Transcriber: Lyzandra Alves Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Oh, hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. It is very good to be here.
How are you all doing?
I’ve got to tell you, it’s a little bit frustrating, because...
I am Daliso Chaponda
I am a standup comedian.
And faced with a wonderful venue and like 2000 people,
my natural impulse is to tell jokes.
But I’m not here to tell jokes.
This is like getting a dancer, putting them on a strictly
and saying, don’t dance.
But I am here to talk about something comedy related,
which is the fact that I, for some reason,
my brand has begun:
telling jokes about painful things.
Painful moments in history, painful moments in my life,
painful things in the news. That’s my brand!
It happened accidentally, and that led me to a few revelations
and experiences which I'm going to talk you through.
And I think the turning point where this became what I am hired for
was a point when I was on television and I was in front of a crowd,
which was predominantly white,
and I said “hey, 200 years ago, this would have been an auction.“.
(Laughter)
It’s funny, it’s accurate!
But there was a direct line between me doing that joke to me being the comedian
who people called when something black and bad has happened.
If they wanted to talk about colonialism, “Call that, call that comedian!”
They wanted to talk about slavery, “call that comedian!”
I was always being called to perform on shows on these difficult themes.
And then like 2020, when there was the Black Lives Matter demonstrations,
I can tell you my phone was ringing off the hook.
I have never been so busy in my life.
I was being called by every channel, every radio channel, every TV channel,
and it led to a situation where it's not that I want racist things to happen,
but when they do, it’s so good for my career.
I’m kind of hoping that.
My heart and soul will always be MLK, Martin Luther King,
but my brain is now KKK, hoping for the worst.
Now, that is obviously a joke, but it’s based on truth.
It’s based on truth, which is often where, I think,
I think that comedy is really powerful in that you can talk about the truth
from the side and make it something that is palatable.
But how did I end up being this?
When I first started out trying to be a comedian, this around 20 years ago,
my comedy was entirely different. I used to wear a leather jacket.
I used to be significantly thinner.
But my jokes were all about dating and rap music,
and I was just trying to be a cool comedian.
And the turning point for me was
I watched a movie called Life is beautiful.
Now, some of you may know it.
It's a movie by this Italian director, Roberto Benigni,
which is absolutely hilarious,
one of the funniest movies I ever watched.
But it is set in a concentration camp.
And it totally blew my mind
because it was so funny, it was cathartic, it was transformative,
but it was set in the most horrific of places.
And in my mid-twenties, I watched this and I was like,
You know what? That’s what I want to do.
I want to find a way to talk about
the things which are terrifying, the things which we can’t understand,
the things that are beyond us through humor.
And it took a while to get right.
I had a lot of clumsy attempts at the beginning,
but it’s very interesting in that I think there is a desire for it.
Whenever anything bad happens,
immediately people start sending jokes.
I guarantee you, whenever there’s a tragedy, whenever there’s a war,
your WhatsApp messages are full of distasteful, horrible jokes.
You know they’re there, right?
People just start sending jokes all the time
and some of them are tasteful, some of them are tasteless,
but there's a need for it.
I feel like there’s...
when we are terrified,
when we're faced with monsters and things which terrify us,
we have this hunger to laugh about it.
And I do not always think that it’s done in the right way,
but the desire is definitely there.
Right? And I think it’s because
it’s easier to deal with these things if you laugh about it.
So when I started trying to do this,
I realized I didn’t just want to be someone shocking people
about these scary subjects. Right? I’ll admit I early on,
I did a joke about the phrase “she was asking for it.“. Right.
And I made it a comedy of errors where a father overheard me saying
“she was asking for it” in an innocent...
like she was asking for the salt,
and then got very angry at me.
And I felt bad about that joke later
because I was engaging with domestic violence,
but I wasn’t talking about it.
So I realized I wanted to, in my comedy,
if I’m going to talk about something horrible,
I’m actually going to talk about it. If I do a joke about slavery,
I'm actually going to tell you my opinion about slavery.
So I ended up doing jokes about going to the Slavery Museum
and taking a white lady on a date,
(Laughter)
and pointing at things and saying, “Look what your people did!”
(Laughter)
And also just talking about contradictions,
talking about contradictions.
Things like the fact that in the Slavery Museum,
there is a gift shop.
What are you meant to buy from the Slavery Museum gift shop?
And I am being silly, but what I think is great
is that you can actually talk to people with humor
about subjects which they normally would turn their ears off for. Right?
They wouldn’t listen.
Like, if I told you “Hey! Come watch me do a speech about slavery.“.
Most of you like “I don’t want to watch that”.
But because it’s comedy, I get to do it.
And you can make points which people normally wouldn’t hear,
like the silly joke, which I did earlier, where I said, you know,
I'm always called on television when bad things happen,
which sort of makes me want to hope for racist things to happen.
That joke is a silly joke,
but it’s based on a truth where I was frustrated by the fact,
why am I only called to be on television
when something black and bad has happened? Right?
I’m never called to talk about dolphins. I could have funny opinions on dolphins.
And so I realized that this power where comedy you can make comments,
that you can talk about important things in a way that is palatable. Right.
And then also, it’s educational.
Like, I can do jokes and talk to people about the history of colonialism.
