Introduction: The realisations of joke performances are subtly and richly encrusted in linguistic and discourse strategies. In a multilingual setting, stand-up comedians need to negotiate the linguistic code(s) to convey their jokes. This study analyses how Nigerian stand-up comedians negotiate codes and voice within the performance space. Although studies have identified the use of code alternation in stand-up performances, the pragmatic and performance functions of code selection in Nigerian stand-up comedy have not been examined. This study, therefore, attempts to fill this vacuum by analysing code switching, selection and voice alternation in purposively selected routines of four Nigerian stand-up comedians. Inputs from functional approaches to code switching and code selection, the concept of voice, and the notions of context and contextualisation are key to this study. Nigerian stand-up comedians adopt two contexts: context-of-the-joke and context-in-the-joke, which are synchronous with the primary and secondary narrative levels in the performances. Selecting and alternating codes within a routine is a strategy which indicates who speaks in the narration of jokes.
Introduction: The realisations of joke performances are subtly and richly encrusted in linguistic and discourse strategies. In a multilingual setting, stand-up comedians need to negotiate the linguistic code(s) to convey their jokes. This study analyses how Nigerian stand-up comedians negotiate codes and voice within the performance space. Although studies have identified the use of code alternation in stand-up performances, the pragmatic and performance functions of code selection in Nigerian stand-up comedy have not been examined. This study, therefore, attempts to fill this vacuum by analysing code switching, selection and voice alternation in purposively selected routines of four Nigerian stand-up comedians. Inputs from functional approaches to code switching and code selection, the concept of voice, and the notions of context and contextualisation are key to this study. Nigerian stand-up comedians adopt two contexts: context-of-the-joke and context-in-the-joke, which are synchronous with the primary and secondary narrative levels in the performances. Selecting and alternating codes within a routine is a strategy which indicates who speaks in the narration of jokes.
Introduction: While George Lamming portrays paternal identity, alienation and exile as
thematic preoccupations of In the Castle of my Skin and Season of Adventure,
father absence remains a major concern in his artistic depictions of fatherhood in
these narratives. The phenomenon of father absence creates a void which the
mother must additionally fill, and the presence of this void provokes as well as
fosters androgyny. Androgyny is the state of having traits of both genders and
refers to the opposites within. Thus, the two texts bring the notion of the synthesis
of the masculine and feminine principles in the human psyche fully to the fore.
The key mother characters in both novels exhibit the image of Carl Jungs
Father Archetype which is categorised as stern, powerful and controlling.
Reading these mother characters as female fathers forces the attention from
them as women and mothers, hence, radically unsettling the conventional notion
of who a father is. Using Jungs psychoanalytic concept of anima/animus as
framing and analytical tools, this paper challenges the stereotypical portrait of
the hegemonic male parent and furnishes an option for a re-envisioning of
masculinity and fatherhood in the context of parental authority, role performance
and conduct. It construes, arguably, that the abilities of the mother characters to
bear and rear children, cross gender role boundaries and compensate for their
offspring's absent fathers, are irrefutable. In this way, both novels do not just
recommend themselves as masculinist texts, but they also show how the mother
characters qualify as fathers, albeit, female fathers.
Introduction: The undercurrents of the inferior female and the marginalised mother which are considerably discernible in Oil Man of Obange and Purple Hibiscus alert the reader to the complex and, often, objectionable practices which continue to sustain patriarchal ideologies and encourage their related female-suffocating philosophies to thrive within a typical family unit. The expression, "female-suffocation" as deployed in this paper refers to the stifling of female productivity, talents and creative energies which, predictably, result when females attempt strict conformity to patriarchal ideals of normative femininity. Drawing on the conceptual framework of the theory of feminism as espoused by Akachi Ezeigbo, this chapter argues that while the two main mother characters in the selected texts are maginalised by the general patriarchal system of their individual environments, however, they fail to utilise the necessary emancipation tools of sensitiveness, wisdom, self-improvement and resilience. Therefore, by wholly accepting the socio-familial constructions of femaleness which devalue them, they unwittingly or otherwise, encourage their husbands' unrestrained hegemonic stance. In this manner, the characters yield to self-tyranny and ultimately become both the victimisers and the victimised. Consequently, they do not only promote and prolong the legacy of gender inequality but also remain complicit in their own devaluations, indignities and afflictions.
Introduction: The Pilgrim Unbound.” Wreaths for a Wayfarer: An Anthology of Poems in Honour of Pius Adesanmi, Eds. Nduka Otiono and Uchechukwu Umezurike.
Introduction: This article explores the comedic construction of national identity in Nigerian stand-up comedy. By national identity, I mean collective perspectives on the sociopolitical and cultural realities of postcolonial Nigeria. While critical discourse analysis provided the framework for interpretation, data was derived from purposively sampled recorded videos of Nigerian stand-up comedians. Such collective perspectives are constructed when a comedian indexes cultural/political events and situations in a monologue. The investigation reveals four identity mapping strategies: performing (non)theatrical identities, using the comedy voice to indicate multiple identities, constructing a trickster identity and constructing a resilient spirit identity. These strategies entail foregrounding assumptions about the Nigerian state and using language in a strategic way to indicate sociopolitical and cultural realities.
