The show is literally the title, Just Jokes. In an exclusive interview with IOL, Yaaseen Barnes discussed his upcoming show at the Homecoming Centre in District Six, scheduled for August 28 and 29.
The premise is “I’m not here to change your mind. I’m just here to change your mood,” he tells IOL.
A diagnosis that helped build a career
Operating without any formal theatrical training or university degrees, Barnes notes his formal qualifications: “I only have a matric. I’ve made a career out of just figuring it out.”
Barnes did not take a conventional route into stand-up comedy, nor did he possess a lifelong ambition to hold a microphone. “Strangely enough, I did not grow up with stand-up. I never wanted to be a stand-up comedian until the day I did stand up for the first time.
“I watched stand-up growing up, but it was always the alternative boys, the nerds. Steven Wright, the one-liner guy. Demetri Martin is also a one-liner, but also a nerd. And also Jimmy Carr again, where words were the trick.”
After his adult ADHD diagnosis in 2019, Barnes began incorporating elements from the comedy he admired into his work. Over the years, his journey navigating his identity has helped him develop his own genuine, emerging voice.
After being diagnosed in 2019, clarity was brought to many years before, when he recalls, “I could not keep a story for long. If I start talking for long, I just stop talking like I can’t hold it together. The sentence just ends. So for that reason, I learned how to play with words.”
Barnes learned the mechanics of language early on, later perfecting his brevity during the early character-constrained days of Twitter, now X, where he holds the crown as the Prince of one-liners.
To stay true to his rigorous professional standards and creative output, Barnes relies on deep structural discipline. He treats his smartphone Notes application as a workspace, creating a dedicated log each month to capture observations, lines, and emerging concepts.
“Every time I think of a thing, if I speak to someone, or I get an idea, I just go put it down. Then throughout the month I’ll look through it and go, ‘This is the thing, I must do this’.”
This operational rigour extends into long-range planning, where every November and December, he restarts a bucket list for the following year that is fully completed by April.
“If you put it out in the world, the world will bring it,” he says.
The core of his work is a rooted understanding of humour and why we, as human beings, need to escape our daily misery. Humour is not a polite entertainment, but an indispensable utility against literal psychological exhaustion.
“It’s just that there’s no better feeling when you laugh and at the end of the laugh, when your body just goes, ‘ah’,” he says. And I agreed; strangely, a few nights ago I found myself in one of these moments while watching a movie, and to my agreement with Yaaseen, the connection resonated.
In a world weighed down by economic anxiety and relentless bad news, Barnes champions laughter as an immediate escape.
“When you laugh, it’s the cheapest holiday; you don’t think about anything else other than the thing that made you laugh. And I go, I feel like in today’s world and in today’s economy, the quickest holiday you can have is a laugh”.
Rooted in his observations of human behaviour, this mindset highlights how easily small frustrations can sour one’s whole outlook. Barnes dissects the ridiculousness of everyday annoyances remarkably.
He tells me a story of how one day a taxi nearly cut him off the road; it offered a wild ride in the mind, and yet he connected the nudge to a much larger outlook on his life in digital doomsday.
“On my way to work, a taxi will cut me off, and it’ll make me late for work, and then just that taxi cutting me off makes my whole day horrible,” he notes. People hold on to that feeling, letting a brief traffic infraction bleed into their professional stresses and even family friction.”
Looking at society and culture retrospectively, Barnes questions how we have allowed “a small moment to take away the whole joy of your day”. Barnes self-replies instinctively: “We shouldn’t let misery hold us for so long. Sadness can be in you, but misery is something we need to get rid of as soon as possible.”
To safeguard his creative energy from the draining realities of administrative and financial logistics, Barnes entrusted these tasks to his wife, who now serves as his operational CEO.
“My wife runs the show now,” Barnes explains that there has been a shift in his professional structure with his wife being the CEO.
“She does the planning and the admin. The things that I’m not built to do,” Barnes acknowledges of his wife, Na’eemah Masoet.
“As an artist, your self-worth goes up and down, and she will say, ‘This is the price you must charge,’ and I go, ‘Okay, you’re the boss, you make the choice'”
“When there is someone who understands what I can’t and understands invoices and all those things, by all means I’ll give it off to her to sort.”
Comedian Yaaseen Barnes with his wife and “operational CEO,” Na’eemah Masoet.
South Africa a country of ‘comedians’
In the South African landscape, historically and today, humour should already carry the weight of its historical significance.
“If you look at Mandela, if you look at Tutu, all of our favourite people that we’ve had in this country, they were all funny,” Barnes says.
This connective thread extends into South Africa’s everyday survival. More profound words were on show and flaunted, connecting his understanding of the reality of it all: be present and laugh. For if there are a few givens in life, it’s a good laugh.
“Your favourite teachers are funny, your favourite chiefs, your favourite pastors, and Sheikhs. They are who the funny ones are; it’s how you remember, it’s how you connect, and it’s how we keep the bonds tighter. Once you laugh, you remember it”.
The admirable aspect of speaking to Barnes was when he shared his sentiments about his own community, one he has navigated throughout his life and to which he remains rooted, with a strong sense of self-awareness of who he is within the space he accounts for himself.
“If you know struggle, you know happiness. It is why people of colour laugh so hard, because we understand that this happiness won’t be forever, so I must make the most out of this. It’s the thing of standing up while you’re laughing, and you must touch someone else while laughing. It’s that feeling of, like, it’s appreciating happiness.”
Barnes goes on to share his philosophy behind laughing. It is that sharing laughter is an act of giving.
“My firm belief is that if you share, first, if you share, you don’t lose. Nothing that you share, you will have less of, even if it’s money or food, and especially laughter. If you share laughter, I think you get more laughs. Then you get more of everything else”.
When dissecting his identity, Barnes opts for a nuanced self-definition: “I’m a comedian who is Muslim, not necessarily a Muslim comedian. We come from multiple worlds. No one is just in their small world the whole time.”
He rejects being pigeonholed into a singular cultural box, noting his awareness of broader trends, news, and music. “While I am a Muslim and I’m a comedian, I’m not a Muslim comedian only because I don’t do only Muslim jokes. I’m South African, so I tell South African jokes. I’m Coloured, so I do Coloured jokes”.
When material that pushes boundaries unites aunties, uncles, and youth of all backgrounds in shared laughter, it validates his belief that once a joke is universally understood, it becomes a collective possession.
“We come from multiple worlds. No one is just in their small world the whole time,” he tells IOL.
His Homecoming Centre show features a show on Saturday, August 29, at the District Six Homecoming Centre.
Barnes is using a Sunday matinee at 4pm to offer a more relaxed, stress-free experience for audience members. To uphold his artistic integrity and consistent creative results, Barnes utilises a system of profound organisational order.
For Yaaseen Barnes, the live stage remains an unmatched realm of freedom, laughter, silences, just jokes and truth and in a digital era choked by noise, comment sections, and artificial posturing, the live room is where he thrives without compromise.
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