In interactions, the culture of the participants influences their contributions and interpretations. Stand-up comedians articulate contemporary culture by making mutually manifest cultural beliefs and representations within the performance space, and teach the audience how to use them. This paper investigated how Nigerian stand-up comedians employ cultural assumptions and representations in their performances. Using relevance theory for analysis and seven routines from seven Nigerian stand-up comedians as the data, this study explored how Nigerian stand-up comedians bring shared cultural knowledge into their performances. Nigerian stand-up comedians joke with culture by manipulating shared cultural representations, distorting collective knowledge, manipulating stereotypes and projecting personal beliefs. By joking with cultural beliefs and representations within the performance space, Nigerian stand-up comedians mediate and negotiate what “contemporary culture” should be.
In Nigeria, in relation to the aforesaid functions, everyday citizens and professional humourists use humour to express their expectations from and disappointments in the socio-political leadership of the country. Common Nigerian jokes indicate the country’s travails with ethnicity and failed political leadership. They also enunciate populist perspectives on nationhood, identity and the challenges of everyday living. In spite of the centrality of humour to daily life in Nigeria, scholarly interests in its sociocultural, political, rhetorical, interactional and interpersonal dimensions have been very minimal. According to Obadare (2016), it is as if once something is categorised as humour, it is expunged from any serious interrogations. There are diverse and numerous dimensions of humour in Nigeria, given the country’s extensive and still expanding popular culture landscape. A handful of these dimensions are examined in the papers that make up this special issue of EJHR.
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