“Doc, He Was Strangled by Diabetes!”

In the South African episode of AI Murray’s comedic documentary series Why Does Everyone Hate the British Empire? , he features the popular South African comedian Loyiso Gola as a local commentator tasked with interrogating the lingering vestiges of British colonialism in the country. Gola, whose usual comedy thrives on the absurdities of colonial and Apartheid projects in South Africa, deploys humour to reflect on colonial and Apartheid remains as he and Murray traverse South Africa’s former hotbeds of colonial power. This article centres Gola and Murray’s parodic humour in this journey of re-discovery, to explore how, in their comedic re-engagement with South Africa’s traumatic colonial and Apartheid pasts, the comedians deal with the ‘ghosts’ of history. The article implements Frantz Fanon’s concept of colonial possession to think through the potential function of humour in what I call the ‘comedic exorcism’ of the colonial and Apartheid spells binding their ‘remains.’ Skirting the usual thinking of humour as a mechanic of resistance and subversion, the article argues that Gola and Murray’s humour manifests complex processes of re-discovery and reflection where comedy is part of a conscious effort of releasing the mind, of exorcising it from shapeshifting spells of coloniality.