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Humour Strategies and Acts in Nigerian Stand-Up Comedy
Published 2016Subjects: “…Humour acts…”
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SATIRIC PERFORMATIVITY OF STAND-UP COMEDY IN NIGERIA
Published 2014Subjects: “…Humour…”
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Page will reload when a filter is selected or excluded.- Humour 1 results 1
- Humour acts 1 results 1
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- Humour, which is associated with amusement and laughter, is produced in comic performances, particularly stand-up comedy; and Nigerian stand-up comedians (NSCs) use language to evoke humour and correct social vices. Existing studies have conceptualized humour, its use and sub-genres but have not given adequate attention to intentionality in Nigerian stand-up joking contexts. This study, therefore, investigated humour strategies and context in Nigerian stand-up comedy, in order to identify NSCs’ intentions and how they are realised in their performances. Humour acts, a model, which combined insights from general theory of verbal humour, multimodal theory, pragmatic acts, relevance, and contextual beliefs, was adopted as the theoretical framework. Data were purposively collected from video compact disc recordings of 28 routines of 16 male and three female NSCs in editions of Nite of a thousand laughs and thecomedyberlusconi, which were produced between 2009 and 2013. This is to reflect the gender composition of NSCs, focus on popular practising professional NSCs and avoid analysing their repeated joking stories. The data were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Humour strategies adopted by NSCs involved manipulating cultural assumptions, stereotypes, representations, corresponding concepts and projecting personal beliefs. The humour strategies included jokes, voicing, verbal and nonverbal cues. NSCs’ jokes were categorised into two: the physical appearance class and the socio-political and cultural situations class. NSCs presented jokes with comic and participants-in-the-joke voices. While comic voice was used to articulate comic image, comedians used participants-in-the-joke voice to dissociate themselves from the activity-in-the-joke. They articulated voicing differently through code-switching, reported speech, mimicry and change in pitch. Female NSCs favoured English as the matrix language of their narration, but male comedians primarily used Nigerian Pidgin. Verbal cues in their jokes included joke utterance, participants-in-the-joke, especially the targets of jokes, and activity-in-the-joke. Two kinds of nonverbal cues, physical and prosodic, were found in NSCs’ performances. The physical cues included gestures, which were categorised into iconic, deictic and metaphoric; posture, which was primarily open; dressing, which connoted professionalism, costume or affiliation with the audience; layout/space, which denoted NSCs’ superior conversational role; dance, which mirrored participants-in-the-joke actions; and pauses, which could be a transition relevance place pause or a non-transition-relevance place pause. Prosody was used to articulate comedians’ attitudes and indicate different performance functions: a change in pitch signalled a change in voice, accents were used for emphasising comedians’ focus, whereas intonation enhanced the textuality and musicality of narrations. The NSCs operationalized two contexts: context-in-the-joke and context-of-the-joke. The context-of the- joke consisted in assumptions shared with the audience like shared knowledge of code, shared situational knowledge, and shared cultural knowledge. By making mutually manifest context-in-the-joke in the context-of-the-joke, they instantiated humour acts like commencement, teasing, eliciting, reinforcement, appraisal and informing, which bifurcated into self-praising and self-denigrating. Nigerian stand-up comedians consciously design their humour strategies towards building a positive society. There is, therefore, the need to harness the views projected in the jokes of Nigerian stand-up comedians for national development 1 results 1
- Jokes 1 results 1
- Nigerian stand-up comedy 1 results 1
- Performance theory 1 results 1
- Satire 1 results 1
- Social criticism 1 results 1
- Stand-up comedy 1 results 1
- Stand-up comedy, an oral dramatic performance commonly enacted by a solo-performer before a live audience, is today one of the most popular forms of performance in Nigeria. Studies of this performance genre have tended to examine its humorous and cultural dimensions to the neglect of its satiric import. This study, therefore, examined the satiric and performative devices deployed by selected stand-up comedians in Nigeria with a view to determining the role of stand-up comedy as a veritable source of socio-economic consciousness and a medium of social criticism. Schechner's performance theory and aspects of the Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic theories were used to analyse the embodied behaviours of the performers and the rationale behind their phenomenal popularity with their audiences. Based on their profound employment of satiric and performative styles, four digital video discs containing 20 live recordings of performances were purposively selected for the study. These include Comedy Klinic Ward1 and Comedy Klinic Ward 2 by Godwin Komone?Gordons?14??, and A Nite of a Thousand Laughs Vol 15 and 16 jointly presented by Bright Okpocha (Basket Mouth ?2 ?), Francis Agoda (I Go Dye ?2 ?) and Godwin Komone?2?. These performances were subjected to performance and literary analyses. All the comedians orient to three types of satire, which are Juvenalian and Horatian in orientation, namely, political, social and religious. Basket Mouth evokes political satire, I Go Dye, social satire and Gordons, religious satire. While both Gordon and Basket Mouth utilise unshielded satiric (Horatian) humour, I Go Dye engages indirect satiric (Juvenalian) resources. In A Nite of a Thousand Laughs vol.15and16, Basket Mouth satirises Nigerian politicians, senior civil servants and other top government functionaries who are incompetent and who engage in bribery, corruption and political injustice through witticism, sarcasm, and paradoxical metaphors. Through burlesque, Gordons lampoons religious leaders, religious fanatics and the bourgeoisie in the society who use religion to perpetuate evil through violence and ethnic militia in the society. I Go Dye also criticises family conflicts which demonstrate the catastrophic effects of mindless pursuits of personal interests through farcical procedures. In all these performances, serious national issues are presented through the use of symbolism, caricature, subtle irony and humour. The performances are generally characterised by vocal dexterity, mimesis, blazer costume, zig-zagmovement, subject-constrained facial and bodily gestures, audience-dependent improvisation and interactivity. The stand-up comedies of Basket Mouth, I Go Dye and Gordons, which are a veritable mode of socio-political criticism in Nigeria, rely on nuanced deployment of both performative and linguistic devices which provoke laughter and aesthetic pleasure. Thus, these versions of comic performance function both as a cathartic device through which psychological and physical strains are eased out, and as a tool for critiquing social problems. 1 results 1
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