Introduction: This essay examines the manner in which Nigerian stand-up comedians evoke gendered concepts in their routines. Specifically, it analyses how gender is manifested and enacted in linguistic expressions, which literally do not have gender undertones. Three strategies for instantiating such gendered conceptualization are identified, privatization of meaning through lexical contextual adjustment, creating ad hoc conceptual coherence in the monologues and foregrounding pragmatic presuppositions on ge
Introduction: The bond between language and ideology has caught the attention of discourse analysts.
Investigating this bond, discourse analysts have further demonstrated that everyday interactions
are embedded in and with different ideologies. Likewise, the performance of humour is motivated by the interlocutors’ ideological inclinations. On the strength of these propositions, this
study attempts a critical analysis of the ideologies in selected Nigerian stand-up comedy routines (NSC), with particular reference to Fairclough and Wodak’s notions of ideology in discourse. Routines were purposively selected from editions of “Night of a Thousand Laughs”
(NTL), the earliest stand-up event and a stand-up comedy road show in Nigeria, so as to focus
on the performances of practicing and professional stand-up comedians in the country. Two
categories of ideologies were found in NSC routines: the first relates to the art of comedy performance while the second relates to the country’s sociocultural context. In the first category,
the comedians project stand-up comedy as a “dignified” profession, while in the second, they
draw from sociocultural beliefs in order to project their ideologies about gender, ethnicity and
the political class.
Introduction: Studies on stand-up comedy and jokes have noted that context plays a major role in the generation and interpretation of jokes and humorous routines. However, these studies do not formalize the concept and what constitute it in joke exchanges. Focusing on Nigerian stand-up comedy, this study is aimed at conceptualizing and describing the contexts that could be found in joking exchanges. The study proposes two types: context-of-the-joke and context-in-the-joke. The context-of-the-joke is grounded in shared beliefs that exist between the participants-of-the-joke. The context-in-the-joke is characterized by features such as joke utterance, participants-in-the-joke (most especially the target) and activity-in-the-joke among others. These features make up the contextualization cues that the participants-of-the-joke (both the joke teller and recipient) use in joke generation and interpretation.
Introduction: Abstract 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.
Introduction: 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.
Introduction: Studies on humour have acknowledged that responses to jokes are important aspects of a
joking exchange; however, investigation of joke recipients’ responses has received little
attention from humour scholars. Moreover, the linguistic investigations of jokes have been
limited to native speakers’ contexts, leaving ESL contexts out. Therefore, this study examines
readers’ responses to a genre of jokes in Nigerian online spheres, Akpos jokes, with a view to
characterising their forms and functions. Akpos jokes are humorous narratives created
around an imaginary character called Akpos. Jokes are randomly collected from a blog and
readers’ responses were derived from a Facebook page in which Akpos jokes are published.
Using computer paralanguage and language mixing in writing the jokes and the responses,
the jokes and the reactions to them mirror the online and the Nigerian ESL contexts in which
they are situated. Readers use their responses to indicate affiliation, disaffiliation with the
joke, or to introduce something that has nothing to do with the subject of the joke or humour.
Readers also use their responses to argue for and/or against the humorousness the jokes.
Introduction: The main objective of this article was to identify and analyse humorous strategies found in Nigerian stand-up comedy. Particularly, the illustrations were taken from the routines of a popular Nigerian stand-up comedian, I Go Dye. First of all, a case was made for humorous meanings. How humorous meanings were achieved in stand-up comedy performance was then explained. Analysis showed that I Go Dye, as a Nigerian stand-up comedian, adopted exaggeration, naming and labelling, self-praising, self-denigrating and retorts as strategies for expressing humorous meanings.
Introduction: The aim of this paper is to characterise stand-up performance as an activity type and
explore ways through which the participants in a stand-up comedy performance,
especially the stand-up comedians, manipulate the parameters of an activity type so as
to achieve their interactional goals. Data comprised extracts from routines of randomly
selected six Nigerian stand-up comedians in a recorded video. Analysed routines
indicated that the participants’ goal and institutional identities influenced how they
manipulated the parameters like allowable contribution and interpersonal maxims; for
instance, the audience made use heckling to negotiate allowable contribution so as to
indicate that their interactional goal was unfulfilled while stand-up comedians made use
self-denigrating motif so as to elicit laughter and reduce the interactional distance
between themselves and the audience.
