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Amid issues and tensions in society, comedians use their abilities in order that we will chortle at ourselves, writes BOBSON GBINIJE
The National Bureau of Statistics has redefined employment to imply any individuals who carried out any work for pay or revenue for no less than one hour within the final seven days. Previously, the minimal threshold was 20 hours per week. The final official knowledge reported unemployment in Nigeria in single digits. Even on this situation, the speed of casual employment, a euphemism for unemployment in Nigeria, stays excessive, being 93% in Quarter 2, 2024 when the final report was issued. This growth makes the labour knowledge not so related for presidency to plan job creation initiatives. In this season of politics and elections, political events and candidates have to contextualise employment creation and poverty discount as key points for the engagement of the voters.
It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow who stated,
“Believe, every man has his secret sorrows, which the world knows not. And often times we call a man cold when he is only sad”.
Man’s quest for pleasure, bliss and happiness takes protean types and might be likened to the sphygmic temperaments of males standing earlier than inquisitors. Hence, the comic tries to create stability via hilarity.
A comedy, throughout the context of utilization, is any literary work – together with however not restricted to drama, play, movement image, tv, radio, oratorical dexterity, verbal phosphorescence and leisure – characterised by a humorous therapy of characters and conditions, and having a cheerful ending. A comic is, due to this fact, anybody who applies these aforementioned instruments to create humour, pleasure and laughter.
Comedy is as previous as man and comedians have at all times been with us. In our world, suffused and impregnated by Neanderthal bellicosity, scorching poverty, sanguinary proclivities, tribal jingoism, non secular extremism, mind-boggling hatred, sabre-rattling, genocide, psychotic corruption, horrendous rapes, ritual murders, ludicrous cluelessness, we will water down our anxieties via comedian aid.
Comedians use satire, sarcasm, allegory, lampoonery, pantomime, onomatopoeia and recondite gesticulations with non secular, political, tribal and socio-economic connotations to make us chortle at ourselves.
The nice literary masterpieces and mythologies – from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, A Man of the People and The Trouble with Nigeria; Soyinka’s The Interpreters, The Bacchae of Euripides and The Man Died; Dickens’ Great Expectations, Martin Chuzzlewit, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield; Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, The Tempest; Chaucer and John Milton; to Sheridan’s The Rivals had a tincture of comedy that didactically stated one thing about ourselves and society, precipitating laughter.
We are in a world cocooned in cerebral dwarfishness and non secular darkness due to our misplaced values and incapacity to talk reality to energy. We use comedy to humourise our scenario, to ameliorate our emotional Erebus and political topsy-turvydom.
However, comedians should heed the admonition of Abraham Lincoln: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in.”
The comic and his jokes are instruments for societal change, political and socio-economic renaissance, cultural revolution, psychological remedy, attitudinal reorientation, propagandistic elan and non secular rebirth, as a result of he can cover actual happenings to impress management and citizenry into motion.
A comic as soon as stated that President Kwame Nkrumah as soon as visited Nigeria and as he drove in a convoy with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, he noticed a person urinating by the roadside. He castigated Nigerians for being soiled. Balewa felt chagrined, despondent and crestfallen.
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· He shortly organised a reciprocal go to to Ghana. As he drove in a convoy with President Nkrumah, he sighted a person defecating by the roadside. He shortly referred to as Nkrumah’s consideration to it. President Nkrumah, breaking protocol, requested the convoy to cease. He referred to as for the arrest of the scoundrel and requested him: “Where are you from?” The man shortly retorted: “I am from Nigeria.”
He instantly recalled the phrases of Mahatma Gandhi: “I can retain neither respect nor affection for a government which has been moving from wrong to wrong in order to defend its immorality.” What a disgrace! And whither goeth Nigeria?
The viewers laughed. But the silent and salient level is to admonish our leaders and Nigerians on social courtesies, accountable waste disposal, provision of public bathrooms and environment friendly waste administration. It can be a truism that the comic gave a joke which regarded innocent, but when a critic or journalist had written an article on “Nigeria, waste management and leadership inertia,” it could have attracted detention or verbal or bodily flagellation. Comedy is a approach of laughing at our all-embracing inadequacies.
We should draw a clear-cut dichotomy between comperes, masters of ceremonies and comedians. The in style mistake is the need of comedians to perform as all of those. The in style compere, Collins Adeyemi, in his e-book Director of Ceremony, adumbrated on the necessity for differentiation to make professionalism the watchword.
The Comedy Guild in Nigeria has change into a fertile floor for teens, graduates and people with inventive abilities. They have change into skilled in their very own proper and a daily characteristic at non-public and public events. The area is robustly enriched with Warri (Wafi) and Sapele (Safa) girls and boys. Indeed, the South-South, South-East and South-West are overwhelmingly represented.
Some of the notable comedians are Basket Mouth, I Go Die, Akpororo, Ali Baba, Gandoki, Rocky Feller, and many others.
Nigerian comedians have labored onerous from the Nineteen Eighties via the Nineteen Nineties to the 2000s to carry comedy from gutter-snipe to skilled degree. They have change into indispensable within the socio-economic and public calculus in Nigeria. We wish to see extra girls comedians (comediennes).
Henry Longfellow posited in ‘The Ladder of St. Augustine’ that “the heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.”
Finally, Nigerian comedians have toiled all night time and so they deserve a spot within the pantheon of nice builders of Comedy/Drama/Theatre like Hubert Ogunde, Moses Olaiya (Baba Sala), Alawada, and many others. They should be extra essential, spontaneous, genuine, inventive and revolutionary of their drive to make Nigeria a greater place.
In attempting to create happiness they have to notice the admonition of François de La Rochefoucauld that “we are more interested in making others believe we are happy than in trying to be happy ourselves” and “the happiness or unhappiness of one depends no less upon their disposition than on their fortunes.” God bless our comedians.
· • Chief Gbinije, Mandate Against Poverty (Map), Sapele-Warri
