Sexual jokes in Nigerian stand-up comedy: a multifaceted analytic approach
Sexual jokes in Nigerian stand-up comedy: a multifaceted analytic approach

Summary/Abstract: Nigerian stand-up comic artists explore emerging social, religious, and political issues asmaterials for comic entertainment within their performance space and community of practice.One of the resources for comic performance is the recourse to sexual contents which aredeployed to reduce apprehension around stereotyped norms about sex and sexuality in theNigerian sociocultural context. Drawing on ethnographic qualitative data using social mediaskits, audio-visual disks and semi-structured interviews, this article examines sexual jokes asideological texts and rhetorical devices that embody the struggle between conservatism andpostmodern conceptions of sex and sexuality. It highlights the recurrent themes and creativediscourses of sexual humour which stand-up comedy performers exploit as artistic tools for theengagement of gender roles, sexual myths, sexual politics and social contradictions within avulnerable socio-political and economic context. We adopt social relief theory and incongruitytheory of humour comprehension to provide a nuanced understanding of sexual jokes and thesociocultural inhibitions that surround them. The dominant themes in these jokes include malesterility, faking orgasm, commodification of sex, prostitution, rape, and the use of aphrodisiac.The results indicate that sexual jokes are circulating within the comedy performance space asforms of protest against stereotyped sexual culture. In this way, male and female comedians,working with the tools and ideology of postmodernism, help to satirise conventional sexualvalues and radicalise their audiences against normative construction of sex and sexuality.

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