Izuu Nwankwọ

University of Toronto, Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, Faculty Member

Gombe State University, Gombe State, Nigeria, English, Faculty Member

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien, Post-Doc

Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Igbariam Campus, Theatre Arts, Faculty Member

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His research interests include African and African diaspora popular culture and performance.
Supervisors: Professor Chukwuma Okoye, Dr. Daria Tunca, Professor Femi Osofisan, Professor Benedicte Ledent, and Professor Matthias Krings

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Oludamini Ogunnaike

University of Virginia

Saheed Aderinto

Florida International University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Babette Babich

Fordham University

Brett Mills

University of East Anglia

Vayos Liapis

Open University of Cyprus

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Nathaniel Stern

University of Wisconsin Milwaukee

Jeanne-Marie Jackson

Johns Hopkins University

Anna Tabaki

National & Kapodistrian University of Athens

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Papers by Izuu Nwankwọ

Introduction: On the limits and prospects of African humour

Critical African Studies, 2024

Humour has been described ‘a socio-cultural construct, seen as an attitude or world view that all... more Humour has been described ‘a socio-cultural construct, seen as an attitude or world view that allows one to perceive and react to the world in ways that are forbearing (sic) and lenient’ (Ruch and Köhler Citation1998, 204). It is viewed as ‘a subset of the broader category of play’ (McGhee Citation2017, 219), and as ‘an anthropological constant, universal and common to all cultures’ (Pérez-Aranda et al. Citation2019; Scott Citation2007). It is a veritable tool for socialisation which has elicited overabundant interdisciplinary enquiries for very diverse purposes. For instance, it has been studied for its usefulness in coping with and adapting to pain (Pérez-Aranda et al. Citation2019; Scott Citation2007), relieving and handling stress (Nezlek and Derks Citation2001; Plester Citation2009), and its application as a means of being politically engaged (Doona Citation2020; English Citation1994; Obadare Citation2016). It can further be said that humour ‘rests on difference (of position, assumptions, and expectations), yet also on similarity’ (Dunphy and Enig Citation2010, 25), and that it plays a crucial role in helping individuals, especially those that are historically disadvantaged, tell their stories and vent their feelings. With humour, such previously minoritised groups become empowered to concurrently avow and disavow (Limon Citation2000) choices, notions, beliefs, stereotypes, and fears. It possesses the ability to connect and disrupt, foreground incongruences and insults, and help build bridges across cultures and diverse values/identities. Also, it can either illuminate or pulverise embedded social structures and as such can be inclusive and selectively exclusive. ...

Dismantling Colonial Laughter: Tracing Emergent African Diaspora Stand-Up Comedy in French and German

Journal of Black Studies, 2024

This study redirects attention from English-speaking African diaspora stand-up productions to Fre... more This study redirects attention from English-speaking African diaspora stand-up productions to French and German language expressions of purposively selected comedians with recent immigration history from Africa performing within mainland Europe. Through a socio-historical interrogation of specific colonial histories and joke themes, the paper comparatively explores the French language stage acts of Fary Lopez, Samia Orosemane (France) and Cécile Djunga (Belgium and France) and the German language works of Dave Davis (Germany), Charles Nguela (Switzerland), and Soso Mugiraneza (Austria). The aim is to show how the individuated colonial histories of the nations in which these comics reside and the chronicles of their relations with Africa(ns) and Black peoples feature in joke formulations and satiric jibes of the jokesters. Through these explorations, this essay studies how stand-up comedy’s transformative power challenges societal norms and attitudes using the backdrop of the concurrently heterogeneous and dissimilar colonial histories of the African continent and its diasporas. Moreover, through its focus on non-English expressions, it presents the unique intersections of language, “race,” ethnicity and colonial histories, as well as the geographic and linguistic spread of the African diaspora beyond European nations with direct colonial contact with the continent. Thus, the enquiry posits joke performances as platforms for cultural expression and critique as well as a site within which African peoples negotiate their presence in non-African environments.

What It Is to Perform, Not Tell, Jokes: Toward a Manifesto of Stand-Up Research

This essay makes a case for studying stand-up comedy with theatre analytical tools by highlighti... more This essay makes a case for studying stand-up comedy with theatre analytical tools by highlighting its performative nature and discussing how body interactivities within its enact- ment produce meaning and humor beyond what comedians say. It provides an alternate reading of stand-up comedy to the prevalence of linguistic evaluations, which often conflate stand-up art with other comedic traditions that are not performed. I argue that such perspectives often downplay the co-participation of the audience and what comedians do with their bodies. Cit- ing joke samples from three African diasporic comedians—Gina Yashere, Urzila Carlson, and Hoodo Hersi performing in the US, New Zealand, and Canada, respectively—I explore the use of the body, audience involvement, and other performed aspects from which hilarity is derived.

