By Ella Smook
Parliament's finance committee chairperson, who fell to international online fame after an apparent accident during a live television broadcast, may yet have the last laugh.
And those who had engineered the laughs at his expense could yet choke on their mirth.
Nhlanhla Nene confirmed on Sunday that he was taking legal advice - but would not elaborate on who the envisioned respondents in a possible lawsuit could be.
According to a recent Sapa report, the SABC had apologised to Nene, and were also investigating how the clip, which shows Nene falling behind the desk during an interview on an SABC2 programme after his chair broke, managed to make the rounds outside the company.
But Nene says possible respondents "can't just be the SABC. There were a lot of people who got up to mischief."
He has not however concluded consultation with his legal advisors, and it could "mess things up if I begin to talk to the media about it before speaking to respondents, if there are any", he said.
Nene has said that the incident would not be good for his public image.
And sure enough, he has had to endure endless headline-grabbing word-plays on his misfortune, such as that he was "falling faster than the rand", that he was the "butt of jokes after fall", that his "bad chair day" was a "weighty matter" and that he was no longer the "chairman", while on Sunday night nearly 300 000 (almost doubled since Thursday) views of the clip on YouTube had been recorded.