Ibukun Filani

Stand-up comedy is a distinctive medium for both the perpetuation of social habits and the creation of social change. In Nigeria, it has emerged as a leading form of mass entertainment and popular culture. Existing discourse-pragmatic studies on Nigerian stand-up comedy have primarily focused on the discourse structures and pragmatic strategies of its jokes without considering the ways in which stand-up comedy jokes make visible sociocultural issues like gender and sexuality. This study, therefore, explores how Nigerian stand-up comedians appropriate popular representations of gender and sexuality in Nigeria for comedic intentions so as to account for the representations of gender and sexuality that are promoted in the performances and how such performances perpetuate or aid the negotiation of certain perspectives on gender and sexuality. Therefore, the proposed study is a discourse-pragmatics investigation which explores how comics have accommodated and reacted to discriminatory perspectives on sociocultural issues as part of the resources for their humour with a view to further enshrining or combating such perspectives within the Nigerian popular culture.