FHM Humour: The “Heroic Couplet of Men and Stupidity”

Abstract

FHM launched its first South African issue in 2000, thereby initiating a new readership into the culture of laddish humour. As an articulation of post-apartheid masculine interest, the magazine used humour in different ways to both push back against apartheid and reinforce its core ideologies. Laddishness, it is argued, provides a carnivalesque resistance to the dominant strains of white masculinity deemed to be aspirational by other men’s magazines at the time. Through a bawdy embrace of juvenile folly and foolishness, FHM South Africa seemed to use self-deprecation and effacement as a means of troubling the ambitious materialism and corporate mobility of the neoliberal masculinities promoted in, for instance, GQ. The question is whether laddish humour was a counterfoil to “serious”, neoconservative masculinities, especially in the early years of democracy, or whether it merely served to complicate and further entrench the project of masculine hegemony.