HUMOUR STRATEGIES AND ACTS IN NIGERIAN STAND-UP COMEDY BY IBUKUN OLA-OLUWA, FILANI B.A. Linguistics (Ilorin), M.A. English (Ibadan) A Thesis in the Department of English, Submitted to the Faculty of Arts in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY of the UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN March, 2016 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Dedication To Aralewa, for making melodious music in silent seasons, and for coming at his time may you find your time while there is still time; and Oreofe, a pretty princess, for choosing me. ii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Abstract Humour, which is associated with amusement and laughter, is produced in comic performances, particularly stand-up comedy; and Nigerian stand-up comedians (NSCs) use language to evoke humour and correct social vices. Existing studies have conceptualised humour, its use and sub-genres but have not given adequate attention to intentionality in Nigerian stand-up joking contexts. This study, therefore, investigated humour strategies and context in Nigerian stand-up comedy, in order to identify NSCs’ intentions and how they are realised in their performances. Humour acts, a model, which combined insights from general theory of verbal humour, multimodal theory, pragmatic acts, relevance, and contextual beliefs, was adopted as the theoretical framework. Data were purposively collected from video compact disc recordings of 28 routines of 16 male and three female NSCs in editions of Nite of a thousand laughs and thecomedyberlusconi, which were produced between 2009 and 2013. This is to reflect the gender composition of NSCs, focus on popular practising professional NSCs and avoid analysing their repeated joking stories. The data were subjected to pragmatic analysis. Humour strategies adopted by NSCs involved manipulating cultural assumptions, stereotypes, representations, corresponding concepts and projecting personal beliefs. The humour strategies included jokes, voicing, verbal and nonverbal cues. NSCs’ jokes were categorised into two: the physical appearance class and the socio-political and cultural situations class. NSCs presented jokes with comic and participants-in-the-joke voices. While comic voice was used to articulate comic image, comedians used participants-in-the-joke voice to dissociate themselves from the activity-in-the-joke. They articulated voicing differently through code-switching, reported speech, mimicry and change in pitch. Female NSCs favoured English as the matrix language of their narration, but male comedians primarily used Nigerian Pidgin. Verbal cues in their jokes included joke utterance, participants-in-the-joke, especially the targets of jokes, and activity-in-the-joke. Two kinds of nonverbal cues, physical and prosodic, were found in NSCs’ performances. The physical cues included gestures, which were categorised into iconic, deictic and metaphoric; posture, which was primarily open; dressing, which connoted professionalism, costume or affiliation with the audience; layout/space, which denoted NSCs’ superior conversational role; dance, which mirrored participants-in-the-joke actions; and pauses, which could be a transition- relevance place pause or a non-transition-relevance place pause. Prosody was used to articulate comedians’ attitudes and indicate different performance functions: a change in pitch signalled a change in voice, accents were used for emphasising comedians’ focus, whereas intonation enhanced the textuality and musicality of narrations. The NSCs operationalized two contexts: context-in-the-joke and context-of-the-joke. The context-of- the-joke consisted in assumptions shared with the audience like shared knowledge of code, shared situational knowledge, and shared cultural knowledge. By making mutually manifest context-in-the-joke in the context-of-the-joke, they instantiated humour acts like commencement, teasing, eliciting, reinforcement, appraisal and informing, which bifurcated into self-praising and self-denigrating. Nigerian stand-up comedians consciously design their humour strategies towards building a positive society. There is, therefore, the need to harness the views projected in the jokes of Nigerian stand-up comedians for national development. Keywords: Nigerian stand-up comedy, Humour acts, Humour strategies, Jokes Word count: 480 iii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Acknowledgements This study is a product of immeasurable contributions from mentors, friends and family, all of whom are too numerous to mention. That I was able to generate the idea of this thesis and develop it was because I was coached by great teachers and researchers. I am profoundly grateful to all of them. I commend them for helping me to generate the inspiration for this study. Specifically, I like to appreciate all the efforts of my thesis supervisor, Dr A.B. Sunday, who encouraged me to adopt an approach which has not been used in my discipline. I am indebted to him for choosing to supervise my doctoral thesis. His deadlines became lifelines that made me to complete this work within the minimum stipulated period. I am also indebted to Dr M.T. Lamidi, my second degree dissertation supervisor, for being available each time I went to him, and, Prof. Akin Odebunmi, who suggested some theories which I found beneficial to this study. Drs M.A. Alo and O.B. Jegede also gave insightful comments which were helpful for the study; my gratitude goes to them. I am grateful to Prof. E.B. Omobowale, the Head of Department of English, for the encouragement and counsel I received from him during the period of my stay as a student in the department. Dr Ayo Osisanwo is another member of the department who is highly appreciated for his comments on this thesis. I must mention Dr Doyin Aguoru, the departmental PG coordinator, for her contributions too. I am grateful to Profs. Ayo Ogunsiji, Obododimma Oha, and Ayo Kehinde, for their sincere concerns for the progress of this study. I want to express appreciation to the Board of University of Ibadan Postgraduate School for granting me the UI Postgraduate School Teaching and Research Award. The award fast-tracked my study and helped me to focus on writing my thesis. In line with this, I am grateful to Prof E.B. Omobowale and Dr A.B. Sunday for always signing my claims forms promptly. The two contributed to my getting the award renewed by giving positive assessments on my performance in the first year of the award. The reinforcements of my family, my dad, mum and siblings have been ceaseless. I appreciate all the support they gave me in the line of my studies. Particularly, I must mention my wife, who has been very patient with me. Your warm support is always cherished. My baby too, who came at the destined time, made completing this research more desirable. I am most grateful to my sister, Mrs Aiyegbusi, for providing me with accommodation and food for the period of my postgraduate studies. My parents never cease to pray for my success; the completion of my study is a testament of their answered prayers. iv UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN I must mention Dr Tomi Adeoti, a sister and colleague, whose contributions helped to refine my theoretical model and who helped in editing the thesis. Prof. S.T. Babatunde of the Department of English, University of Ilorin is another individual who contributed enormously to the progress of my research. He made lots of inputs to this study. I am also grateful for his counsel. In addition, the contribution of Dr Felix Ogoanah of the Department of English and Literary Studies, University of Benin is highly appreciated. Dr Ogoanah kindly gave me access to his library. The journal articles and most of the texts that were reviewed in this thesis were provided by him. My colleagues and friends, Melefa Moses, Mayowa Ogunkunle, Tope Ajayi and Akin Tella are likewise appreciated for sharing ideas with me and showing me the blind spots of my reasoning. I thank Charles Iyoha, who helped in reading some chapters of this thesis. I am grateful to other colleagues who also supported me for their spirit of camaraderie. Last and most importantly, I am grateful to God, the owner of the spirit of man, who gives wisdom, knowledge and understanding, for enabling me with all I needed for this thesis. My inmost thankfulness goes to Christ, my saviour, for His mercy and grace. And to the Holy Spirit, I am grateful for His inspiration. I.O. Filani, March, 2016. v UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Certification I certify that this work was carried out by Mr. I.O Filani in the Department of English, University of Ibadan, under my supervision …………………………………………….. Supervisor Dr A.B. Sunday, B.A, M.A., Ph.D. (Ibadan) Department