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.