Content-Type: text/shitpost

Today, reading about the political history of Zimbabwe, I discovered that Zimbabwe's first president had the astonishing name of “Canaan Banana”.

Reading the Wikipedia article to find out more, I learned:

In 1982, a law was passed forbidding citizens from making jokes about his name.

The citations, to obituaries from The Telegraph and The Economist, check out. The Telegraph adds:

it continued to invite cheap jibes, illustrated later in such headlines as "Man raped by Banana"

That sort of thing never works out. I suppose that if you're a politician, there's only one way to prevent people from mocking you, and that's to arrange for them to be immediately and disproportionately punished. If you can arrange that, you don't need to pass a law, and if you can't (or won't), the law is not going to help.