of English, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria. vi UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page i Dedication ii Abstract iii Acknowledgements iv Certification vi Table of Contents vii Transcription Conventions xi List of Tables and Figures xii List of Plates xiii CHAPTER ONE: GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1 1.1 Background to the study 1 1.2 Statement of the problem 3 1.3 Aim and objectives of the study 4 1.4 Significance of the study 5 1.5 An overview of stand-up comedy 5 1.6 The Nigerian stand-up comedy 9 1.7 Summary 16 CHAPTER TWO: REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE 17 2.0 Introduction 17 2.1 Classification of humour 17 2.2 Taxonomy of humour theories 17 2.2.1 The incongruity theory 18 2.2.2 The superiority theory 20 2.2.3 The relief theory 21 2.3 Linguistic theories of humour 22 2.3.1 Semantic script theory of humour (SSTH) 22 2.3.1.1 The pragmatic aspect of SSTH 25 2.3.1.2 Criticisms of SSTH 26 2.3.2 General theory of verbal humour (GTVH) 27 2.3.2.1 Criticisms of the GTVH 28 2.4 Jokes 29 2.5 Functional studies on jokes 31 vii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 2.6 Conversation joke-telling and stand-up joke-telling 32 2.6 Joke performance in stand-up comedy 33 2.8 Timing in joke performance 36 2.9 Studies on Nigerian stand-up comedy 37 2.10 Theoretical orientations 40 2.10.1 Relevance theory (RT) 40 2.10.1.1 RT approaches to humour 41 2.10.2 Mey’s pragmatic acts theory 43 2.10.3 Context 45 2.11 Theoretical model: humour acts 47 2.12 Aspects of humour acts 50 2.12.1 Layer A: Context-in-the-joke 50 2.12.1.1 The joke utterance 51 2.12.1.2 The participants-in-the-joke 51 2.12.1.3 The activity-in-the-joke 53 2.12.1.4 Conversational acts 53 2.12.1.5 Prosodic cues 54 2.12.1.6 Physical acts 54 2.12.1.7 Voice 55 2.12.2 Layer B: Context-of-the-joke 56 2.12.2.1 The shared cultural knowledge 56 2.12.2.2 The shared situational knowledge 57 2.12.2.3 The shared knowledge of code 57 2.12.3 Layer C: Encyclopaedic knowledge 58 2.13 Summary 59 CHAPTER THREE: METHODOLOGY 60 3.0 Introduction 60 3.1 Research design 60 3.2 Data collection 60 3.3 Sampling size and technique 61 3.4 Method of data analysis 63 viii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN CHAPTER FOUR: NARRATIVE ASPECTS OF THE SAMPLED NIGERIAN STAND-UP PERFORMANCES 64 4.0 Introduction 64 4.1 The use of voicing 64 4.1.1 Code selection and code switching in Nigerian stand-up Performances 65 4.1.2 The use of mimicry 71 4.1.3 The use of reported speech 76 4.2 Conversational acts 79 4.2.1 The use of pauses 80 4.2.2 Prosodic cues 83 4.2.2.1 The use of pitch 83 4.2.2.2 The use of accent 85 4.2.2.3 The use of intonation 86 4.3 Nonverbal cues 88 4.3.1 The comedians’ attires 89 4.3.2 Layout and space utilisation 95 4.3.3 Adoption of dancing 105 4.3.4 Posture: comedian’s body position on stage 115 4.3.5 Gaze 118 4.3.6 Gestures 122 4.4 Towards a classification of jokes in Nigerian stand-up comedy 127 4.5 Summary 129 CHAPTER FIVE: HUMOUR STRATEGIES IN THE SELECTED NIGERIAN STAND-UP COMEDY PERFORMANCES 130 5.0 Introduction 130 5.1 Predicting interpretive steps 130 5.2 Employing conflicting assumptions in joke performances 131 5.3 Comparing, contrasting and extending corresponding concepts and referring expressions 137 5.4 Referring to assumptions from previous discourse(s) 145 5.5 Joking with shared cultural beliefs 150 5.5.1 Manipulating shared cultural representations 152 ix UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 5.5.2 Distorting collective knowledge of people, social events and situations 154 5.5.3 Strengthening and/or contradicting stereotypes 158 5.5.4 Projecting personal beliefs 160 5.6 Summary 162 CHAPTER SIX: HUMOUR ACTS IN THE SELECTED NIGERIAN STAND-UP COMEDY PERFORMANCES 163 6.0 Introduction 163 6.2 Analysis of humour acts 163 6.2.1 Commencement acts in stand-up comedy performances 163 6.2.2 Informing acts in stand-up comedy performances 166 6.2.2.1 Denigrating acts in stand-up comedy performances 168 6.2.2.2 Self-praising acts in stand-up comedy performances 172 6.2.3 Eliciting acts in stand-up comedy performances 175 6.2.4 Teasing acts in stand-up comedy performances 180 6.2.5 Appraisal acts in stand-up comedy performances 183 6.2.6 Reinforcement acts in stand-up comedy performances 187 6.3 Summary 190 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 191 7.0 Introduction 191 7.1 Summary of the study 191 7.2 Findings and contributions knowledge 191 7.3 Suggestions for future studies 193 References 194 Discography 203 x UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Transcription conventions  Prominent raising intonation  Prominent falling intonation < Higher Pitch > Lower Pitch (p) Non-transition-relevance place pause (P) Transition-relevance-place pause “ ” Denotes utterances adduced to participants-in-the-joke , Pause less than a second ! Accent or emphasis. When there is more than one, it signifies the degree of the emphasis Overlaps : Length (AL) Audience laugh (AC) Audience clap (CL) Comedian laughs (AS) Audience shout (AR) Audience reply … false attempt at the utterance ? Interrogative utterance . Declarative utterance {…} unclear and unable to transcribe / line boundary in the translations Source: The researcher xi UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN List of tables and figures Table 1: Attardo’s classification of humour theories 18 Table 2: Presentation of comedians’ appearances 62 Figure 1: Humour acts model 50 Figure 2: Classification of jokes in Nigerian stand-up comedy 129 xii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN List of plates Plate 4.1 AY portraying D’banj 74 Plate 4.2 AY portraying D’banj II 74 Plate 4.3 AY portraying Chris Oyakilome 75 Plate 4.4 AY portraying Chris Oyakilome II 75 Plate 4.5 Comedian’s manner of dressing 90 Plate 4.6 Comedian’s manner of dressing II 90 Plate 4.7 Costume in I Go Dye’s performance 91 Plate 4.8 I Go Dye removing his sunglasses 92 Plate 4.9 I Go Dye using his necklace as a prop 92 Plate 4.10 Princess appearance on stage 94 Plate 4.11 Bovi’s appearance on stage 94 Plate 4.12 Performance layout 96 Plate 4.13 Performance layout II 96 Plate 4.14 The use of spotlight 98 Plate 4.14 The use of coloured light 98 Plate 4.15 The use of spotlight II 99 Plate 4.16 The use of borderlights 99 Plate 4.18 Funnybones’ use of stage layout 101 Plate 4.19 Funnybones’ use of stage layout II 102 Plate 4.20 Funnybones’ use of stage layout III 102 Plate 4.21 Funnybones’ use of stage layout IV 103 Plate 4.22 Gordons’ use of performance layout 103 Plate 4.23 Gordons’ use of performance layout II 104 Plate 4.24 Gordons’ use of performance layout III 104 Plate 4.25 Princess dancing into the stage 106 Plate 4.26 Princess focusing on her dance 106 Plate 4.27 Princess facing the audience while dancing 107 Plate 4.28 Princess adoption of Alanta dance 107 Plate 4.29 Princess intensifying her Alanta dance 108 Plate 4.30 Princess focusing on the audience while performing Alanta dance 108 Plate 4.31 Basketmouth mimicking the dance steps of his target 109 Plate 4.32 Basketmouth intensifying the mimicry of his target 109 Plate 4.33 Basketmouth intensifying the mimicry of his target II 110 Plate 4.34 Basketmouth intensifying the mimicry of his target III 110 Plate 4.35 AY mimicking the dancing steps of Raskimono 112 Plate 4.36 AY mimicking the dancing steps of Raskimono II 113 Plate 4.37 AY mimicking the dancing steps of Chris Okotie 113 Plate 4.38 AY mimicking the dancing steps of Chris Okotie II 114 xiii UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Plate 4.39 AY mimicking the dancing steps of Alex O 114 Plate 4.40 AY mimicking the dancing steps of Alex O II 115 Plate 4.41 Open posture adopted by Bovi 116 Plate 4.42 Open posture adopted by Seyilaw 116 Plate 4.43 Gordons mirroring the postural stance of a participant-in-the-joke 117 Plate 4.44 Gordons mirroring the postural stance of a participant-in-the-joke II 117 Plate 4.45 Funnybones with inviting posture 118 Plate 4.46 Basketmouth focusing his gaze on the stage 119 Plate 4.47 Basketmouth focusing his gaze on his gesticulations 119 Plate 4.48 Basketmouth focusing his gaze on his audience 120 Plate 4.49 Bovi gazing at the audience to his left 121 Plate 4.50 Bovi gazing at the audience opposite him 121 Plate 4.51 Bovi gazing at the audience to his right 122 Plate 4.52 Iconic gesture 123 Plate 4.53 Concrete pointing in Princewill’s performance 124 Plate 4.54 Concrete pointing in Basketmouth’s performance 124 Plate 4.55 Metaphoric gesture in Gordons’ performance 126 Plate 4.56 Metaphoric gesture in Gordons’ performance II 126 Plate 4.57 Bovi gawking 127 Plate 4.58 Basketmouth gawking 127 Plate 5.1 Youngest Landlord’s dressing 135 Plate 5.2 Helen Paul’s appearance on stage 140 Plate 5.3 Helen Paul’s