Humour and Politics in Africa

Politics, Jokes and Power in Africa: The View From Stand-Up Comedy

African Studies, 2024

The history of stand-up comedy in Africa has often been tied to developments in popular culture, ... more The history of stand-up comedy in Africa has often been tied to developments in popular culture, language, and performance. In this article, I take a different perspective by identifying the interactivities of politics and comedy, and how the actions, endorsements, and even censure of national leaders across different nations buoyed up stand-up performances on the continent. With specific examples from different countries, the explications in this paper show how the (in)actions of political leadership in Africa served as fodder for laughter elicitation – in Kenya, with Daniel arap Moi’s capitulation and Mwai Kibaki’s lethargy; in Nigeria, with Olusegun Obasanjo’s comedian-president posture as well as the gaffes of Patience Jonathan; and in South Africa, with Jacob Zuma’s unending drama until his resignation. These situations are equally contrasted with the experiences in Uganda, Egypt and Rwanda, where political censure is variously rife.

Yabbing and Wording

Incongruous liaisons: Routes of humour, insult and political (in)correctness in Nigerian stand-up jokes

The European Journal of Humour Research, Jul 28, 2019

Nigerian humourists have always told risible jokes within myriad pre-colonial satirical acts. Fol... more Nigerian humourists have always told risible jokes within myriad pre-colonial satirical acts. Following on their heels in recent times, stand-up comedy has emerged as one of the most prevalent art forms in the country, providing entertainment through laughter-eliciting jokes. Accompanying this development also, is an increasing attitude of offence-taking which has seen post-mortem criticisms and castigation of comedians. Not much scholarly attention has been paid to this menacing backlash against ostensible "inappropriate jokes" and the fact that stand-up humour is primarily derived from causing offence. What happens is that joke performances take place within liminal moments, which allows for audience's suspension of offence and the performer's unwritten consent to stay within socially accepted bounds of good humour. Through performance analysis, this paper sets out to study how four randomly selected Nigerian comics-I Go Dye, Basket Mouth, Klint da Drunk and AY-deploy selfcensorship in averting offence within their joke routines. The essay finds that despite the specificities of stand-up arts, which place peculiar demands on artists' joking capabilities especially in its dependence on courting audiences' participation and familiarity, these comedians have devised specific means through which they circumvent the stringency of eliciting mirth through insult. Hence, their jokes and those of others who have learned their trade well, often elicits hilarity rather than offence.

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Preamble

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Humour and Politics in Africa: An Overview

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

The Last Laugh?

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Beyond the Symbolic: Humour in Action

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Between Jokes: Silence and Ambiguities within Humour

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Multiple For(u)ms of Resistance: Humour, Agency and Power

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Ambivalence in the stand-up acts of Nigeria’s Klint da Drunk and Mr Paul

Journal of the African Literature Association, May 4, 2022

In a progressively permissive world, stand-up art is experiencing repressions and censure for its... more In a progressively permissive world, stand-up art is experiencing repressions and censure for its dependence on potentially politically incorrect jokes. Stand-up’s primary purpose is to instigate laughter, but its greatest ambivalence is that its mirth comes primarily from abuse/insult. Through performance analyses of the humor acts of Mr Paul and Klint da Drunk, this paper discusses their use of non-traditional stand-up forms, underscoring how these jokesters balance offence and abuse, and the complexities of being different. Specifically, Mr Paul builds his jokes around non-sequitur meandering narratives riddled with implausible claims, while Klint enacts the stock character of a drunk who depends heavily on heckling, direct insults, and disparaging jokes for the evocation of mirth. Though not using the more established joke-telling patterns, these two still elicit laughter, entertain audiences, and provide politically charged critiques of the harsh and unsavory socio-political conditions in Nigeria, albeit conveyed through the agency of humor.

