Zimbabwean comedian Learnmore Jonasi certainly didn’t anticipate his punchline to turn out so serious. One minute, he’s doing what comedians do best: experimenting with concepts, twisting meanings, and bringing in laughs. The next thing he knows, he is facing a $27 million lawsuit.
During a podcast and a stand-up bit, Jonasi took a shot at one of the most iconic moments from The Lion King. The iconic opening chant from Circle of Life, “Nants’ingonyama bagithi Baba”, Jonasi simplified it a lot. According to his joke, the powerful Zulu chant basically meant: “Look, there’s a lion. Oh my God.”
Everyone laughed. Then came the lawsuit. The reaction went viral at first, but later it turned legal.
Lebohang Morake, the Grammy-winning composer behind that very song, could not see the funny side of it and took serious issue with it. And not quietly. He filed a lawsuit: over $20 million in damages and another $7 million in penalties. Just like that, a joke was turned into a $27 million problem.
This is where all of it becomes even more bizarre. Jonasi was not personally informed. Not via email or some silent legal notice. It was on stage that he was served midway through his performance. In front of an actual audience. His reaction was very real. “Oh [explicit]… I just got served.”
For a moment, the room didn’t know whether to laugh or stay silent.
Jonasi isn’t pretending everything is okay. He is well aware of the challenges he faces. Rather than hiding, he is embracing it in the only way he knows how. He appeared online in a T-shirt which had a cartoon image of him raising a lion. Smiling, but not completely joking. “I don’t have 27M 😂😂😂”
It may sound funny, but there is something real below the surface. Merch is being sold, and a GoFundMe campaign has been created that has already raised more than $10,000. This is no longer just content.
From Morake’s perspective, this is not about humor. It is about culture. He believes that the song was misinterpreted. Something deeply steeped in tradition and significance was reduced to a throwaway line. And for him, that crosses a limit. “He’s insulting my work that has been inspirational to people around the world for over 50 years, then insulting my culture.”
Jonasi, on the other hand, tells a different story. He believes there was no malicious intent. Simply a joke that got viral. Jonasi clarified, saying, “Personally, I had no idea [the lyrics] had a deeper meaning.”
He even tried to fix things. Reached out but to no avail, with Morake calling Jonasi “an idiot.”
Nobody really planned for it to go this way. But words were spoken, and feelings got hurt. And before anyone could stop it, the whole thing had turned into something very ugly.
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