Guyanese Humour: A Complete Guide to the Vampire Poem That Became a National Treasure
Guyanese humour runs through Creolese, the country’s rich English-based Creole language, and through a body of folklore so vivid and specific that its most famous literary showcase is a poem about beating a blood-sucking supernatural hag to death with a broom — rendered in a form of verse still studied and celebrated as a landmark of national literature more than fifty years after it was first written.
Wordsworth McAndrew and the Language of Ol’ Higue
Wordsworth McAndrew (1936–2008), a BBC-trained radio producer, poet and folklorist, spent decades championing Creolese as a legitimate literary language rather than a lesser dialect fit only for casual conversation. His radio programmes, including “What Else?”, “Creole Meche Meche” and “Proverb for Today,” brought Creolese storytelling into Guyanese living rooms nightly before television arrived, and his 1975 reference work, A Dictionary of Guyanese Folklore, remains a foundational text for anyone studying the country’s oral tradition today. His most celebrated poem, “Ol’ Higue,” dramatises the folk ritual of catching and destroying the ol’ higue — a shape-shifting vampiric witch of Guyanese legend — using a deep, historically grounded form of Creolese that Stabroek News describes as highly familiar to the Guyanese audience, who can identify with it and its characters.
Jumbie Tales and the Comedy of Fear
McAndrew’s poem draws on a much broader ecosystem of Guyanese “jumbie” folklore — supernatural figures including the ole higue, the mischievous bottle-dwelling baccoo, and the moon gazer, a tall spectral figure said to crush unwary travellers between its impossibly long legs — that mixes genuine folk horror with a distinctly comic exaggeration in the telling. The specific, almost slapstick mechanics of catching an ole higue — tricking her into counting grains of rice until dawn breaks, then beating her with a manicole-palm broom kept specifically over the doorway for this purpose — turn a horror tale into something closer to dark comedy in performance, the folkloric equivalent of a cartoon villain undone entirely by their own compulsive greed.
Guyanese Humour vs. Jamaican, Sierra Leonean and Irish Humor
Guyanese humour shares Jamaican humour’s foundation in a single towering folklorist figure fighting to elevate a Creole language into legitimate literature, covered in our guide to Jamaican Humour — McAndrew’s relationship to Creolese mirrors Miss Lou’s relationship to Patois quite directly, right down to the radio broadcasts and the folklore scholarship. It also shares Sierra Leonean humour’s rich trickster and supernatural storytelling tradition, covered in our guide to Sierra Leonean Humour, both traditions treating the supernatural tale as comedy and moral instruction fused into one performance.
Where Guyanese Humour Lives Today
Creolese wordplay and jumbie folklore continue circulating widely across Guyanese social media, where younger creators regularly retell Ole Higue and baccoo stories for new audiences, keeping McAndrew’s core insight alive: that the language most Guyanese people actually speak, day to day, is where the country’s very best stories genuinely live. For the tradition’s musical satire branch, see our companion guide to Guyanese Satire.
Further Reading
For Guyana’s satirical calypso tradition, see our guide to Guyanese Satire. For the performance comedy scene, see Guyanese Comedy. For our coverage of the same comic instincts from the American side, visit our sister publication Bohiney.com.
This guide draws on published sources including Stabroek News and the Guyana Chronicle’s documented history of Wordsworth McAndrew and Guyanese Creolese folklore. It is maintained as part of Prat.uk’s ongoing guide series on national comic traditions, tracing how folk horror and folk comedy so often turn out to be the same story.
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