appearance on stage II 140 Plate 5.4 Helen Paul removing her “packaging” 141 Plate 5.5 Helen Paul without her wig 141 xiv UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN CHAPTER ONE GENERAL INTRODUCTION 1.1 Background to the study Humour is part of human cultural universals and it is a condition for humanity (Oring, 2003). Schwarz (2010: 8) asserts that humour “represents a central aspect of our everyday conversations and it is a general fact that all humans naturally participate in humorous speech and behaviour”. Bilig (2005) notes that humour is an innately intricate phenomenon that plays a central and necessary part in social life. Scholars usually associate humour with laughter, gaiety, mirth, and feelings of happiness (Berger 1995). To Roventa-Frumusani (1986), as noted in Attardo (1994), a text is humorous if its perlocutionary effect is laughter. Moreover, Attardo (2011:135) opines that “the term humour has emerged as technical term to be intended as covering anything that is (or maybe) perceived as funny, amusing or laughable.” Some scholars have argued against using laughter as a determining factor for humour because it is difficult to always pin down laughter to humour (Attardo, 1994). Laughter may signify different meanings depending on the culture. Attardo (1994) calls for a cautious use of laughter as a prerequisite for humour and following Raskin (1985), he advocates the use of humour competence (Raskin adopted the Generative Linguistics‟ notion of competence) as a criterion for defining humour. To Attardo and Raskin, what is humorous is what the native speakers of a language take as humorous. Using the generative notion of competence to define humour limits the application of such definition to only monolingual and mono-cultural societies, since the term competence in Generative Linguistics denotes the intuitive knowledge of a native speaker. It implies that humour takes place only in native speakers‟ contexts, and also, in order to define it, we must look into only what native speakers take as humorous. However, humour occurs in cross cultural and multilingual societies, where interlocutors have different cultures, languages and might even be multilingual. Thus, the use of only Generative Linguistics‟ notion of competence may not cater for humorous texts that are generated in a multicultural society like Nigeria. Besides, humour is not just intuitive, as Lin and Tan (2010) have noted, it is socially generated. It can thus be found in a situation where interlocutors may not actually share the same first language competence. 1 UNIVERSITY OF IB DAN The concept of humour has been reviewed in the preceding paragraphs because the goal of this study is to examine the use of humour in Nigerian stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy is a genre of popular culture, where humour is produced by stand-up comedians and consumed by the audience. For the purpose of this study, Attardo‟s (2011) concept of humour will be adopted. Thus, a humorous text will be taken as a text which is seen as humorous in the context of its production. The study of humour cuts across different disciplines like philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, literature and anthropology (Dynel, 2009). In language studies, scholars have approached humour from the linguistic perspective. Schwarz (2010) opines that the study of humour occupies an important place in research in English linguistics, and as Attardo (1994) has shown, linguistic theories and approaches have been applied to the phenomenon of humour. In addition, the use of humour in human interactions has been examined in several aspects of linguistics studies such as cognitive linguistics (Bergen and Binsted, 2003), and applied linguistics, especially conversational analysis (Sacks, 1972 and 1978; Tannen, 2005; Andrew, 2012; Pan, 2012; Matsumoto, 2009; and Knight, 2008), language learning (Lovorn, 2008), gender (Holmes, 2006; Sev‟er and Unger, 1997), and translation studies (Vandaele, 2010; Jabbari and Ravizi, 2012). The main focus in these linguistic studies is to examine how humour is derived from language and most especially, from jokes. These studies also examine the social functions of jokes in conversations, for instance, gender dimensions in the use of jokes, significance of jokes in communication exchanges and relevance of jokes to language teaching. Raskin (1985), drawing from cognitive notion of scripts and generative grammar, presents a new approach to the semantics of humour (Attardo, 2011). Raskin (1985) proposes that a linguistic approach to humour is an instance of applied linguistics. Raskin‟s argument, according to Attardo (1994: 16) is that the “problems to be solved should come from the field of humour, whereas the methodology and evaluation should come from linguistics.” Linguists are interested in humour because it is primarily expressed through language, and just like language, it is embedded with meaning. Also, since humans engage in conversations which often include the use of humour, it is necessary for linguists who are interested in conversational analysis to investigate how humour is used and the purposes it serves in conversations. Besides, users of humorous utterances do have implicit and/or explicit intentions for their use of humorous utterances, hence, there is need to investigate the pragmatic force of such 2 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN language use. This study attempts to carry out a linguistic approach to the study of humour, which is generated from Nigerian stand-up comedy. The genre of Nigerian stand-up comedy was chosen because it readily provided humorous texts for analysis and a situation where an interaction between participants, the stand-up comedians and the audiences, was taking place. 1.2 Statement of the problem Previous linguistic studies of humour have focused on canned jokes and conversational joking, leaving out instances humour performance like stand-up comedy. Gun ther (2003:1) observes that “linguistic analyses of humour have generally been based on prepared material (texts, canned jokes) and introspection”. According to Gunther (2003), several linguistic studies on humour are subjective since they are based on eclectic collections of anecdotal data and corpora focused on narrow selections of conversational contexts. Gu nther (2003) also notes that these linguistic studies are carried out within the structuralist framework and are scarcely discussed from the perspective of actual use. Schwarz (2010:9) corroborates Gun ther‟s assertions by noting that, though “various researchers have dealt with specific categories of humour and have either developed humour theories or modified existing theories… only scant attention has been paid to research on stand-up comedy.” The observations that stand-up comedy has not been given a proper attention in linguistic approaches to humour is true, because even in Attardo‟s (1994) Linguistic Theories of Humor, stand-up comedy is not mentioned as one of the genres of humour nor is any academic study on stand-up comedy reviewed. Besides, linguistic studies on humour have concentrated on only ambiguity-based jokes (for example, Giora, 1991; Raskin, 1985; and Lew, 1997). In addition, most linguistic studies of jokes do not view jokes as having particular pragmatic functions or performing specific acts; perhaps, because scholars have concentrated on investigating only the structure of jokes and have formulated their theories without considering the context and content of the jokes. For instance, Richie (2004) does not involve the consideration of joking contexts in the analysis of jokes, even though the study recognises that jokes are culturally oriented. Jokes certainly have messages which they convey whenever they are used. Participants adopt jokes to indicate their intentions in any communication exchange. 3 UN VERSITY OF IBADAN Moreover, linguistic studies on humour have focused only on jokes generated from native speakers‟ contexts leaving out humorous texts which are generated in multilingual contexts like Nigeria. Adetunji (2013) observes that linguistic investigation of stand-up comedy performances have been limited to only native English contexts. Although there are studies that compare humour across cultures (for instance, Katamaya 2008), most of the linguistic scholarships on stand-up comedy are based on analysis of performances from America and the UK. From the preceding paragraphs, it can be deduced that the genre of stand-up comedy, most especially Nigerian stand-up comedy, has been neglected in linguistic studies. The observations identified above serve as impetus for this study. Since the previous studies have not examined stand-up comedians‟ intentions in their joking contexts, this study describes stand-up comedians‟ intentions in their performances and the strategies that are used to actualise such intentions. 