Purple Hibiscus and theme of moderation as a metaphor in the evolution of contemporary Nigerian fiction

International Journal of Pedagogy, Innovation and New Technologies, Dec 30, 2018

The article reflects the results of the empirical study of the problem of the students’ spiritual... more The article reflects the results of the empirical study of the problem of the students’ spiritual values formation. The author offers determining indicators, structural components and criteria of high, efficient, medium and low levels of the personality spiritual values. The researcher offers a range of methods aimed at establishing the levels of spiritual values formation in students studying at the college. According to the experiment results the researcher has developed educational program in which effective forms, methods and means of upbringing spiritual values in conditions of a student group were determined. The author emphasizes the importance of pedagogical support and encouragement of every student to spiritual self-improvement. The results comparison of summative and control experiment levels have evidenced the effectiveness of pedagogical means focused on spiritual growing of student youth.

Re-engaging master narratives: Re-encountering Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Oct 26, 2018

Just like Aimé Césaire's Une tempête, Esiaba Irobi's Sycorax is a parallel narrative of Prospero'... more Just like Aimé Césaire's Une tempête, Esiaba Irobi's Sycorax is a parallel narrative of Prospero's encounter with characters of other skin colour and gender. Both plays, like many others, represent successful efforts in countering the hitherto master narrative, Shakespeare's The Tempest. They speak back to and destabilize it through different versions that, at once, query and mitigate Shakespeare's. Using the idea of counter-narrative and writing back, Sycorax is interrogated here through textual analysis and selective close reading with a view to examining its exhumation and foregrounding of the silences, elisions, and under-or misrepresentations of The Tempest. With a highly provocative diction-Irobi's language is sexually explicit, violent, abusive, and unsettlingand experimental, somewhat postmodernist, dramatic structure, Sycorax intertextually dramatizes the issues of race, enslavement, colonial domination, migration, and gender as well as sexuality. Its relocation of action from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean; resurrection of Sycorax; Caliban's able-bodiedness, revolutionary zeal, vociferousness and change of name to Caribbean; Ariel's piebald sexuality as a bisexual hermaphrodite with the liberty to jump from Prospero's bed to Sycorax's; and the questioning of Shakespeare himself to answer for his (mis)representations; all exemplify Irobi's redirection of action and the emergence of new protagonists out of the characters of The Tempest. This article sees Sycorax as part of the work of formerly-colonized writers and artists now engaged in the process of redefining their people, identity, and cultural realities in the face of the preponderant assault of more powerful cultures and narratives that often garble them. Irobi's politically incorrect, troubling, and highly charged play thus expresses the angst of finding oneself vilified simply on the basis of race, body, or sexuality.

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Joke performance mechanics in Nigerian stand-up comedy

South African Theatre Journal, May 4, 2021

Stand-up comedy in Nigeria today has become not only big business but popular entertainment. It i... more Stand-up comedy in Nigeria today has become not only big business but popular entertainment. It is, indubitably, one of the most obvious of the entertainment industry boom the country has recorded since the 1990s. The overwhelming patronage it has received transcends the deep ethnoreligious divisions within Nigeria and has ensured the prosperity of its practitioners. In this paper, through a histo-cultural perspective, I interrogate the performance ‘mechanics’ of the stand-up renditions of select Nigerian jokesters. This inquiry takes the perspective of theatre and performance studies, highlighting similarities and differences, and emphasizing how stand-up comedy straddles the two disciplines. The stage ‘mechanics’ of two Nigerian jokesters, Klint de Drunk and Basketmouth are examined to show how joke contexts and stage personalities are deployed towards laughter evocation.

Confronting Race, Colonialism, and Difference in African Diasporic Stand-up: The Cases of Trevor Noah and Cécile Djunga

by Izuu Nwankwọ and Daria Tunca

African comedians are fast becoming prominent in the global stand-up scene, especially since the ... more African comedians are fast becoming prominent in the global stand-up scene, especially since the emergence of South Africa’s Trevor Noah as replacement for The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. Noah and other comedians of African descent continually make jokes about racism in the West as well as the effects of colonialism on people of colour both in the homeland and in the diaspora. Much of what these comedians are doing has received little or no critical attention, especially from a postcolonial perspective. This paper thus seeks to conduct such an assessment through performance analysis and close reading of purposively selected stage acts by Cécile Djunga and Trevor Noah, highlighting the relevance of their joke-making in enlivening, resuscitating and eliciting newer questions and discussions on issues of racism and the negative bequests of colonialism. Specifically, Cécile Djunga continually makes jokes about racism and colonialism – including the cutting of hands in the Congo – to her Belgian audiences, while Trevor Noah resurrects his Apartheid experience in analysing contemporary racism in the US and elsewhere. The main question that confronts us in this paper is: can one laugh about these things, especially atrocious acts such as those seen in colonial Congo as well as racism in Apartheid South Africa and globally? The paper thus posits these stand-up acts as postcolonial texts designed to buttress the significance of Africa’s history and her people in a fast globalizing world

