Comedy of tragedies in Nigerian popular culture

Abstract

The intrinsic consequences of political actions on society become more obvious in a developing state like Nigeria, where consequences of governmental actions or inactions over the years had become tragedies causing severe emotional, mental, and material distress for its citizens, one of which is insecurity. Nigerians have consequently turned to comedy for relief as the country’s comedy content is largely centered on ridiculing politics and inefficiencies of the government. This study, therefore, attempted to ascertain the utility of comedy using as a politically-induced social problem; 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%) followed by negative sentiments (29%) suggesting that most Nigerians remain unperturbed about their tragedies as Comedy remains a tool for comic relief rather than for social change.

Keywords:

• Comedy
• socio-political tragedies
• insecurity
• popular culture
• social media
• Nigeria

Acknowledgements

Appreciations to the owners of YouTube channels used for this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Table 5. Tabular representation showing viewers’ sentiments of Video 5.

Table 6. Tabular representation showing viewers’ sentiments of Video 6.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tunde Adebisi

Tunde Adebisi is a second-year PhD researcher at Ulster University. He is interested in Youth Culture and the key pathways, innovations, or strategies young people in Africa are developing or adopting to mitigate many challenges besieging their society. Probing the self-help activities of African youths may reveal important dynamics of youth culture in Africa.

Henry Nweke-Love

Henry Nweke-Love teaches International Relations at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Landmark University, Nigeria. His areas of research interests include international economic relations, globalization, politics of energy resources, migration studies, and diplomatic practice.

Edidiong Ayeni

Edidiong Ayeni teaches Politics and Public administration at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Landmark University, Nigeria. Her areas of research interests include political participation, public administration in Nigeria, democracy, and democratic practice.

Victor Afinotan

Victor Afinotan holds a first degree in Political Science from the Department of Political Science, Ekiti State University, Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria. He belongs to a regional security outfit in Nigeria.