When I first came on the show, I had to quickly figure out how I was going to make it work for me, morally. I don’t think I would have been able to live with myself had I just gone out and mocked people who didn’t deserve it. So I turned it around on myself: I became the idiot reporter, and the brunt of the joke.
You say you’re not political, but don’t you think determining who is innocent and who is not is a political question?
I didn’t see it as political, I just saw it as being a decent human being. Really, it’s very simple: I just didn’t want to make fun of innocent people. There is no joy in that.
Forget crooked politicians, daily blackouts, long lines at gas stations or even the scourge of Boko Haram here in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Despite the litany of social ills and troubles — or maybe because of them — Nigeria has never laughed harder.
Comedy here is booming. Top comics have become, in a few short years, among Nigeria’s most successful entertainers and now perform throughout Africa.
.. So quickly has the art form caught on that stand-up comics have become fixtures at social events, like the lawyers association that hired Ali Baba for its dinner here recently. Securing a talented comic for a wedding, company event or political gathering has now become de rigueur in Nigeria’s higher social circles.
“Ten years ago, you had masters of ceremonies who would just run a program and put in some lighthearted talk that would make people smile,” said Barclays Ayakoroma, a cultural critic who has written about the rise of stand-up comedy in Nigeria. “But today, depending on how deep your pocket is, you must get a good stand-up comedian for your event. Today, there is hardly any function that you will not see a stand-up comedian coming in and performing during interludes. It’s a common practice nationwide.”
.. Sometimes he texts jokes to politicians with whom he has built a relationship to gauge their response before using the material.
.. As comedians have become powerful, some politicians have come to understand the benefits of serving as comic material. Being the subject of a joke can be proof of the politician’s power or of ties to an influential comic.
“Some of them will come up to me and say, ‘Talk about me,’ ” Mr. Agwu said. “It’s like hype for them.”
Behind a desk, the jokes are similar, but can be slightly more evolved. “It’s a tried-and-true, tested delivery system,” Meyers says, adding that the format allows him to punctuate his jokes visually, a long-time SNL gambit similarly employed by Comedy Central hosts like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. This also makes it easier for the show’s writers to throw in an extra punchline and get more mileage out of a topic.
One of the reasons she posits for a lack of conservative satire is that the genre has always been aimed at taking down the powerful, from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam and 9/11. “Conservatism supports institutions and satire aims to knock these institutions down a peg,” she wrote.
.. Peter McGraw, an associate professor at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business, has argued for what he calls the “benign-violation theory” of humor. McGraw believes that humor results from violating social norms or by violating a particular person or group. But it only becomes funny when it’s placed in a second context that clearly signals the violation is harmless or benign. In other words, if someone falls down the stairs, it will only be really funny if that person doesn’t get hurt.
.. This attempt to provide an overarching theory of humor suggests that academic explanations aren’t much help to the professionals who are trying to be funny. Humor is a creative art that responds to a specific culture at a particular moment in its history. This response can take many forms: TV sit-coms, internet parody, late-night variety shows, cartoons, stand-up, sketch, improv. But in each case, the jokes only work if they’re perfectly timed and aimed at the right audience.
.. Dannagal Young, an assistant professor of communications at the University of Delaware, was looking into the lack of conservative comedians when she noticed studies that found liberals and conservatives seemed to have different aesthetic tastes. Conservatives seemed to prefer stories with clear-cut endings. Liberals, on the other hand, had more tolerance for a story like public radio’s Serial, which ends with some uncertainty and ambiguity.
.. The people who are most knowledgeable about politics—and therefore, the ones who understand the most political jokes—also tend to be the most ideologically extreme. So it makes sense that political satire shows, like conservative talk radio and its Fox News spinoffs, are ideologically skewed