1.3 Aim and objectives of the study The aim of this study is to identify and explain how Nigerian stand-up comedians actualise their intentions in the contexts of their joke performance. All humans use language but how language is used and what it is used for differ from one context to another. In similar way, language use in Nigerian stand-up comedy performance differs from language use in any other context. Nigerian stand-up comedians play with language and use it to portray the prevailing socio-cultural situations in the country while amusing their audience. The following were the specific objectives of the study: i. to describe the humour acts in the performances of jokes by Nigerian stand-up comedians; ii. to explore the humour strategies employed by Nigerian stand-up comedians in their performances; iii. to examine how Nigerian stand-up comedians employ nonverbal cues like gesture, posture, dance and costume for the purpose of their performances; iv. to investigate how Nigerian stand-up comedians articulate voicing for the narration of jokes; v. to describe the contexts deployed by Nigerian stand-up comedians in the performance of their jokes. 4 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 1.4 Significance of the study This study will help readers to understand how Nigerian stand-up comedians realise their intentions in the context of their performances. The study investigates, primarily, the humour acts and strategies, in the performances of jokes by Nigerian stand-up comedians. Thus, it will contribute to the existing body of knowledge on how humour is instantiated in stand-up comedy performances. Specifically, it will help readers to know how Nigerian stand-up comedians use language and other semiotic means to elicit laughter in their performances. The study will also provide information to other researchers who are interested in studies related to this. The study will be relevant to stand-up comedians and individuals who desire to become stand-up comedians. This study will help stand-up comedians to see how their trade is conceptualised theoretically from the linguistic perspective. For those who desire to be stand-up comedians, it will provide illustration of how they could perform jokes since it presents analysis of samples of performances. Besides, by adopting pragmatic principles to analyse humour in Nigerian stand-up comedy performances, this study underscores how Nigerian comedians reflect in their joking stories the realities of their country. Therefore, it pinpoints the social relevance of stand-up comedy in Nigeria. 1.5 An overview of stand-up comedy The term stand-up comedy refers to a genre of entertainment in which a performer stands in front of an audience, presents to them funny utterances and also behaves in a funny way. The performer is also known as a comic, stand-up comic, stand-up comedian or stand-up (Ayakoroma, 2013). Schwarz (2010:17) describes stand-up comedians as individual performers who plant themselves in front of their listeners with their microphones and start telling a succession of funny stories, one-liners or short jokes, and anecdotes, which are often called „bits‟, in order to make their audience laugh. The humourists‟ personalities, their interaction with the audience and their ability to spontaneously react to heckling are crucial aspects for successful stand-up comedy. Mintz (1985:71) defines stand-up comedy performance as “an encounter between a single standing performer behaving comically and/or saying funny things to 5 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN an audience.” Mintz (1985) argues that it is the purest form of public communication that performs the same social and cultural roles in every known society. He also argues that stand-up comedy is the oldest, most universal, basic and deeply significant form of humorous expression, apart from spontaneous joking. Mintz notes that its roots are intertwined with rites, rituals and dramatic experience; and argue that the scope of stand-up comedy performance includes seated storytellers, other comic characterisations that employ costume, sitcoms and motifs with dramatic vehicles. In the same way, McIlvenny, Mettovaara and Tapio (1993:239) assert that stand-up comedy performance is “a live comedy show” that “can be best described as consisting of a rich interaction between a comedian and audience, in which the comedian‟s talk and the variety of audience responses are intricately interwoven.” To Greenbaum (1999), stand-up comedy is a rhetorical discourse which strives not only to entertain but also to persuade people. The comedians are successful when they persuade the audience to see the world through their comic vision. Also, McIlvenny, Mettovaara and Tapio (1993:225) describe stand-up comedy as “a rather strange and precarious line of work in which to succeed one must routinely win the attention, approval and laughter of a large assembly of people.” These descriptions and definitions of stand-up comedy performance point to it as a genre of humour, as a form of entertainment, and as an instance of cultural rhetoric and symbolism. Limon (2000) alludes to the socio-cultural significance of stand-up comedy and gives a cultural analysis of the genre. Limon sees stand-up comedy performance as purely abjection. He adopts the term abjection to mean “abasement”, “grovelling prostration” and “a psychic worrying of those aspects of oneself that one cannot be rid of, that seem, but are not quite, alienable, for example, blood, urine, faces, nails and the corpse” (p. 4). His notion of abjection is taken as what cannot be subjected to one and at the same time, what one cannot object to. By this, Limon (2000) draws attention to the contents of stand-up comedy performances as containing those things the society has taken as debasing, dirty or profane and should not be the subject of public discourse. Such topics are usually due to cultural stereotypes and social beliefs, but they form the basis of humour in stand-up comedy performances. On the etymology of the word, Limon (2000) notes that the term stand-up comedy came into existence in 1966. Scholars have however traced its origin to several years before 1966. Ayakoroma (2013) observes that stand-up comedy genre 6 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN can be traced to 1800s. A common suggestion for the origin of stand-up performance is that it is an offshoot of theatrical performances like burlesque, vaudeville, and other jesting or comic performances. Double (2005) observes that the work of jesters, commedia dell‟arte, Shakespearean clowns, British music hall comedians and American vaudeville entertainers instigate the development of stand-up comedy. Mintz (1985) emphasizes the connection of stand-up comedy with the commedia dell‟arte troupes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He notes that these entertainers make use of characters that employ spontaneous, uncomplicated performances and simple stories, such that even uneducated audiences could follow them. Likewise, Schwarz (2010:18) asserts that “in America, the earliest form of stand-up comedy had its roots in vaudeville, which first started as a minstrel or variety show. White comedians painting their faces black and started to perform by speaking and singing in black dialects.” Schwarz (2010) further notes that the minstrel show developed into American vaudeville towards the end of the nineteenth century. At the start of the twentieth century, American humourists performed popular genres of American entertainment before turning their attention to stand-up comedy. The adoption of radio shows caused a decline in the vaudeville theatre, because people could listen to performances on the radio without paying for them in the theatres. Because the vaudeville performers focused on every day matters in their personal lives, they were able to attract and sustain the audience interest. They also offered privileges to stand-up comedians to achieve popularity. At this early stage, stand-up was informal and permeated with dark humour, sarcasm and satire. Further still, Schwarz (2010) observes that Lenny Bruce, a stand-up comedian notorious for his brisk manner of speaking, foul language and engaging of taboo areas, largely influence the genre. Because of him, it is normal in stand-up comedy to overtly engage taboo topics during performances. Because of Lenny Bruce, obscene and vulgar subjects like drugs, sex, violence and racism are very common in stand-up comedy practices. