Pulling at the strings pulls in laughs

Tats Nkonzo

Tats Nkonzo

Published Jun 23, 2015

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THE CLEVER BLACK

CAST: Tats Nkonzo

VENUE: Golden Arrow studio

UNTIL: Saturday

RATING: ***

BOOK-ENDED by a canned explanation of just exactly what a clever black is, this comedy show is a bit of a long ramble, but funny fun nonetheless.

The intimacy of the Golden Arrow Studio is well-suited to this kind of stand-up which sees comedian Tats Nkonzo striding around the edges of the tiny stage to meet all his audience members in the front, but always return to the centre where his guitar is situated.

The well-dressed stage resembles a classroom, with the audience being schooled in the way Nkonzo sees the world. He makes great use of his guitar and voice, incorporating everything from silly to sarcastic songs into his patter. He hits no sour notes, changing up from delivering a line from an opera in one breath, to croon a love song in the next.

His comedy is a mixture of a stream of consciousness around how he views the world and observations on what make people emotional. A lot of what he talks about is geared around race and specifically how different races look differently at the same issue.

Music, though, is what binds everyone in his opinion, and he has a song to punctuate every joke, underscore every point and blow the lid off every suppressed opinion. Luckily, his entire show isn’t centred only on the use of made-up lyrics to make us laugh, he also pokes fun at how we don’t truly listen to the real lyrics and the whole show is geared around finding the funny.

“I don’t want you to view this as a performance,” he tells the audience at one point, but really it is. Nkonzo’s schtick flows like verbal diarrhoea so even if an audience member throws a spanner in the works he smoothly moves on and doesn’t get rattled. He even turned a potentially embarrassing moment, when he corpsed thanks an astute audience member’s response, into a funny moment and smoothly moved on.

While there isn’t a narrative thread running through the show, his energy and warm presence is the throughline, as is the consistently funny way he looks at the world. He pokes fun at everything from the use of the “N” word to Capetonians’ love/hate relationship with our city and the one politician we all love to hate.

If the show was edited down a bit it would be sharper and more of a punch to the gut, but Nkonzo is already very funny indeed.

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