"I always used to say that the old South African government wrote all my best material, but the new government is catching up fast," says Pieter-Dirk Uys, the satirist who was the scourge of the old apartheid regime and whose videos were much enjoyed by Nelson Mandela while in prison. Times may have changed in South Africa, but Dirk Uys is sharper, wickeder and funnier than ever before and he has absolutely no compunction about savaging the hand that feeds him. He's the rottweiler conscience of the South African nation.
On a recent 60-town election tour it was white liberals who deemed some of his act offensive. Black audiences loved it, often travelling hundreds of miles, by whatever means they could, to get there. "We don't call it hijacking, we call it affirmative commuting."That's pretty mild for a comic whose alter ego, the fabulous Evita Bezuidenhout, is liable to bemoan the fact that the only way she can see her black grandchildren in the dark is when they smile.
As the title of this show suggests, Dirk Uys is concerned here with the nature of language, the difference between what we say and what we really think, how easy it is to hide our true feelings and attitudes behind politically correct words. It is only laughter that betrays us, rising involuntarily in the throat. Dirk Uys knows well enough that one person's joke is another's prejudice - there's even a gollywog hanging upside down on the piano.
Nobody is safe from his caustic humour: not the white liberals who left the country as soon as it became a democracy, not the Afrikaner nationalists in their rural strongholds ("Like doing Fiddler on the Roof in Nuremburg," is how he describes one of his election-tour performances) not the ANC, the Truth Commission, not PW Botha or Nelson Mandela. As Dirk Uys says: "We must be careful to offend everyone equally." Which he does.
I imagine it is rather what it would be like to watch a prime-time performer such as Rory Bremner doing an entire show about the Stephen Lawrence affair. But I don't think any British comic has the guts, anger, pain or wit to match Dirk Uys. This is a man who knows that more than just language is needed to bridge the reality gap between spending years of your life fighting for freedom and discovering that all you've got is democracy