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a turnaround in the development of stand-up comedy (Double, 2005; Schwarz, 2010; Ayakoroma, 2013). During this period, a number of comedy clubs were opened and the number of stand-up comedians increased. According to Schwarz (2010:20), “the first comedy club worldwide was opened in Sheepshead Bay, New York, in 1962.” The comedy clubs were avenues where the comedians practise their arts, and through which they became so popular to 7 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN the extent that attendance of performances outgrew the capacity of the clubs. The comedians, therefore, began to perform in stadia and amphitheatres, and more people became interested in the genre. Comedians like Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Steve Martin, Bill Cosby, Robert Klein, Jerry Seinfeld, Richard Lewis, Larry David, David Letterman and some others became famous through the art of stand-up practice (Schwarz, 2010; and Ayakoroma, 2013). Ayakoroma (2013) remarks that the new stand-up comedians were faster and looser while performing. Some of them, like Robert Klein and Jerry Seinfeld, ushered in a fresh style of observational comedy. Their observational comedy was made up of materials based on everyday life and which were assessable to the audiences. He further states that the proliferation of comedy clubs exposed audiences to new comedians and provided new opportunities for the upcoming comedians. Both Schwarz (2010) and Double (2005) report that, in Great Britain, the development of stand-up comedy is similar to what is obtainable in the USA. It was carried out in huge music halls where music performers entertained working class audiences. The music performances were characterised by songs which were often comic. With time, the performances evolved into the contemporary stand-up comedy style in which performers presented a series of jokes. From the 1960s, famous clubs were established. The entertainment in these clubs began to boom and more clubs were established, for instance, the Batley Variety Club was established in Yorkshire in 1967. More stand-up comedians came from the British folk music clubs, where stand- up comedy was becoming more conversational. In 1979, Peter Rosengard opened the first American-style stand-up comedy club in London, the Comedy Store, in which the most successful comedians of the country in the 1980s began their careers. With the clubs, British stand-up comedy spread all over the country, and predominantly political humour dominated this geographic genre of stand-up comedy (Schwarz, 2010). Another contributing factor to the development of stand-up comedy is the employment of the broadcast media to popularise the art. According to Ayakoroma (2013), the television played a vital role in sustaining the genre. Similarly, Schwarz (2010:20-21) asserts that “television had developed into a real comedy market place and increased the popularity of numerous stand-up comedians.” For instance, Saturday Night Live which premiered in 1975 gave many stand-up comedians like Carlin, Pryor and Martin a ninety minute national showcase. Also, in the 1980s, sitcoms and other television shows made a number of comedians like George Carlin, Dennis Miller, 8 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Robin Williams, Eddie Murphy, Jerry Seinfeld and Billy Crystal very popular. An example of such sitcom is The Cosby Show by Bill Cosby which aired in the 1980s (Schwarz, 2010; Ayakoroma, 2013). Similarly, in Great Britain, stand-up comedians adopted the television and radio to popularise their acts. Bernard Manning, Stan Boardman, Frank Carson and Bobby Thomas became prominent through television shows like The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club (Schwarz, 2010). 1.6 The Nigerian stand-up comedy As stated by Ayakoroma (2013), the commencement of stand-up comedy performance in Nigeria can be traced to late 1980s when Ali Baba (Alleluia Atunyota Akporobomeeriere) performed jokes as a student of and in Bendel State University, Ekpoma (now Ambrose Ali University, Edo State). His first performance was in 1988 at the pavilion of the institution (Ayakoroma, 2013). As shown in Ayakoroma (2013) and other studies like Haynes (1994), Adeleke (2005; 2006; 2007), there were genres of entertainment in Nigeria which acted as precursors to the development of stand-up comedy. If Mintz‟ (1985) broad definition of stand-up comedy is considered, these genres will be regarded as stand-up performances. Ayakoroma (2013) argues that stand-up comedy began prior to Ali Baba‟s performance, since traditional cultures in the country identified the roles of village spokesmen who functioned as masters of ceremonies and entertained their audiences with jokes and other humorous short stories. Apart from the local ceremonies where masters of ceremonies functioned, the radio, television, theatre troupes and films also contributed to the development of stand-up comedy in Nigeria. Ayakoroma (2013) cites the Mazi Mperempe programme on Radio Nigeria and the old Anambra State Television, Enugu, in the 1970s and 1980s as one of the precursors of the stand-up genre in Nigeria. In the radio and television show, the character of Mazi Mperempe tells several rib-cracking jokes, starting with his call-and-response slogan “Oluo n‟omume… onye agbana oso,” which translates to “the time of action has arrived… nobody should run away!”. Apart from the Mazi Mperempe programme, there were several sitcoms which were broadcast on the radio and television across Nigeria before the advent of stand- up comedy. Some of these shows are The New Masquerade, Hotel De Jordan and Samanja. The New Masquerade was a sitcom on Nigerian Television Authority 9 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN (NTA) network in the 1980s. The sitcom featured the characters Giringory, Chief Zebrudaya, Jegede Shokoya, Zakky, Ovuleria, Clarus and Natty. All of the characters in The New Masquerade acted comic roles; however, Zebrudaya was the most famous. He was notorious for deliberately violating English grammar rules in his utterances. Samanja was a sitcom which started in the northern Nigeria in the mid 1970s on NTA Kaduna (Muhammed, 2014). The sitcom was later aired on the NTA network in the 1980s. In an interview granted by the main character, Samanja, to Daily Trust Newspaper, Samanja noted that he started acting comedy when he joined the Northern Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) Kaduna. In NBC, he acted in a radio show titled “Mallam Jatau Na Albarkawa”, which mirrored a university and in which weak and brilliant students were satirised (Muhammed, 2014). His sitcom on television, Samanja, was meant to mock the regimentation of the military. The major character‟s real name is Mallam Usuman Baba Pategi. Another popular comedian from the northern part of Nigeria was Shehu Jibril, whose screen name was Golobo. Golobo acted comic roles in weekly series on the NTA in the mid 1980s. Hotel De Jordan started in 1973 in Midwest Television. The TV station was later changed to NTA. Hotel De Jordan was produced by Joe Ihonde and it featured funny characters like Lord Mayor, Casino Manager, Chief Ukatabribri and Okhue (Usman, 2015). Another sitcom is Icheoku. Icheoku is a series on the NTA Enugu and Lagos (Teilanyo, 2003). Icheoku means parrot. The sitcom was set in an Igbo community which was being colonised by the British. It featured a Court Clerk, the main character, translating the utterances of the district commissioner for the indigenes of the community and vise versa. The Court Clerk was reknowned for being bombastic (Teilanyo, 2003). In the western part of the country, the radio personality, Fu nwontan (Gbenga Adeb oye) presented a number of humorous radio and television shows in Ogun, Lagos and Ondo States. Gben ga Adeb oye gave himself several stage names like „King of Oduology‟, „Alaaye  mi Gben gul o‟ „Alhaji Pastor Olu wo Adegboye‟ , Okanlom o of Europe, Amul uu d un of London and Alabef e  to enhance his humorous personality and comic character. As an entertainer, Gbenga Adeboye recorded a number of songs and tagged his music style Fun wontan . He also recorded a number of talk shows for 10 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN instance London Yabis and O ro  Sun ukun , which were well received as humorous narratives because they satirised the socio-cultural and socio-political situations of Nigeria. These recordings were renowned for mocking the political class of the country. In addition to the content of Gbenga Adeboye‟s performances, his style of delivery which entails manipulation of linguistic structures and twisting translations, together with the presentation of anecdotes, endeared him to the audience. Furthermore, Adeleke (2005; 2006; 2007) chronicle the use of laughter, humour and humorous personalities in Yoru ba  land, southwest