Social Media Humour Amongst Zimbabweans: Discoursing Gendered Playful Engagements Around Covid-19

This chapter examines what I call gendered humour which refers to jokes about men and women and their relations, interactions and perceptions of one another and the world around them. In Abedinifard’s (2016: 234) words, gendered jokes are a form of “humour that speaks to and protects the fundamental elements of the gender order of the society and culture in which the humour circulates.” Humour offers an opportunity to understand “social and cultural phenomena. It lends insights into gender ideologies and gendered power structures” (Shifman and Lemish, “Mars and Venus” in Virtual Space: Post-Feminist Humor and the Internet. Critical Studies in Media Communication 28: 254, 2011). The global pandemic of Covid-19 has had a fair share of humour associated with it. Some of this humour speaks to gender relations and perspectives about gender dynamics. I explore humour written in Shona and English which was circulated amongst Zimbabweans on social media. There are challenges associated with this. For example, it is difficult to identify the source of the humour, i.e., is it by Zimbabweans, Africans or from elsewhere? This is import if one would want to make bold claims about humour as it relates to a specific group or society. For jokes in Shona, it is relatively easy to, at the very least, establish a co-relationship with Shona and more broadly Zimbabwean society. Notwithstanding, I work with the assumption that the very circulation of humour or playful engagements amongst Zimbabweans, when these engagements may have clearly originated elsewhere, signifies some degree of identification with the humour being circulated. The playful engagements come in various forms—pictorial, text and video clips. I examine these pieces of documentary evidence and reflect on the meanings embedded and extended by the humour. I have sampled jokes from the WhatsApp platforms.