Tumi or Not Tumi (2020)

Tumi Morake’s new stand-up comedy special Tumi or Not Tumi puts some hee-hee in Heritage.

Showmax is South Africa’s stand-up comedy stage and Tumi Morake is walking on and owning it with her new special, Tumi Or Not Tumi. If you’re looking for a Heritage Month activity, give it a try. Tumi is brimming with heritage. “We must all know our roots and where we come from,” she insists. “Me? From Thaba Nchu. I grew up where you know we are rural! It is that place where all we had was apartheid, Marie Biscuits and one robot. And you wake up at six every morning to sweep soil.”

Tumi jokes. She laughs. She twerks. And she interprets. Performing for a mixed-race multicultural audience in her comedy special, she chooses what to translate, what to explain, and what to just let people have a good gasp and laugh over while their less fluent neighbours look on in envy. And she demonstrates her wicked knack for painting a portrait with accents. She knows, and you know, exactly who she’s talking about at all times. And when she talks about the pain of rent, petrol and being broke as a joke, she takes us to church. Preach, Tumi! She’s not bringing sexy back, though. Sexy must go away. With three kids in the house, Tumi has had to “unsexy” herself in a multi-step unsexy programme that includes exchanging lingerie for “back-to-school bloomers”. And say a tiny prayer for your innocence, because this leads to a Sarafina joke that needs to go straight to the headmaster’s office.

So whip out the notebook for more lectures as Professor Tumi touches on…

• Keeping your man: how Petunia the mistress could be your urban dictionary of sex acts
• The truth about how exactly her hips do, in fact, lie
• Kids: dreadful, expensive, baffling, and prone to swearing
• Parenting: why are you testing us, Lord?
• The childhood joy of giving Jesus money for sandals
• Jehovah’s Witnesses: nobody likes a snitch
• Madiba’s top secret life-support system
• Chatting with the ancestors (blowout) and saints (budget)
• Migrant labour mentality and Christmas Clothes: Joburg’s sweaty secret
• “Criming while white”
• How to (possibly) save the rhino… with toilets
• Swaziland’s flight restriction on witches

And, of course, so much more. The ruling party gets read to filth, our tragic economy is mourned along with our even more tragic protest music and dancing, sexism gets a smackdown, and South Africa’s little struggle with racism is explored. It’s one hour and eleven minutes of local laughter and social commentary.

Watch it now, before it’s on the curriculum and the teacher makes you analyse it.