Nigeria. It is important to note that the geographical location, where Adeleke‟s studies are situated, is where stand-up comedy is dominant in the country. Nigerian stand-up comedy is primarily domicile in Lagos, a major city in southwest Nigeria. Thus, the traditional use of humour which Adeleke explores must have influenced, positively, the development of Nigerian stand-up comedy since according to Adeleke, in Yorub a culture and towns, humour is pervasive. Adeleke (2005) observes that laughter is part of the social activities of Yoru ba. It is highly important that it is embodied in an Ifa  verse which states the mythology of laughter in the culture. Laughter is evoked in the performances of Egun gu n (masquerade) dramaturgy. The masks worn by these masquerades bear iconographies of the targets that are being satirised and lampooned. Some masquerades, like ge  lede, adopt satirical songs, Ef e, which is rendered with mocking tones and which employs traditional tools of comedy like exaggeration and grotesqueness. There is also Etiye ri,  which “employs verbal humour to give information about scandalous events within its environs” (p. 47). Oral artists in the culture also adopt humour to excite and entertain their audiences. In addition, there are festivals in which scornful or satiric laughter is evoked. The use of humour in these contexts is described by Adeleke (2005) as institutionalised laughter. There are also instances of individualistic laughter in which interlocutors adopt forms of humour in their interaction. Adeleke (2005) cites two joking relationships where this is found: between a woman and her in-laws and between participants in a traditional game, Ayo . In the first instance, a woman requires much competence in the culture so as not to incur the wrath of her in-laws whenever she humorously targets 11 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN them. Likewise, within the frame of Ayo  game, social status is not recognised, such that players could easily humorously target each other. Thus, the royalty and wealthy are not excluded from the banter the game permits. In another study, Adeleke (2006) investigates the use of fools (jesters) at the micro-discourse level in Yoru ba  culture. Specifically, he identifies the use of court fools, who are found in palaces across Yorub a  cities and towns; mythological fool, which “covers the fool figures in Yorub a  sacred myth and folktales” (2006:50) and the fool role in modern Yoruba theatre and movies, which has been championed by Moses Olaiya (Baba Sala). According to Adeleke (2006: 63), “the fool in court focused on pure entertainment and rhetoric; while the mythological fool… challenges the status quo of the society.” Baba Sala and his followers, as fools, combine “the diverse personality traits of the court fool in reality with those in mythology” (p. 63). Baba Sala belonged to the theatre movements which were championed by Herbert Ogunde. Baba Sala championed the comic roles and performances in these movements. Baba Sala produced his first comic movies in the 1980s- Orun Mooru and Mosebolatan. To Haynes (1994), these movies represent high-water-mark of Nigerian film comedy. He produced two other movies, Agba Man and Return Match, in 1992 and 1993 respectively. He also had comic television shows on the NTA station in Ibadan in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Baba Sala was so successful that he acquired his own theatre in Ibadan- Cinema de Baba Sala. Haynes (1994) notes that Baba Sala‟s personality and excellent acting were at the centre of things in his movies, which were set in various rich and well-structured comic worlds. His costumes, both traditional and English, were caricatures of the accepted models. Haynes (1994) further describes his comedies as nasty because they satirize the prevailing business class. Also in the 1980s, the likes of Ade rupo ko , Ajimajasan, Jacob and Papalolo whose real names are Sabitu Tijani, O la O mo nitan, Tajudeen Gbadamosi and Ayo Ogunsina respectively, came into the limelight by presenting comedies. They appeared in the programme, Awada, which was broadcast on the Western Nigerian Television, now NTA Ibadan. They also formed the group- The Jesters International, which produced comic plays on stage and TV stations like NTA Ibadan, Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State and Ogun State Television. There were also female actors 12 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN who acted comic roles in conjunction with the male comedians. Examples of these female actors are Iya Sala, Iya Mero and Moladun. Baba Sala‟s comic roles are duplicated in today‟s Nollywood by Baba Aluwe, Mr Latin, Baba Suwe, Aki, Pawpaw and others. At the start, these comedians depended so much on costume and absurd roles to create humour, but today, their rely less on costumes and work more on distorting words or fixed utterances like idioms and proverbs. For instance, Baba Suwe is noted for manipulating and distorting proverbs, and thereby creating his own versions of Yoruba proverbs. By whetting people‟s appetite for comedy, Baba Sala prepared the ground for stand-up comedy performances and other television sitcoms. The influence of these theatre comedians and media personalities on Nigerian stand-up comedy cannot be overemphasized. For instance, Sam Loco Efe, renowned for comic roles in the Nollywood, has featured in the most popular brand of Nigerian stand-up comedy, as one of the stand-up comedy performers. Ali Baba is regarded as the progenitor of contemporary Nigerian stand-up comedy (Adetunji, 2013 and Gabriel, 2012). Ali Baba started the trade and refined his acts as an undergraduate. After school, he moved to Lagos in 1990 in search for a greener pasture. He got a job in an advertising agency where he worked for a while. During this period, he performed in a number of social gatherings and his primary audience were students of higher institutions in Lagos State (Gabriel, 2012). When Ali Baba started performing stand-up jokes, there were little or no financial gains since it was negatively perceived and received by Nigerians (Ayakoroma, 2013). However, because of his doggedness, he continued. In 1998 he registered his comedy company, Ali Baba Hiccupurathird. In the same year, he erected three billboards to advertise his trade in strategic locations in Lagos State: Victoria Island, Ikoyi and Marina. The billboard carried the message: „Ali Baba- Being Funny is Serious Business‟. Ali Baba brought so much dexterity to stand-up comedy performance. In 2010, he achieved a landmark by performing for six hours without a break for a Lagos audience. It was his acts, promotions and subsequent popularity that attracted several other people to stand-up comedy, most of whom were university graduates seeking employment. It can thus be said that Ali Baba opened up the stand-up comedy genre in Nigeria. He inspired other stand-up comics like Julius Agwu, Basketmouth, AY, and TEE A (Ayakoroma, 2013, Adetunji, 2013 and Gabriel, 2012). 13 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN It is important to mention the contribution of Opa Williams, a movie producer, who popularised Nigerian stand-up comedy by producing and sponsoring “Nite of a thousand laughs” (NTL), a comedy road show in which numerous stand-up comedians are given the opportunity to express their acts (Ayakoroma, 2013). Adetunji (2013:3) describes NTL as a national road show…staged at unspecified intervals in the country‟s major cities. In any instance of NTL, a comedian is given 10-15 minutes to make a seated audience laugh, in monologues interspersed with musical performances, mines, and pantomimes. Apart from the institutionalized NTL, specific national and international events or holidays- National Democracy Day (May 29), Independence Day (October 1), Valentine‟s Day (February 14), Christmas (December 25) - provide opportunities for stand-up comic shows. Opa Williams started out as a movie producer but ventured into producing NTL when he realised the power of comedy. The first edition of NTL was organised on October 1, 1995, at the University of Lagos, Akoka, Lagos State. The event was artistically successful. He started with the likes of Mohammed Danjuma, Okey Bakassi, Sam Loco Efe, Boma Erokosima and Sammy Needle but has produced many more contemporary stand-up comedians like AY, Basketmouth, Klint de Drunk, Holly Mallam and Elenu (Ayakoroma, 2013). Ayakoroma (2013) identifies the landmark contribution of Opa Williams to Nigerian Stand-up comedy by noting that he made comedy a veritable business. Through NTL, stand-up comedy in Nigeria has become an industry. Today, apart from the NTL, there are other sources of Nigerian stand-up comedy. Many stand-up comedians now have their own comedy