Comedy of Socio-political Tragedies in Nigerian Popular Culture

Abstract

<p>The intrinsic consequences of political actions on the society become more obvious in a developing state like Nigeria. Nigerians have consequently turned to comedy for relief as the country’s comedy content is largely cantered on ridiculing inefficiencies of the government. This study, therefore, attempted to ascertain the utility of comedy using insecurity as a paradigm. Three (3) politically-induced contemporary comedy shows on YouTube were analyzed using Sentiment Analysis in Nvivo and a search on “insecurity” and/or “security” was initiated. The analysis showed a predominance of neutral comments (53%) indicating that most Nigerians remain unperturbed about their tragedies.</p>