Traditions of naming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's fiction

Postcolonial Text, 2023

Names aid the identification and classification of individuals, objects, phenomena, places, and t... more Names aid the identification and classification of individuals, objects, phenomena, places, and things. They also bear immense cultural significance, easily ignored in critical appraisals of works of art because they are seemingly arbitrary and not intrinsically linked to narratives as characters, plot, and language. They are thus considered less important due to their ostensible latent bearing on the appreciation of personality compared to other more evident aspects of characterization in art. However, in Adichie’s oeuvre, I identify deliberate crafting that points to a political angle to naming. This essay engages in onomastics appraisal in examining this aspect of Adichie’s fiction to identify and discuss the aesthetics and politics underlying her use of Igbo personal names. This essay is specifically interested in an ontological exploration of names in Adichie’s work, identifying the roles names play within Adichie’s narratives and society, especially within the pervasive environment of intercultural encounters in today’s world.

The Indigenous Origin of Intermediality in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy

Matatu, 2023

Intermediality, a conflation of different artistic media into one event, is typically considered ... more Intermediality, a conflation of different artistic media into one event, is typically considered to have developed in the West. In this paper, we argue that intermediality existed in pre-colonial performance traditions across Africa, where various modes of artistic enactments merged into one were preferred to enactments partitioned into different generic categories. This study identifies multiple artistic genres inherent in Nigerian stand-up art, with specific reference to various sets of Ayo Makun’s AY Live wherein we identify the blending of joke-telling, theatre, cinema, song performance and dance within each show. We trace indigenous origins of this conflation of forms by illustrating how delineations between “types” of play, as seen in AY Live, did not exist in indigenous performances. This paper thus, extends research on intermediality and African popular culture by detailing the ways in which Nigerian stand-up enactments are packaged as total entertainment in the manner of pre-existing indigenous performances

Introduction: On the limits and prospects of African humour

Critical African Studies, 2024

Dismantling Colonial Laughter: Tracing Emergent African Diaspora Stand-Up Comedy in French and German

Journal of Black Studies, 2024

What It Is to Perform, Not Tell, Jokes: Toward a Manifesto of Stand-Up Research

Humour and Politics in Africa

Politics, Jokes and Power in Africa: The View From Stand-Up Comedy

African Studies, 2024

Yabbing and Wording

Incongruous liaisons: Routes of humour, insult and political (in)correctness in Nigerian stand-up jokes

The European Journal of Humour Research, Jul 28, 2019

Download

Preamble

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Humour and Politics in Africa: An Overview

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

The Last Laugh?

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Beyond the Symbolic: Humour in Action

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Between Jokes: Silence and Ambiguities within Humour

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Multiple For(u)ms of Resistance: Humour, Agency and Power

Bristol University Press eBooks, Mar 27, 2023

Ambivalence in the stand-up acts of Nigeria’s Klint da Drunk and Mr Paul

Journal of the African Literature Association, May 4, 2022

Purple Hibiscus and theme of moderation as a metaphor in the evolution of contemporary Nigerian fiction

International Journal of Pedagogy, Innovation and New Technologies, Dec 30, 2018

Re-engaging master narratives: Re-encountering Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Oct 26, 2018

Download

Joke performance mechanics in Nigerian stand-up comedy

South African Theatre Journal, May 4, 2021

Confronting Race, Colonialism, and Difference in African Diasporic Stand-up: The Cases of Trevor Noah and Cécile Djunga

by Izuu Nwankwọ and Daria Tunca

Traditions of naming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's fiction

Postcolonial Text, 2023

The Indigenous Origin of Intermediality in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy

Matatu, 2023

Between street and digital arts: conflations of multiple binaries in Elvin Mensah's social media texts

This paper examines Elvin Mensah's London streets and trains performances, portraying them as rei... more

Confronting Race, Colonialism, and Difference in African Diasporic Stand-up: The Cases of Trevor Noah and Cécile Djunga

