CHAMPIONS! I will never ever forget Saturday, the 19 th of September 2026.
Imagine meeting and working with one of your heroes. This is what I did, and I’ ll never forget it. I had been included in Bafunny Bafunny, which is South Africa’ s National Team of Comedy, captained by Trevor Noah with Eugene Khoza the vice-captain and host. The other comedians for the Durban show were to be Zimbabwean international sensation Learnmore Jonasi and fellow Durbanite Nonto R.
A whole Trevor Noah. I would be performing on the same stage and appear alongside him in the artwork and write-ups. WHAT? My first show was set for Saturday, the 19th of September, at the playTSOGO Globe at Suncoast Casino, with a second performance in Cape Town a week later.
So, I did the only sensible thing a grown man would do with this kind of opportunity. I panicked quietly for an entire week. I spent the days before the show doing something I ' ve never done for a gig in my life: I sat down and rewatched every set of mine I had ever video-recorded and listened back to all my shows I had audiorecorded on my phone. Hours and hours of footage and terrible audio. My set was to be seven minutes, so my mission was to find my
best seven minutes. Not my favourite or my safest, but my best! The seven minutes I could perform on a stage that would later feature Trevor Noah.
I found them. I practised them. I timed them, over and over, as if a bomb would go off if I exceeded seven minutes.
And then, the day before the event, I did what any reasonable, totally-not-spiralling comedian would do: I doubted myself and built an entirely different seven minutes. New set. New jokes. New doubts. I went to bed that night with two completely different versions of myself, and no idea which one was showing up on Saturday.
I woke up on the morning of the show, looked at both sets, and went straight back to my original seven minutes. I recorded it again. And again. And again. Champions, I was a hamster in a cage on the wheel.
The best way for me to explain this feeling would be Comrades Marathon morning. Packed shoulder to shoulder with thousands of strangers, waiting for the cockcrow and that gun. In that pen, there ' s a very specific stillness. Everything you could have done, you ' ve already done. The training ' s banked or it isn ' t. The taper ' s worked or it hasn ' t. All that ' s left is standing there, in the cold, with your own doubt for company, waiting for a noise you can ' t control to tell you it ' s time.
COLUMN
Standing in the wings at the Globe on Saturday night felt exactly like that. Same stillness. Same " it ' s done now, whatever it is." Except instead of a starter ' s gun, I had Eugene Khoza ' s voice calling my name.
Champions, there is a very specific feeling, somewhere between the top of a bungee jump and that Comrades gun going off, where there is genuinely no turning back. I ran onto that stage in front of 2,200 people, and for one full second, I just stood there. Took it in. And then I heard myself shout, completely unplanned: " Good evening, Durban! YOH, there ' s a lot of you!"
And from there, it just flowed, the way a race does once your legs remember what they ' re there for. All that panic, all that rewriting, all those hostage-negotiation rehearsals, gone, replaced by the thing you actually can ' t rehearse: a room full of your own city, laughing with you. My set ran exactly seven minutes and 32 seconds. Thirty-two seconds over. I ' m blaming the laughs.
I keep thinking about that second before I spoke. The pen at Comrades, the wings at the Globe. Different starting lines, same held breath. The whole week of doubt, the two competing sets, the 47 recordings of myself in my kitchen, all of it collapsed into one second of silence in front of 2,200 people, and then just... noise. Laughter. The good kind.
You don ' t get many starts like that. I ' m not going to pretend I wasn ' t terrified. I ' m just glad I was terrified in the right direction. And I get to do it all again in Cape Town. This time in front of 8000 people. I felt nauseous just writing that. Thank you, Bafunny Bafunny and Savanna for believing in me. Unbelievably grateful for every single opportunity I get to live my dream.
I love you. 3-ones. I know I change these farewells every month, but that one is for the Springboks’ RGR win over New Zealand!
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