Life on the Margins: Humour and Post-Independence Experiences in Colin John Warren’s When the Going Gets Tough

Abstract

In his novel When the Going Gets Tough Colin John Warren reveals the poverty, unemployment, struggle for survival, and economic hardships in Malawi of the 1980s and early 90s when the politicians sought to create the impression that people’s lives had improved tremendously. This article examines the ways in which Warren uses humour to engage with issues of day-to-day life in the Malawi society of his day and how he entertains and empowers critical faculties of the reader in his popular novel. The article argues that Warren uses humour as an aspect of style to laugh at human foibles and to entertain his readers while exposing the social ills in the Malawi of his day. It also demonstrates that the novel shows that Wadi Ndogo, one of the central characters, uses humour as a coping mechanism against adversity and as a means of constructing a sense of selfhood. In my discussion of humour in the novel I draw on the superiority and incongruity theories of humour.