I can talk about being a refugee, and again,
because it’s funny, people listen!
But then while I was doing this, something unintentional happened, right?
Because I intended to try and educate
and I intended to try and talk about difficult subjects.
And I also intended to make money.
You know, it is good to make money and live.
But the unintentional result of talking about pain is
I wasn't only talking about historical pain.
I wasn't only just talking about war and slavery and colonialism.
I also started talking about my own pain,
talking about being a refugee when I was a kid,
talking about feeling not welcome, experiencing racism,
talking about breakups, talking about loneliness,
talking about childhood trauma.
And unintentionally, just by doing these jokes,
I put myself through a kind of therapy course
in that by making jokes about these terrible moments in my life,
I found that I, even though I didn’t plan it, was healing myself.
Because by making it funny, it gave myself a distance
and allowed me to change my relationship with that memory.
Now, you’re not all comedians.
So, I think an example which would show this,
I have a friend...
I have a friend who had a very hard childhood
with a father who was very abusive.
Now, he had very bad memories associated with Christmas,
very bad memories associated with playgrounds.
And then he became a father
and had wonderful experiences with his son around Christmas, around playgrounds.
And so now his associations changed.
And so his memories almost rewrote those bad experiences.
And now he thinks of things positively.
Comedy does that. Comedy does that.
If I have a breakup and I’m depressed about it,
and then I make a joke up and everybody laughs,
I nolonger think badly of the breakup,
I think of the great joke.
Also, sometimes, I can fiddle with the facts.
So if I talk about a time in my childhood when I was bullied, right,
everybody laughs, but I can change the facts.
I can change it that, at the end, I actually won over on the bully.
And that’s not actually what happened in reality.
But still, by living this fantasy in front of a crowd and everybody laughing,
I feel better.
And you know, there are a lot of people who subscribe to, you know,
therapeutic methods of people like Freud,
where you relive those bad moments again and again and again.
But sometimes you’re retraumatizing yourself.
And I think it’s time, it’s maybe a little bit arrogant,
but I think it’s time for the deletion method.
Relive it, but change some facts.
(Laughter)
Make yourself the winner.
(Laughter)
No, but I want to give you.... Yes, it’s true!
(Applause)
And I think there’s a level
where everyone does this a bit with their friends.
We use comedy to heal.
We use comedy to deal with stuff which scares us.
So let's say you lose your job today.
It’s not funny today, but in six months, all your friends are like
“you unemployed bastard! Ah ah ah!”
(Laughter)
And you laugh!
And I think it’s part of how we cope, and I’m so glad I found comedy.
I’m so glad I found it
because I was an angry person, I was a depressed person...
And turning things into comedy
is always a way in whic I can manage my things.
It doesn’t have to be comedy ifyou’re not a comedian.
Perhaps it’s relooking at moments by writing a diary or something like that.
But I’m going to give you two examples before I finish
of moments which I have rehabilitated
through humor.
OK, so the first one of these is shallow and the second one is deeper. Ok.
But the shallow one is this:
some years ago, I did Britain’s Got Talent and I came third. Right.
I’m very happy with third. But I was a little depressed. Right.
I was like, I could have won.
And I was so frustrated and depressed sometimes about almost winning
until I wrote a joke. I wrote a joke - and this is totally true -
about how the winner gave all of his prize money
to charity to hel underprivileged children.
Isn’t that beautiful?
You had better be more appreciative, I wouldn’t have done that.
(Laughter)
I would have given some money to underprivileged women,
but that would have been on a one by one personal...
(Laughter)
That is a... that’s a dodgy joke, possibly questionable.
But either way, doing that joke meant that now,
any time I think about the fact that I didn’t win,
instead of being a little depressed, I laugh.
I smile because I think of that joke. Right?
And so it’s one of the moments where I did it.
But like much deeper and much harder for me to talk about
is when I was young,
I went through some traumatic childhood experiences.
And I really took around five years to be able to talk about them on stage.
And I talk about it for on 15 minutes.
But I’ll just tell you, like one of the jokes
at the end of this routine, which I do.
And it was really hard to talk about
because I was very embarrassed by this, I was full of shame,
because sometimes you feel shame
for things you shouldn’t feel ashamed about
but you can’t convince your brain, even if you know you shouldn’t.
So I tried to talk about the fact that the first time I tried to have, like,
an intimate relationship with someone,
because of childhood traum I had been through,
sometimes I would just freak out,
and not be able to continue.
But this is where I’d got.
God has a sense of humor.
The first person I was intimate with,
they also had bad memories.
So sometimes they couldn’t continue and would freak out.
So for the two of us, making love was like playing Operation.
(Laughter)
I’ll tell you what the amazing thing is, I thought of this joke,
I told her the joke, and we both laughed
about this really embarrassing moment between us.
And things got better gradually.
And I think the humor helped indeed.
So I very much feel like humorously looking back on things,
is almost a superpower now, which get me through anything.
So if this TED Talk is received terribly...
Right.
If you are all bored and you all hate me
or the people watching on YouTube are like, “this person’s terrible!“,
as much as it will be terrible, within around five or six months,
I’ll have a great joke.
(Laughter)
Thank you very much.
(Applause)