Laughing at the Pandemic: Youth Performance and Digital Humour in Response to Covid-19 in Nigeria

Abstract

This article investigates humour as a crucial instrument for the expression of young people’s perceptions regarding Covid-19 in Nigeria. The article relies on creative digital data sourced from the online environment (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and WhatsApp) and discusses these data based on thematic categories to demonstrate how young people use humour to express doubts about the existence of the virus and to downplay its deadly global threat. The article uncouples the manner in which humour as a performative idiom is heuristically exploited to signify collective sociopolitical discontent with a political establishment that is disconnected from its people. Drawing insights from multimodal critical discourse analysis and performance theory, the article engages digital comic narratives, skits, and memes as dialogic new media texts that sustain indigenous comic oral performances for collective socio-psychological healing and to engage in political satire. Beyond these, we conceive of digital humour and its responses to the Covid-19 pandemic as one more creative enterprise in which social media provide a platform for young people to engage a conservative system.