Laughing Through The Pain: Multimodal Humor, Power, and Public Healthcare Failure on South African TikTok

Abstract

This study investigates the ways in which multimodal humor on TikTok operates as a critique of institutional failure within the South African public healthcare system. Centering on the satirical series “Metron Phithibhuli”, the analysis addresses two principal research questions: first, how multimodal humor articulates resistance to systemic dysfunction; and second, how power relations are negotiated through processes of carnivalesque inversion. Grounded in Bakhtin’s theorization of the carnivalesque and Scott’s notion of hidden transcripts, the study examines how visual, linguistic, sonic, and embodied semiotic resources converge to parody bureaucratic discourse, destabilize medical authority, and render perceptible the sensory and affective dimensions of everyday encounters with deteriorating healthcare infrastructures. Employing multimodal discourse analysis, the research demonstrates that the series reconfigures patient frustration and vulnerability into shared comedic repertoires that simultaneously reveal the precarity of institutional power and circulate coded forms of dissent among marginalized publics. The findings indicate that digital humor functions not solely as entertainment, but as an affective and epistemic modality of public reasoning through which communities witness, negotiate, and interpret institutional decay. Ultimately, the study argues that “Metron Phithibhuli” exemplifies how South African TikTok users exploit the participatory affordances of the platform to reimagine power relations and foster collective resilience through satire.