Becoming The Muse

Oh My Gosh Its A Lawsuit

Its official, comedian Learnmore Jonasi is in a $27 million lawsuit. He revealed this in a social media video, that he got served. This wasn’t the metaphoric serving of a dish best served cold, but literal papers, on stage, mid-performance… how’s that for a punchline.

Grammy-award winning South African composer Lebo M is is suing the comedian for allegedly damaging his reputation by intentionally misrepresenting the song’s meaning on a podcast and in his standup routine when he translated The Circle Of Life opening chant.

The complaint alleges that Jonasi “presented this as authoritative fact, not comedy,” and shouldn’t get the First Amendment protections afforded to parody and satire that make fun of other artistic works.

"Jonasi’s reduction to 'Look, there’s a lion. Oh my god' is not a simplified translation it is a fabricated, trivializing distortion, meant as a sick joke for unlawful self-profit and destruction of the imaginative and artistic work of Lebo M"

The true meaning of Nants’ ingonyama bagithi Baba is ‘All hail the king, we all bow in the presence of the king.’

“I am officially getting sued for telling a joke.”

Learnmore Jonasi

Nants’ingonyama

The thing is this isn’t the first time the Nants’ingonyama has been subject to popcultural memefication, the most viral, maybe, the most recent definitely.

The opening chant has been misheard as “pink pajamas penguins on the bottom.” and “penguin llama, penguin, I’m a buy ya.” while others have just basically sang gibberish to the tune of the song…

Popculture

An Honest Trailer Video from 2015 makes fun about people not knowing what they are singing and there’s a 2016 parody version which became a viral social media trend about time to wake up and check social media.

In promotional interviews for the 2019 remake of The Lion King, Seth Rogen who plays Pumba and Billy Eichner who plays Timon in the remake pokes at the opening lyrics and how one can get away with saying anything in a foreign language..

 Carl Joshua Ncube has a stand-up comedy set from Showmax where he does a similar joke on the literal translation, “There’s a lion Oh my gosh daddy..“

A quick internet search for the translation of the Circle of Life song will show the opening vocals as a Zulu chant which means “Here comes a lion, father / Oh yes, it’s a lion” Which is also what you get when you put the words in a translation tool.

So why has Lebo M. decided to stand for African intellectual property, cultural dignity and narrative ownership on the world stage?

Could it be a case of the straw that broke the camel’s back? For decades, the composer has seen his body of work’s sacred royal chant reduced to a punchline in comic skits, misheard, missunderstood and massacred.

The more I think about it, if anyone is to be held accountable, maybe its Disney for appropriating a cultural praise chant and setting up pedestal on which they made millions of dollars, without ever adding a footnote or a special bonus feature on the DVD or even a Youtube Video, something that answers the obvious question that would arise when someone heard the Zulu Chant for the first time….

But no, they shrouded it in mystery and let people imagine what they would, and the joke wrote itself.

Maybe I am just biased against Disney because another song from The Lion King, The Lion Sleeps Tonight was originally created by Solomon Linda, who died without ever receiving a royalty cheque, although his descendants started getting compensation in February 2006 with an arrangement that was set to end in 2017 conveniently before the Lion King remake.

In the court of public opinion, who is in the wrong? The Composer or The Comedian?