Unpublished, 2019

African comedians are fast becoming prominent in the global stand-up scene, especially since the ... more African comedians are fast becoming prominent in the global stand-up scene, especially since the emergence of South Africa’s Trevor Noah as replacement for The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart. Noah and other comedians of African descent continually make jokes about racism in the West as well as the effects of colonialism on people of colour both in the homeland and in the diaspora. Much of what these comedians are doing has received little or no critical attention, especially from a postcolonial perspective. This paper thus seeks to conduct such an assessment through performance analysis and close reading of purposively selected stage acts by Cécile Djunga and Trevor Noah, highlighting the relevance of their joke-making in enlivening, resuscitating and eliciting newer questions and discussions on issues of racism and the negative bequests of colonialism. Specifically, Cécile Djunga continually makes jokes about racism and colonialism–including the cutting of hands in the Congo–to her Belgian audiences, while Trevor Noah resurrects his Apartheid experience in analysing contemporary racism in the US and elsewhere. The main question that confronts us in this paper is: can one laugh about these things, especially atrocious acts such as those seen in colonial Congo as well as racism in Apartheid South Africa and globally? The paper thus posits these stand-up acts as postcolonial texts designed to buttress the significance of Africa’s history and her people in a fast globalizing world.

“Fault Lines in the Academy: How ‘Minor’ is African Stand-up Comedy?

DIFFERENCE, ALTERITY AND PLURALISED IDENTITY IN JACKIE KAY’S RED DUST ROAD

Paper presented at the 3rd Gombe conference on Nigerian Literature 2012

Suffering and Smiling: Ebola Scourge, The General Elections and Comedic Social Media Responses in Nigeria

The June 2014 re-surfacing of the Ebola virus in Africa is so far the most deadly with over eight... more The June 2014 re-surfacing of the Ebola virus in Africa is so far the most deadly with over eight thousand deaths recorded. From Guinea where it started, it quickly moved through land borders into Sierra Leone, Liberia and, for the first time, into the most populous black nation on earth, Nigeria, through a US-Liberian citizen, Patrick Sawyer. The then, Nigerian government took up a belated, but eventually successful, action to stem the spread of the virus within its borders. The people, on their part, reacted to the scourge in several ways apart from abiding by the precautionary measures instituted by the government, especially through caricature, parody and sundry forms of comedy. These forms of response also characterized the bitterly contested General Elections held in February 2015 which saw the opposition triumphing, for the first time, over a sitting government since the dawn of democracy in 1999. In spite of the rancor and bitterness generated, Nigerians still found comedy amidst the tension of the Ebola and the general election eras. Nigerians have been variously described as some of the happiest peoples on earth perhaps due to their resilience and ability to find mirth amidst sundry crises like poverty, official corruption as well as violence perpetrated by the dreaded Boko Haram insurgents, armed Fulani herdsmen, kidnappers, armed robbers and Niger-Delta militants. The Afro-beat music maestro, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti dubs it "Suffering and Smiling." Using Fela’s coinage as a pivot, this paper appraises the use of humor in social media responses to tragedies in Nigeria. My approach is a close reading/analysis of randomly selected humorous social media posts (pictures, updates, broadcast messages) on Ebola virus scourge/scare as well as the general elections in the country, examining them as quintessential Postcolonial responses to disasters when the people have little or no help anywhere left. Homi Bhabha’s discourse on hybridity is used to explore the emergence of humor as a mitigating factor amidst divisive conditions of ethnicity and religion, on the one hand, and poverty and institutional corruption, on the other. Humor, in this situation, is thus described as an emergent condition that ameliorates tensions that ordinarily have the potential to escalate with very grave consequences on the society and its people.

The Urban African Space and Its Marginal Literatures/Performances: Questioning the Continued Peripherality of African Popular Arts

by Ifeyinwa G Okolo and Izuu Nwankwọ

Contemporary urban tastes (sometimes, a transmutation of rural trends) has in many ways affected ... more Contemporary urban tastes (sometimes, a transmutation of rural trends) has in many ways affected and altered the creation and reception of arts in Africa. While this establishes the symbiotic relationship African arts share with sociology and anthropology, it does not justify the continued marginality of popular genres like stand-up comedy, eroticas and reality shows which rarely get attention even when they have become increasingly more preferred than their mainstream others. By interrogating the deployment of popular narrative styles/subjects in Okey Udenwe's Holy Sex: A Church Erotica, and the stand-up routines of Bright Okpocha (stage name, Basket Mouth); this paper problematizes the understudy of these genres and their likes in the academy, and seeks to re-position them out of peripheral spaces. In its use of potpourri theories, the essay harvests Jacques Derrida's and Judith Butler's deconstructionist idea of iterability in teasing out the grafting of rural traits in urban settlements within the texts; and deploys Homi Bhabha's concepts of hybridity and "third space" in designating how these artistic productions are new in themselves, and continue to create newer urban cultures.

