Example #1:

When I was living in Johannesburg during the 1980s and working at the Market Theatre, I bought a telephone answering machine. Now the death threats I received would be recorded.

“Pieter-Dirk Uys, you bleddie communist … We’re going to stop you…. We will…”

The gruff voice was interrupted as the machine took over: Please wait till you hear the bleep and then leave your message. BLEEP. Back came the gravelly voice, but no longer as confident:

“No man! Hell! I can’t talk to these bleddie machines….”

But the threats were real. I put one recording into my show. The audience roared with laughter – and now, so did I.

Example #2: 1985.

I noticed a car parked outside my gate with two men sitting in it, day after day. I was being watched. My first reaction was fear. Then I prepared two mugs of coffee and a plate of koeksisters on a tray, and went out into the street. The men stared at me as I came closer. The driver’s window was open. I smiled at them and held out the tray.

“Hello, Oom? Koffie en koeksisters?”

They revved their car and sped away. I never saw them again. Those were the best koeksisters I’d ever tasted. As Archbishop Tutu said, “Love your enemy; it will ruin his reputation.”

There was nothing funny about apartheid, a crime against humanity. In Christian South Africa it was just policy. To fight it was to expose oneself to the might of the state. Political protest led to imprisonment, banning, even death. Humour became my weapon of mass distraction: I laughed at something too horrible to contemplate; laughing at the hypocrisy and absurd arrogance of those who perpetuated a system of terror. Making fun of horror and the blandness of the evil was my job for 20 years during apartheid. And old habits die hard. But today, what was satire then is now only just tolerated as comedy; to some it’s even a form of hate speech.

Nothing gets easier keeping one step ahead of the targets. I find it very difficult to take political correctness seriously. Everything I did on stage under apartheid was considered politically incorrect by the status quo. For 40 years I made fun of fear and those who use it as a weapon to control us. Disrespect is one of few successful ways to put a spotlight on the absurdity, obscenity and mindlessness of rotten politics.

Even though most of my old targets have faded away since 1990, separate developments seem to be reinventing themselves in many countries. Democratically elected governments are using democratically accepted ways to entrench racism and division. The need to use humour as a weapon against the new ruling class of populist dictators is now more essential than ever.

One of the most memorable satirical pieces of the past 60 years was Stanley Kubrick’s chillingly funny film Dr Strangelove or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Who can forget that last image of the insane pilot astride the atom bomb on its way down to blow up the world? We all cheered and laughed. Satire then was easily recognised as extreme; outrageous jokes in bad taste at the expense of those who we were meant to respect or fear – politicians in the main, with popes as a good second choice.

One immediately recognised what was ‘satirical’. More often than not, people would just sigh and turn the page. Famously on Broadway, it was said, “Satire is what closes on Saturday night.”

In the 1960s there was plenty of horror and madness, but social media was not yet invented and all-present to rub your nose in it 24/7. As a result, today’s 21st century world seems more insane than ever. I’m sorry to be the one to break the news. There is no gentle way of doing it: satire is dead. There have always been the fake newsflashes of satire’s demise. It has never been the friend of power. Satire can be traced through history. Much of the time it flourished underground where it was easily trapped and neutralised, preaching to the converted. It wore disguises: funny hats, false noses and high-pitched voices that helped satire to hide in the costumes of clowns and comedians, and so some of its perpetuators got away with assassinating their targets.

Reputations were destroyed by innuendo. Whispers in the theatres could contribute to a final carriage ride to the local guillotine. Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator is a milestone on that long, winding road of using politically incorrect humour to fight the rising tide of intolerance. It did not stop Adolf Hitler, but it has a legacy: the satirical depiction of power at its maddest, its bloodiest and its most dangerous, such as the recent film The Death of Stalin.

It should be a human right to laugh at fear, but maybe the only human right we are left with is the right to be human. That humanity includes the compassion, dignity and respect we show one another, the ubuntu that is the essence of our democracy – or should be. During the Zumafication of South Africa, human rights were bandied about to disguise corruption, theft, possibly murder. Celebrating Nelson Mandela behind his back, as we are doing on his 100th birth year, is again allowing politicians to use his legacy of humanity to pretend that we practise what he preached. We do not.

In our 24 years of democracy the greatest infringement on our human rights has been the reality of people forced to live in undignified, abject poverty, unable to access their socio-economic rights. That’s where government for the people, of the people, and by the people should have come in. Making jokes about Hitler in death camps like Auschwitz wouldn’t have helped any of the condemned inmates, and yet they did use dark bitter humour to help confront the horror. On the other side of the spectrum, a cartoonist’s showerhead coming out of the head of a leader of questionable morality did a lot to remind us what we were in for. And after nearly eight years of Jacob Zuma, our nation has been traumatised all over again. But at least we have a refreshed optimism and the belief that there is light at the end of the tunnel. We also realise that the tunnel is still curved.

Meanwhile the world’s superpower, bastion of democratic values, leader of the free world is only entering its second year of trauma. Let me quote from 25 recent speeches by President Donald Trump:

“Nobody can do it like me. Nobody. Honestly … Nobody is stronger than me. Nobody has better toys than I do … There’s nobody bigger or better at the military than I am … Nobody loves the Bible more than I do … Nobody builds walls better than me … Nobody’s better to people with disabilities than me … Nobody’s fighting for the veterans like I’m fighting for the veterans … There’s nobody that’s done so much for equality as I have … There’s nobody more pro-Israel than I am … There’s nobody more conservative than me … There’s nobody who respects women more than I do … Nobody would be tougher on ISIS than Donald Trump … Nobody’s ever had crowds like Trump has had … There’s nobody that understands the horror of nuclear better than me … Nobody ever understand it but me; it’s called devaluation … The sale of uranium that nobody knows what it means, I know what it means … Nobody knows more about trade than me … Nobody in the history of this country has ever known so much about infrastructure as Donald Trump … I know the H1B; I know the H2B. Nobody knows it better than me … Nobody knows politicians better than I do … Nobody knows more about taxes than I do … Nobody knows more about debt than I do … Nobody knows the system better than me. Which is why I alone can fix it.”

God bless America. And God help the world. DM

Pieter-Dirk Uys is performing When in Doubt say Darling at the Fugard Studio Theatre till 25 August. He will be speaking at The Gathering (CTICC) at 15:30 on Wednesday 15 August.