show. Gordon produces ComedyBerlusconi, Basketmouth produces Basketmouth uncensored and Laffs „n‟ jams; and AY‟s comedy show is tagged AY Live. Also, with the success of NTL, other individuals ventured into the production of comedy shows, examples are Bunmi Davies‟ Stand Up Nigeria and Richard Mofe Damijo‟s Made in Warri. Apart from comedy shows, night clubs are avenues where people encounter stand-up comedy performances. Before he became popular, Ali Baba performed regularly in a Lagos nightclub (Adetunji, 2013). Ayakoroma (2013) pointed out that some comedians established their own clubs where people could meet and interact with the comedians as well as watch their performance. One of such comedians is 14 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Basketmouth, who owns EmBARssy Lounge, an upscale ultra-modern discotheque, bar and lounge (Ayakoroma, 2013). In addition to live performances, Nigerian stand-up comedians also adopt the television and other media like Facebook and You Tube to enlarge their audience base. Ali Baba has featured on Charly Boy Show, Friday Night Live and Night Train with Bisi Olatilo, all on the network service of the NTA (Ayakoroma, 2013). These programmes made him popular with the audience. Some of the comedians have their own television shows, for instance, AY has three shows: AY Live- a comedy and music concert; Ay Show- a television programme; and the Open Mic Challenge- a talent-hunt programme which identifies promising entrants into the genre. Bovi, has his own sitcoms- Extended Family and Bovi Ugboma Show, both of which enjoy large followership on Africa Magic, an African movie channel (Ayakoroma, 2013). The patterns of the performances of these comedians are very diverse; however, they initiate humour primarily through language. Due to the multilingual nature of Nigeria, these comedians use Nigerian Pidgin (NP) as the lingual franca of their performances (Adetunji, 2013 and Ayakoroma, 2013). Often time, NP is alternated with English, the country‟s official language, and some other indigenous languages. The way comedians use language is different from the way language is used in everyday talk. Nigerian comedians play with language by manipulating the propositional contents of their utterances and the background knowledge they share with their audience. Their choice of NP is not unconnected to the fact it is spoken by almost every Nigerian, therefore through this language, the comedians reach a wide audience across Nigeria‟s multilingual society. As observed by Ayakoroma (2013), it should be noted that a majority of these comedians are university graduates, thus they can speak the educated variety of Nigerian English. Nigerian stand-up comedians adopt diverse styles. Apart from language, some of these comedians wear costumes or dress in an absurd way, for instance, Klint the Drunk do perform without his shoes on. Some of them do sing, dance and mime; for example, Julius Agwu termed his comedy performance as Musicomedy. The comedians also use exaggerated gesticulations. In sum, these comedians use any available resource at their disposal to achieve their aim of making people laugh. Besides its performance aspects, Nigerian stand-up comedy contributes significantly to the Nigerian economy. Ayakoroma (2013) describes Nigerian stand-up comedy as a veritable business venture, an industry and a factory that feeds people. 15 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Nigerian stand-up comedians engage in business partnership with multinational and indigenous companies in the country. These companies sponsor and partner with them in their shows while the comedians are hired as brand ambassadors. To set up any comedy show, a large number of professionals like photographers, make-up artists, cameramen, event ushers and stage managers are employed. The comedy shows attract high profile fees. The comedians also are highly paid for making the audience laugh. 1.7 Summary This chapter serves as the background to this study. The next chapter presents the review of relevant literature and theoretical model adopted for analysis. 16 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN CHAPTER TWO REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE 2.0 Introduction The goal of this chapter is to appraise the studies that have been carried out on humour. The chapter also presents the theories which form the basis of the model adopted for analysis. Reviewing previous studies on humour is germane because it provides necessary background for discussing the theoretical model for this study. It will also help to position the present study in the context of linguistic approaches to humour and the broader context of humour research. 2.1 Classification of humour Humour, as a concept, is very broad and it has diverse genres. It has been described as an extensive phenomenon with multifarious manifestations (Dynel, 2009; Ritchie 2004). Therefore, it is necessary to narrow down the investigation of humour to one of its specific manifestations (Dynel, 2009). Studies on humour make a distinction between humour conveyed by the means of language and humour which is conveyed by other semiotic channels. Humour expressed through language is termed verbalised or verbally expressed humour while humour expressed through other semiotic means like picture, music, dance or body language is termed nonverbal humour (Attardo, 1994; Ritchie, 2004; Dynel, 2009). As a genre of humour, stand-up comedy employs, primarily, verbal humour, which may or may not be augmented with nonverbal humour. The main type of nonverbal humour adopted in stand-up comedy is expressed through body language. 2.2 Taxonomy of humour theories Regardless of the different manifestations of humour and the diverse disciplinary approaches for analysing humour, humour theories are traditionally grouped into three major categories: incongruity/cognitive, relief/release, superiority/aggression (Raskin, 1985; Attardo, 1994; Ritchie, 2004; Krikmann, 2006). Attardo (1994: 47) presents the classes of humour theories in a tabular form as follows: 17 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Table 1: Attardo’s Classification of humour theories Cognitive Social Psychoanalytical Incongruity Hostility Release Contrast Aggression Sublimation Superiority Liberation Triumph Economy Derision Disparagement The different approaches result from investigating different humorous data with different goals under different disciplinary lenses. Ritchie (2004) opines that several of these approaches could be simultaneously true. It seems that the motivating factors for choosing an approach are the humour manifestations to be analysed and the disciplinary orientation of the analyst. Thus, a researcher, whose orientation is sociology, when faced with any manifestation of humour like jokes, riddles or pun, may investigate the aggressive mechanism in the jokes; while a researcher in linguistics may be more concerned with the linguistic devices like ambiguity in such humour manifestations. For instance, Servaite (2005) and Lew (1997) look at the linguistic structure of jokes while Davies (1982) whose goal is to investigate “hostility” in ethnic jokes is more concerned with social issues. Two approaches are found relevant to the present study. Incongruity is used to account for how the humour strategies employed by Nigerian comedians leads to humour while the superiority theory is used to account for the social relevance of the joking stories. 