SOUTH AFRICA LAUGHS AT COVID: A Functional Perspective on Political Humour in Social

Multilingual, political communication during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa (Rudwick et al. 2021) elicited a great variety of responses on social media. This paper focuses on humorous engagements by politicians and the public with official government health and crisis communication on sites where these were streamed. After outlining rhetorical commonplaces (topoz) invoking humour and their specific functions such as relief, incongruity, superiority, enforcement, subversion, and concealed hate speech, we apply discourse analysis to selected social media examples of humorous government communication and their reception on social media. The focus lies on two prominent themes during the pandemic unfolding in 2020/2021: the South African alcohol ban and the vaccine rollout/roll-back. The comments range from deploying humour to cope with anxiety caused by the pandemic uncertainty to racially charged malicious statements about politicians or certain vulnerable social groups. Humour is thus a double-edged sword in communication.1 We conclude that humour plays a vital role in critical moments of political communication, but its easing effect tends to fade with the duration of a crisis.