Keywords
cinema
Marxism
grotesque realism
Ousmane Sembene
How to Cite
Abstract
This article explores the use of comedic strategies in Ousmane Sembene’s early cinema as a form of heterodox Marxist resistance to authoritarian and neocolonial power. Focusing on the relatively understudied Borom Sarret (1963) and Niaye (1964), alongside Mandabi (1968), we draw on concepts such as Bakhtin’s “grotesque realism” (1984)—understood as a “physiological” mode of comedy grounded in the disruption and inversion of symbolic order, power, and gender hierarchies—to offer the first systematic analysis of Sembene’s early films within the framework of humour studies. We argue that Sembene’s first comic strategies echo three traditions: Soviet dialectical montage, Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect), and the satirical mode of African theatre (Koteba). Through a plurality of benign, derisive, and dark humour strategies, Sembene functions as a gadfly, mobilising laughter as both an affective and cognitive force that exposes incongruity, conflict, and injustice while affirming popular vitality. His cinematic “grotesque realism”—directed at elites but also rooted in the comic-dramatic tensions and open contradictions of people’s everyday life—reveals the transformative and decolonial potential of humour as a comedic praxis, one that is irreducible to pre-established ideological certainties such as the dichotomies of good people versus evil elites, tradition versus progress, or entertainment cinema versus serious revolutionary cinema.
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