Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Communication Studies

Faculty/School

Faculty of Arts

First Advisor

Dr. Jade L. Miller

Advisor Role

Thesis Advisor

Abstract

This study explores social media comedy skits in Nigeria as a novel type of creativity that is both an economic and cultural activity with political and social implications within the context of the rapidly expanding global ecosystem of online content creation. Academic interest in social media comedy skits has grown as a result of their emergence as a popular culture within Nigeria's entertainment landscape. However, most research has focused on understanding this form of humour through its positive societal correlates. Hence, within the notion of industrialization of culture, which suggests that various methods of financing and arranging communication resources have implications on the range of discourse and representation in the content of such communicative space, the study attempts a critical study of social media comedy skit in Nigeria from the vantage point of its mode of economic organization. The study is situated within the theoretical framework of the critical political economy of communication and culture, as well as the central debate about humour and politics in Africa, which sees humour as functioning as a communication space of resistance to state power on the one hand and as part of the ensembles of discourses that reify the status quo on the other hand. Guided by two research questions that sought to locate the comedy skit production and circulation within the broader economic interest, and examine the discourses of selected skits in relation to power structures in Nigeria, the study used two research methods: Critical political economic analysis through discursive reading and reflexive engagement with relevant secondary data about the industry, and multimodal critical discourse analysis which combines the social semiotics and Foucauldian approaches to analyze texts and visuals of the selected skits. Pattern mapped out in the critical political economy analysis suggests that the social media comedy skit Nigeria is organized informally within a hyper-commercial drive to accumulate capital through 'dollars' payout from various platform partnership programs as well as cultivation of huge fanbases, which then elevates creators to microcelebrity status, which in turn opens further doors of capital accumulation, mostly through influencer marketing and backdoor entry into money-spinning mainstream cultural productions in the country. This mode of organization, in which frivolities appear to have higher returns within the logic of attention economy on Web 2.0, is therefore argued to be liable for the marginalization of the common good in comedy skits. In the same vein, patterns from the multimodal critical discourse analysis of selected skits, reveal that the social acts depicted in the skits are identifiable within commonly accepted social knowledge on the power relations addressed in the skit with the skits’ discursive frames reinforcing rather than challenging the social knowledge thereby contributing to conditions within which Nigerians amuse themselves to submission. Consistent with these patterns, it was then concluded that the social media comedy skit industry in Nigeria is best described as a rapidly growing culture industry structured within user-driven micro-informational capitalism on Web 2.0, where creators primarily geared their creativity to fortune and fame, and of which the dynamics of creativity and fame lead to cultural power to create, define, shape, reinforce, or challenge social knowledge but with the pendulum of such cultural power being controlled by the dominant capital interests that form the base of the industry and thereby aligning it discourses with dominant discourses that sustain conditions of social homeostasis in the country.

Convocation Year

2025

Convocation Season

Spring

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