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By Bobson Gbinije
The National Bureau of Statistics has redefined employment to mean any persons who performed any work for pay or profit for at least one hour in the last seven days. Previously, the minimum threshold was 20 hours per week. The last official data reported unemployment in Nigeria in single digits. Even in this scenario, the rate of informal employment, a euphemism for unemployment in Nigeria, remains high being 93% in Quarter 2 2024 when the last report was issued. This development makes the labour data not so relevant for government to plan job creation initiatives. In this season of politics and elections, political parties and candidates need to contextualise employment creation and poverty reduction as key issues for the engagement of the electorate.
“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” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Man’s quest for joy, bliss and happiness takes protean forms and can be likened to the sphygmic temperaments of men standing before inquisitors. Hence, the comedian tries to create balance through hilarity.
A comedy, within the context of usage, is any literary work – including but not limited to drama, play, motion picture, television, radio, oratorical dexterity, verbal phosphorescence and entertainment – characterized by a humorous treatment of characters and situations, and having a happy ending. A comedian is, therefore, anyone who applies these aforementioned tools to create humour, joy and laughter.
Comedy is as old as man and comedians have always been with us. In our world, suffused and impregnated by Neanderthal bellicosity, scorching poverty, sanguinary proclivities, leadership inertia, chauvinism, tribal jingoism, religious extremism, mind-boggling hatred, sabre-rattling, genocide, psychotic corruption, horrendous rapes, ritual murders, ludicrous cluelessness, planlessness and lovelessness, we can water down our anxieties through comic relief.
Comedians use satire, sarcasm, allegory, lampoonery, pantomime, onomatopoeia and recondite gesticulations with religious, political, tribal and socio-economic connotations to make us laugh at ourselves.
The great 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 said something about ourselves and society, precipitating laughter.
We are in a world cocooned in cerebral dwarfishness, pusillanimous tergiversation and spiritual darkness because of our lost values and inability to speak truth to power. We use comedy to humourise our situation, to ameliorate our emotional Erebus and political topsy-turvydom.
However, comedians must 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 comedian and his jokes are tools for societal change, political and socio-economic renaissance, cultural revolution, psychological therapy, attitudinal reorientation, propagandistic elan and religious rebirth, because he can hide real happenings to galvanize leadership and citizenry into action.
A comedian once said that President Kwame Nkrumah once visited Nigeria and as he drove in a convoy with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, he saw a man urinating by the roadside. He castigated Nigerians for being dirty. Balewa felt chagrined, despondent and crestfallen.
He quickly organised a reciprocal visit to Ghana. As he drove in a convoy with President Nkrumah, he sighted a man defecating by the roadside. He quickly called Nkrumah’s attention to it. President Nkrumah, breaking protocol, asked the convoy to stop. He called for the arrest of the scoundrel and asked him: “Where are you from?” The man quickly retorted: “I Am from Nigeria.”
He immediately recalled the words 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 shame! And whither goeth Nigeria?
The audience laughed. But the silent and salient point is to admonish our leaders and Nigerians on social courtesies, responsible waste disposal, provision of public toilets and efficient waste management. It is also a truism that the comedian gave a joke which looked harmless, but if a critic or journalist had written an article on “Nigeria, waste management and leadership inertia,” it would have attracted detention or verbal or physical flagellation. Comedy is a way of laughing at our all-embracing inadequacies.
We must draw a clear-cut dichotomy between comperes, masters of ceremonies and comedians. The popular mistake is the desire of comedians to function as all of these. The popular compere, Collins Adeyemi, in his book Director of Ceremony, adumbrated on the need for differentiation to make professionalism the watchword.
The Comedy Guild in Nigeria has become a fertile ground for youths, graduates and those with creative talents. They have become professional in their own right and a regular feature at private and public occasions. The field is robustly enriched with Warri (Wafi) and Sapele (Safa) boys and girls. 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, etc.
Nigerian comedians have worked hard from the 1980s through the 1990s to the 2000s to lift comedy from gutter-snipe to professional level. They have become indispensable in the socio-economic and public calculus in Nigeria. We want to see more women 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 and they deserve a place in the pantheon of great builders of Comedy/Drama/Theatre like Hubert Ogunde, Moses Olaiya (Baba Sala), Alawada, etc. They have to be more critical, spontaneous, authentic, creative and revolutionary in their drive to make Nigeria a better place.
In trying to create happiness they must note 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.
