Police Brutality in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy
Police Brutality in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy

Summary/Abstract: Police brutality is a universal phenomenon. It is a world issue that is discussed among the comity of nations. Police are meant to be friendly and polite in their civil activities to individuals in the society but rather the reverse is the case. They are supposedly ought to maintain laws and orders, protect the citizens and promote good governance through various civil duties to the society. Previous studies have largely examined police brutality from points of view of print media, social media, literary texts, histories, religions and journalistic approaches to the neglect of its deeper examination from stand-up comedy point of view. Therefore, this article exams how stand-up comedy is used to lampoon police brutality in Nigeria to create moral sanity among the police, and, at the same time, reveals better way of which police could have humane relationship in their dealing with civilians. The comedy also reveals modalities of how civilians are killed, injured, tortured, shot, raped, extorted, imprisoned, accused, and unlawfully arrested the police. Stand-up comedy performances of Godwin Komone whose stage name is Gordon is used for analysis of this article. Performance theory of Schechner is used to analyse the data. Data are subjected to performance analysis.

• Details
• Contents