For Pieter-Dirk Uys, South Africa's best-known comedian (though comic actor, polemicist or provocateur might be a more accurate description), comedy is still the most effective medium for challenging, educating, aggravating, in the name of freedom. ... In Foreign Aids, Uys is at pains to remind his audience that this is not satire for its own sake, that there is a purpose behind his entertaining impersonations. Perhaps unusually for someone with such passionate convictions, Uys is still very funny, and much of the force of his comedy is in his ability to win his audience's sympathy before puncturing their prejudices.



In Brechtian fashion, Uys keeps his make-up and costumes visible on stage and transforms into his characters in front of the audience, keeping up a monologue as he slips on his false nails and eyelashes, slipping in and out of voices and accents to become an array of characters new to his London admirers.



For Uys, satire is about defusing the threatening by exposing its absurdities. ... As long as the Rainbow Nation continues to provide him with this kind of material, Uys will be fighting for his country's future for some time to come.

– Stephane Merritt, The Observer, 8 July 2001