LIKE many others I celebrate the life of the iconic Thandi Klaasen. She is, rightly, remembered as a jazz legend and social activist. But there's another aspect of Thandi’s living that I wish to focus on.
I saw her perform live only once, many years ago, and have never forgotten that experience. At one point Thandi turned her back on the audience and, without moving a single other muscle, regaled the onlookers with a wiggling of her bottom.
Nowadays, I believe, many lesser lights have also perfected the technique. However, these (usually) scantily-clad young women are explicitly sexually enticing in their gyrations. That is simply vulgar.
Not so with Thandi. She exuded superb professionalism during her entire stage performance, and did the bottom-wiggle in her full-length evening gown. She had style and class. And what I came to realise soon enough was that she did her wiggle as an expression of wonderful, joyous humour. That is the difference between a great like Thandi Klaasen and others who would wish to focus on the sexually explicit.
Yes, the death of Thandi Klaasen made me think about the import of humour in our lives. To tell a humorous anecdote is to express a class of emotions indispensable to human beings in social living.
Humour enriches us enormously and falls into that sphere of activity known as art. It may be true that the physical – the flesh – does not need art to survive but art, which includes humour is essential to the survival of the spirit.
Humour happens not when some person sets out to be funny, to create a situation or tell a story with the sole aim of making people laugh. That would be the province of the joke-teller. Humour happens when persons inadvertently say or do things they do not immediately recognise as humorous. It is the listener and/or observer who sees the humour in a situation and articulates it as such. Humour does not seek to destroy – instead it can, indeed, bring people closer together, especially when the humour is pointed out to perpetrators of words and/or deeds that are interpreted as humorous, and these perpetrators come to recognise them as such.
The human condition presupposes a degree of stress that is unavoidable, often arising when persons are confronted by the unknown.
I relate a story that could have resulted in a dinner-time disaster if the persons concerned did not see the humour in the situation. And that situation arose simply because many people do not know “the other” – a person of different skin colour and/or accent. We were dinner guests at the home of a then well-known white Afrikaans journalist and his wife. Two more guests were expected, a fellow journalist and his spouse.
The doorbell rang and the hostess went to answer it. Upon seeing a black woman she, assuming the woman to be a domestic worker from the neighbourhood, said, very kindly, “Sisi, what can I do for you?”
The host was hot on her heels. He greeted the woman by hand and said, "Welcome”, reached behind her, and shook his journalist colleague's hand profusely. Needless to say, the hostess cringed and was overcome with remorse. When she began to apologise profusely, the colleague's wife merrily reassured her that she had nothing to worry about because, after all, now they knew one another better, and asked how she could help her hosts get dinner on the table – an offer that was gratefully and graciously accepted.
When I recalled this incident, another came to mind. A black professor in the faculty where I previously taught was, on a Saturday afternoon, pottering in his garden wearing his oldest jobbing clothes.
An imperious voice said to the potterer that he wanted to speak to the master of the house. Our professor mildly informed the enquirer that he was the master of the house!
Along the same lines of not knowing one another or our different accents goes the story – it might by now have assumed the proportions of an urban legend – that the bedside telephone of a well-known couple rang at an early hour on a Saturday morning.
In a sleepy state, the lady of the house, without hearing what the voice asked, but registering an accent not known within her circle of friends and acquaintances, answered: “Beauty does not work on Saturdays.” Imagine her chagrin when the voice told her he was calling from the president's office, and wished to relay an invitation to her husband. If this story is true, at least in outline, I hope that the lady and the gentleman in question have come to see the humour in the situation.
The next two anecdotes are of a culinary nature. A jet-lagged young woman arrived in London from New York, and needed some sustenance. In a café she began an elaborate (and laborious) explanation of what she required, along the lines of: Take two slices of bread, and put butter on one side of each. Put these on a plate, but keep them separate. Now take a frying pan and put a bit of butter in it… So she proceeded until the woman on the other side of the counter said: “You mean you want an egg sandwich, luv!”
The next culinary anecdote has probably to do more with our distrust of the linguistic skills of non-English speakers than anything else. The gentleman was in Greece, on one of the Greek islands, in a small hotel. It was time for the morning meal. What he wanted was marmalade on toast with a cup of tea. He probably thought the term “marmalade” was too advanced for the native Greek speaker. However that may be, he dumbed down his order and told the waiter he would like jam and bread and nice tea. Imagine his surprise when he was confronted by a large plate of ham (and he a vegetarian!) and iced tea. He took this in good humour and regaled family and friends for years through the retelling of this tale.
My last two anecdotes concern a really and truly absent-minded professor. At the time of these tales he still drove his car himself, and his family would pray for his safe-keeping because they knew that, although he kept to speed limits and rules of the road, his mind was not fully on his driving. He would incessantly be debating philosophical issues, physics, politics, poetry and drama in his head.
While seeming to be fully compos mentis while driving, his family knew this was not the case, and that it was through nothing but the grace of the angels that he arrived back safely every day. One day he drove to the nearby filling station, all the while entertaining the family with the wonderful thoughts in his head.
Upon arriving at the filling station he sat there blankly, forgetting that he had come to buy a specific amount of fuel and wanted the car's tyre pressures checked. He stared at the attendant and said to him: “I want a little bit of petrol and a little bit of air!"
Here is a final story about the absent-minded professor. One afternoon he arrived home, drove the car on to the front lawn, and started hooting furiously. The family rushed out to see what the matter was. From inside the car our professor gesticulated in desperation. Family went to him and motioned to him to turn down the window, which he eventually managed to do, after several prompts. His problem? He said he was locked in the car and could not get out!
The professor enjoyed many laughs about these incidents over the years. He saw the humour in the situations, when he and his family retold these stories. And that is a point about humour which I want to highlight. It brings out the laughter in us. When we engage in humour, we are not laughing at people, but with them. And this laughter is not necessarily only about what others said and did, but also about what we ourselves have said and done.
We cannot be critical about ourselves unless we can laugh at ourselves. Humour assists in acquiring a self-critical spirit.
Thank you, Thandi, for enriching our lives through your artistry and activism, and for illustrating humour and, through that, bringing healthy laughter into our lives.