The Urban African Space and Its Marginal Literatures/Performances

This panel seeks to discuss the representations of cityscapes in marginal/minority genres of arts... more This panel seeks to discuss the representations of cityscapes in marginal/minority genres of arts in Africa. Rural-urban drift in the continent has reshaped African literature and performances, given that the cities are populated with peoples of diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. Each city thus becomes a container of histories, a celebration of the rich texture of human experience; what Samuel Johnson calls "school for studying life". Mainstream arts - novels, films and the likes have been largely interrogated for their portraiture of Africa's urban/rural realities but marginal arts. These minority genres also re/present the daily encounters, relationships and the numerous complexities of humans versus machines, as well as other innumerable conflicts of identities (of gender, class, belief, social status, location, ethnicity) that form part of everyday living in the continent. They are also concerned with the overwhelming effect of industrialization on individuals; the city as a materialist spectacle and receptacle for the past, hidden lives and passions of its inhabitants, among others.

Arnold Weinstein (2007) identifies several themes that appear in artists' rendering of urban-rural living: orientation (people finding their way in the city); the marketplace (exchanging goods and services); anonymity, experiencing solitude or freedom; encounters (fearing or choosing connections with others); history (maintaining contact with other times); and cultures, entering the cities ever-changing cultural forms. How do any of/all these theme(s) play out within understudied African art genres like stand-up comedy, carnivals, new cinema, contemporary dance, music videos, performance in religion, games - especially followership of foreign club football, etc.

Humour and Politics in Africa: Beyond Resistance

Analyses of humour often focus primarily on the Global North, with little consideration for examp... more Analyses of humour often focus primarily on the Global North, with little consideration for examples and practices from elsewhere. This book provides a vital contribution to humour theory by developing a Global South perspective.

Taking a wide-ranging view across the whole of the continent, the book examines the relationship between humour and politics in Africa. It considers the context of the production and reception of humour in African contexts and argues that humour is more than just symbolic. Moving beyond the idea of humour as a mode of resistance, the book investigates the ‘political work’ that humour does and explores the complex entanglements in which the politics, practices and performances of humour are located.

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Stand-up Comedy in Africa: Humour in Popular Languages and Media

Wondering how people manage to laugh in the face of unrelenting political assault is one thing; p... more Wondering how people manage to laugh in the face of unrelenting political assault is one thing; puzzling at the explosion of stand-up comedy across Africa is another. With the former, one ponders the question of social resilience among agents desperate to rescue and preserve dignity and self-worth; with the latter, one launches a sociological inquest into the emergence and diverse facets of an industry that has taken full advantage of all the affordances of the emergent techno-media.

Stand-up Comedy in Africa is a timely, interdisciplinary survey of an art form whose ubiquity prompts sundry technical, artistic, and political questions. For those seeking critical guidance on the ethics and praxes of popular performance in Africa, this is as good a place as any to start.

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Yabbing and Wording: The artistry of Nigerian stand-up comedy

Yabbing and Wording: The artistry of Nigerian stand-up comedy is a long-overdue academic interrog... more Yabbing and Wording: The artistry of Nigerian stand-up comedy is a long-overdue academic interrogation of the novel stand-up practice in Nigeria as performance. ‘Yabbing’ comes from the Nigerian Pidgin English verb, ‘yab’, which means a satirical jibe thrown at individuals, groups or institutions. Nigeria’s Fela Anikulapo-Kuti used this effectively in his recorded and live music performances against successive military regimes. ‘Wording’ derives from the English term ‘word’ and refers to a game in which parties exchange insults. It is a modern-day coinage for traditional forms of joking that existed across Nigeria and elsewhere in precolonial times.

In this book, Nwankwọ identifies ‘yabbing’ and ‘wording’ as outstanding indigenous elements within contemporary stand-up practice in Nigeria. On the one hand, these local joking patterns inform how comedians fashion their narratives. On the other, they mitigate offence and how the audience responds to ridicule in joke performance venues. The book’s strength is its academic perspective and the inclusion of as many examples of stand-up and comedians as possible, to give a panoramic view of the practice. It also traces the historical path of the development of professional stand-up comedy in Nigeria. Its closing chapters detail the global outreach of Nigerian stand-up while also anticipating its future developments.

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Ihe Aghasaa

Igbo Language Translation of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart

Izuu Nwankwọ

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