Johannesburg - Getting a laugh out of the darker side of life has become as South African as a boerie roll on a sunny afternoon or a dead traffic light, (oops, robot) after a Highveld thunderstorm.
And the vehicle of that humour is now the good old meme. They pop up on smart screens across the country poking fun at politicians, Eskom and anything else that has caught the ire of the nation, for the moment.
But the meme has done more than put a smile on South African faces, it has probably saved lives too, believes Professor Sarah Gibson and it all has to do with a bit of fun being poked at the president.
Gibson recently was involved in a study where she examined how South Africans used memes or memetic media in response to the Covid 19 pandemic and in particular President Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidential addresses.
“I do think there's something very specific about the role of humour in South African society. There have been histories of how humour has been used to define the nation and to identify a South African culture,” says Gibson, who is a senior lecturer in the University of KwaZulu Natal’s Centre for Communications and Media Society. Her study appears as a chapter in a book titled Communicating Covid-19.
Gibson focussed her study over the hard lock down period between March 5 and April 29, during which time Ramaphosa made five addresses. Included in those speeches was the famous mask mishap, when the president struggled to put his mask on. Within minutes it was meme fodder.
It was all a bit of fun, but what Gibson found was that more importantly the president’s message got out there.
“So it was not the sort of top down broadcast media, but it's been the co-creation, circulation between ordinary people in South Africa of these humorous memes,” explains Gibson.
“So it has allowed them to engage with the public debates and public health interventions. But it's also allowed that message to circulate and go viral in a different way to those generated by government agencies and campaigns.”
It was found during that period that mask wearing was high.
Funny memes have played other important roles during the Covid 19 pandemic, other international studies have found.
In research published by the American Psychological Association, they discovered that memes helped people cope with stress, made them feel calmer and more content.
“As the pandemic kept dragging on, it became more and more interesting to me how people were using social media, and memes in particular, as a way to think about the pandemic,” says lead author Jessica Gall Myrick, PhD, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, in the US. “We found that viewing just three memes can help people cope with the stress of living during a global pandemic.”
The study was published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media.
Interestingly Gibson found that people began watching the President’s speeches in expectation of something going wrong.
"To this day, my daughter will still put her mask on wrong and say who am I," laughs Gibson.