Whilst other art genres keep improving each year in terms of quality of the work, one genre that has backslidden is comedy.
The depth of the content presented is really shallow.
Majority of the acts that performed at the Saturday night gig, ‘Meet The People’, headlined by female comedian, Gonyeti at the Ambassador Hotel were really disappointing.
What is more worrisome is that the acts at the aforementioned gig are the ‘new generation’ comedy acts but sadly they lack the zing when compared to their seniors who include Carl Ncube, Q The Boss, Doc Vikela and Clive Chigubhu amongst others.
One area the majority lack in is writing.
They don’t have the punch lines to take the audience from its natural physical realm into ecstasy mode.
When watching the acts perform, you can tell that the idea is in there somewhere but the delivery is poor.
Some of the acts seem to confuse comedy with drama.
Instead of dealing with issues in an intelligent manner, which will provoke thoughts and at the same time make the audience laugh, some rock up on stage and start pulling off some street theatre shenanigans, reminding us of Kapfupi in his formative years.
Acts like Gonyeti, who was the headline act of the evening, still need to deal with delivering their jokes in English.
In the words of Anne Kansime before she filled up the HICC, “For you to go big in the continent, it is important to use English because that way you reach out to a broader audience and not just folks from your home country.”
Attendance at comedy shows has also dropped significantly over the past two years.
Recently, a weekly comedy show at the Jazz 24/7 was shutdown due to poor attendance.
Magamba Network launched a new comedy programme at Chez Zandi for free to patrons and yet they used to charge for such shows.
However, there is hope in acts like Tinaye and Mandla. The lads can be the next bug thing on local comedy if they keep grinding as they have been doing on the past two years.