Introduction: The goal of this study is to analyse the use of mimicry in Nigerian stand-up comedy. Mimicry is conceived as a strategy in the routines of Nigerian stand-up comedians, who adopt two kinds of mimicry acts: verbal and nonverbal. For comedians to use mimicry, they have to draw from collective beliefs they share with their audience. On their part, the audience find a mimicry act humorous because it relates to their background assumptions. Data for analysis comprised four routines of four Nigerian stand-up comedians purposively selected because of the comics’ extensive use of mimicry. Mimicry activates background assumptions, distorts the collective representation of the target and could be used for articulating voice in stand-up performances.
Introduction: The concept of name and naming is not just a tool for constructing identity; it is an important signification system in African cosmology. It is imbued with the people's perception of life and being. This explains why certain individuals who are discontented with their names either change them or adopt nicknames to reflect their sense of dignity, reinvented individuality and humanity. This paper explored nicknaming as a signification tool for identity reinvention from a socio-semiotic dimension. Data for the study was sampled purposively from students' halls of residence at the University of Ibadan and analysed using insights from socio-semiotic theory of sign. The use of irony in names was observed to be a common tool for reinvention, especially with those instances where the nicknames were given as derogatory labels to redesign the identities of the concerned personalities. It was observed also that others use nicknames to project a sense of reinvented self, especially in instances where the nicknames were the creations of the individuals concerned.
Introduction: The primary focus of this paper is to apply Discourse Type theory to stand-up comedy. To
achieve this, the study postulates two contexts in stand-up joking stories: context of the joke
and context in the joke. The context of the joke, which is inflexible, embodies the collective
beliefs of stand-up comedians and their audience, while the context in the joke, which is
dynamic, is manifested by joking stories and it is made up of the joke utterance, participants in
the joke and activity/situation in the joke. In any routine, the context of the joke interacts with
the context in the joke and vice versa. For analytical purpose, the study derives data from the
routines of male and female Nigerian stand-up comedians. The analysis reveals that stand-up
comedians perform discourse types, which are specific communicative acts in the context of
the joke, such as greeting/salutation, reporting and informing, which bifurcates into self-praising and self denigrating.
Introduction: Rivalry and enmity are phenomena that seem to have permeated the Nigerian music industry, especially the hip hop genre. In this regard, Nigerian hip hop artistes employ language to demonstrate their superiority over one another. A strategy employed by Nigerian hip hop artistes to assert their differences and superiority is the pragmatic use of pronouns. Here, pronouns are said to do more than achieve coherence.The paper investigates how Nigerian hiphop artistes use pronouns to achieve pragmatic meanings. Nigerian hip hop artistes employ pronouns to project their individuality and personality; identify and solidarise with their fans, and map boundary and polarity with their rivals. The paper submits that, while using pronouns, the Nigerian hip hop artistes express a sense of rivalry and enmity, individuality and personality; identity and solidarity.
Introduction: This paper, "Masculinities and Authority: Who has Authority in the Home?" examines the concept of authority as the key area in Masculinities
Introduction: This paper argues that one's dignity as "masculine" and access to the competence and prerogatives associated with it are contingent upon the justification of male peers.
Introduction:
This paper, “Masculinities, Hierarchical Tyranny of Traits, and Statuses examines Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Arrow of God (1964) and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of
Motherhood (1979), and Second Class Citizen (1974), and the Slave Girl (1977). The Methodology
adopted is anchored on aspects of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory and Ideology in
Marxist theory. In spite of the generally held views that gender is both biologically innate and
socio-culturally determined; this paper argues that there is a psycho-social conspiracy between
traits and statuses to tyrannize the masculine subject in the novels examined here. The study
reveals that the desire of the masculine subject to comply with social-cultural expectations in traits
and roles attached to statuses usually creates unmanageable conflicts and crises in the intra- and
inter-personal relationships of the masculine subject. The study concludes that no one male
character can be hegemonic in every attribute or status. Therefore, every male deserves respect
in any area he is very successful but the society is unforgiving and will not permit this respect.
Based on these findings, the study recommends that there is need to re-examine the global view
that hegemonic and subordinated hierarchies of masculinities can be determined in absolute
terms.
Introduction:
This paper, “Masculinities, Hierarchical Tyranny of Traits, and Statuses examines Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Arrow of God (1964) and Buchi Emecheta’s The Joys of
Motherhood (1979), and Second Class Citizen (1974), and the Slave Girl (1977). The Methodology
adopted is anchored on aspects of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic theory and Ideology in
Marxist theory. In spite of the generally held views that gender is both biologically innate and
socio-culturally determined; this paper argues that there is a psycho-social conspiracy between
traits and statuses to tyrannize the masculine subject in the novels examined here. The study
reveals that the desire of the masculine subject to comply with social-cultural expectations in traits
and roles attached to statuses usually creates unmanageable conflicts and crises in the intra- and
inter-personal relationships of the masculine subject. The study concludes that no one male
character can be hegemonic in every attribute or status. Therefore, every male deserves respect
in any area he is very successful but the society is unforgiving and will not permit this respect.
Based on these findings, the study recommends that there is need to re-examine the global view
that hegemonic and subordinated hierarchies of masculinities can be determined in absolute
terms.