This chapter examines the connections between comedy, politics and comic poetics in the context of the Second Republic in Zimbabwe. It asks how the performative-aesthetic can illuminate our understanding of the political in post-coup Zimbabwe. It introduces the focal comedians, namely Sabhuku Vharazipi, Marabha, Kapfupi and Doc Vikela, whose comedies I read as subversive texts that counter official discourses of change and newness associated with the Second Republic. I also explore the history of comedy, from as early as the classical and the medieval periods in Europe and the role of art in general and comedy in particular in subverting power and providing space for alternative voices to be heard. In the African context, I draw on the works of scholars such as Ngugi wa Thiongo, Chinua Achebe and Abiola Irele who have emphasised the role of art, including theatre and performance, in contesting oppressive power structures and systems. I introduce the main theoretical concepts that frame my reading of the comic and the political in post-coup Zimbabwe, such as Benedict Anderson’s (1983) theorisation of nations as imagined communities, Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of nations as narrations and Elleke Boehmer’s view of nations as textual exercises. I also present Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson’s (1986) relevance theory and Elleke Boehmer’s (2018) postcolonial poetics, two theories that foreground the dialogical in communication. To read, according to this theory, is not to decode meaning embedded in text but to listen to, and engage with, the implicatures in text. I argue that this reading framework is particularly useful in understanding how texts, including performative texts, dialogue with, and subvert dominant narratives.