and poetry. If this is used by Ugandan performers, of the comedic and poetic bent, the story arc of the performative art can be bent towards the growth of both art forms.

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