2.2.1 The incongruity theory The incongruity theorists hold that the essential element in humour is the incongruous. Incongruity is seen as some sorts of unusual or unexpected juxtaposition of events, objects, or ideas (Bardon, 2005). The linguists who have defined humour from incongruity perspective suggest that humour is created from conflicting or opposing meanings. In line with this, Krikmann (2006) observes that in humorous text, there are two different planes of content which are also called frames, schemas, scripts or isotopies. Although, these two planes of content are mutually incompatible, 18 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN they include a common part which makes the shift from one to another possible. The recipient processes the textual and contextual information of the humorous utterance, reducing them to the most accessible plane of content, and proceeds until interpretation bounces over a semantic obstacle and fails. The theorists propose that when the interpretation fails, some instantaneous cognitive work will be done to overcome the contradiction and another interpretation which has so far been hidden will be found. It is the renewal of understanding, attended by the emotion of surprise and satisfaction, which causes laughter. Koestler (1964) and Apter (1982) are important contributions to the incongruity approach. Koestler coined the term bisociation to describe the mental process involved in perceiving humorous incongruity. To Koestler, bisociation occurs when a situation, an event or idea is simultaneously observed from the perspective of two self-consistent but normally unrelated and even incompatible frames of reference; for instance, in puns, two different meanings of a word are brought together simultaneously. Apter (1982) uses the concept of synergy to explain the cognitive exercise in which two conflicting images or notions of the same object are held at the same time in one‟s mind. Furthermore, Apter (1991) distinguishes between two states of human mind. The first is the paratelic mode which is a playful and non-serious mode while the second is telic which is a more serious and goal oriented mode. Apter noted that humans switch from one mode to another in the course of daily activities and it is in the paratelic mode that humorous activities take place. On the shortcoming of incongruity approach, Ritchie (2004) points out that the key terms in the theory, like incongruity, are not given a common definition. Also, what Krikmann (2006:27) terms “planes of contents” have been given different terms and definitions in literatures: isotopies (Attardo, 1994), scripts (Raskin, 1979 and 1985), frames of reference (Koestler, 1964), informativeness (Giora, 1991) and schemas (Krikmann, 2006). According to Ritchie (2004:54), the definitions given for this term are “disappointingly vague”. Another weak point of the approach is that the proponents argue that for anything to be humorous, it must be incongruous. Incongruity, however, may be an essential feature of humour, it is not an exclusive feature of humour as there are several incongruous situations and utterances that are not humorous. Bardon (2005) argues that humans laugh at situations that are not incongruous and that not all incongruous situations or utterances create humour. Some incongruous utterances may 19 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN warn, alert or create fear or awe in the recipients; for instance, the maxim- wolf in sheep‟s clothing will not elicit laughter, rather, it cautions its recipients. Furthermore, Attardo (2009) observes that incongruities do not necessarily generate humour, because finding things funny can be affected by external factors like tiredness, distress and availability of the relevant schematic knowledge to be able to appreciate the incongruity in question. Regardless of these weak points, scholars have argued that incongruity is vital to humour. Martin (2007) opines that incongruity seems to characterise all forms of humour. Krikmann (2006) argues that incongruity has to be perceived and resolved in humorous texts. It is the resolution of the incongruity that is attended by an emotion of surprise and satisfaction. Tsakona and Popa (2011) observe that it is the enjoyment of incongruity that leads to humour. Attardo (2009) notes that the following features are important for incongruity to lead to humour: a. The incongruity must be non-threatening b. The incongruity must not be too complex or too simple c. Available scripts/knowledge: The recipients must have sufficient knowledge to be able to process the scripts and identify the incongruity d. The incongruity must be unexpected and surprising e. The participants should be in a playful mode: the situation must be framed or keyed as humour. It should reflect suspension of disbelief. f. Co-presence of the opposed scripts: two scripts should be available and accessible at the same time, and/or be activated closely. 2.2.2 The superiority theory The superiority approach is a social approach to humour because it draws from the social relationship between the users of humour and the butts of the humour. The proponents of superiority perspective hold that humans laugh at the misfortunes of others. According to Krikmann (2006:27), studies which adopt superiority theory “accentuate the negative attitude of the producer and/or user of humour towards its target and often alleged aggressive character of laughter… humour is said to be pointed against some person or group, typically on political, ethnic, or gender grounds.” 20 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN The inherent concept in the superiority theory is that jokes make their users powerful, especially when they are directed towards a person or group. Although superiority theory accentuates negative use of humour, it presents elements of positive use of humour in that it emphasises the social corrective roles of humour. It is the social corrective function of humour that Bergson (1956) refers to when he notes that the purpose of laughter is to promote free and well-adapted behaviour through humiliation (Attardo, 1994). To Bergson (1956), humour is used to correct people‟s behaviour which is incongruous with social norms, especially when such people are made the butt of a joke (Schwarz, 2010). The superiority theory is not without limitations. Humans witness many instances where they are made superior, and such instances do not necessarily lead to humour; for instance, witnessing someone in pain is not amusing (Bardon, 2005 and Morreall, 2009). Another weak point of the approach is that humans need not to compare themselves with each other in order to laugh. If comparison is the basis of amusement, then humans will only laugh after they discover that they are better than others. In addition, it seems that the concern of the theorists is laughter and not humour. In several studies where superiority theory is applied to humour, the focus is usually on laughter and not humour. Such studies present the use of laughter in social interactions, which may not necessarily be connected with humour. Superiority thesis is not sufficient for explaining humour as there are jokes which do not have targets. However, the approach is very important in contemporary humour research because of its emphasis on the interpersonal and social aspects of laughter which results from humour. 2.2.3 The relief theory The relief theory postulates that humour relieves its users from tensions, psychic energy, inhibitions and social conventions (Attardo, 1994). Humour is seen as psychological or psycho-physiological device through which humans relieve themselves from both social and physical tensions. The relief theorists hold that in everyday living, humans are faced with lots of social inhibitions which lead to storing up of psychic energy, which is then released (or expressed) through laughter when things that are related to such inhibitions are mentioned. The proponents see “humour as one of the so-called substitution mechanisms which enables one to convert one‟s 21 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN socially tabooed aggressive impulses to acceptable ones and thus avoid wasting additional mental energy to suppress them” (Krikmann, 2006:34). Freud, who formulates the psychoanalysis, is referred to as the most influential amongst the proponents of relief theory (Attardo 1994; Krikmann, 2006). Freud (2002) proposes that laughter releases tension and psychic energy. Freud argues that psychic energy in human body is built as a means for suppressing feelings in taboo areas like sex or death. Humans laugh when psychic energy is released, not only because of the release but also because these taboo thoughts are being entertained. Freud (2002) identifies three situations in which psychic energy can be released: jokes or wit, the comic and humorous situations. To Freud, a joke is made up of features like human thoughts, playful judgement, combination of opposing ideas and sense in nonsense. A major weakness of Freud‟s theory is that his focus is on laughter and not humour. He directly links laughter to humour; however, studies after his work have shown that not all laughter results from humour, and laughter and humour are two different things. Freud thesis is more of a theory of laughter since he did not say what constitutes humour. 2.3 Linguistic theories of humour Since the present study adopts linguistic theories to analyse humorous texts generated from Nigerian stand-up comedy performances, it is important to examine how humour has been viewed in linguistic studies. In this section, therefore, how the question “what is humour?” has been answered in semantics and pragmatics will be reviewed. It should be noted that most linguistic approaches to humour fit into the incongruity class because they hold that humour results from antonymous relationship between two meanings juxtaposed into a text. 2.3.1 Semantic script theory of humour (SSTH) The SSTH is fully explicated in the monograph Semantic Mechanism of Humour, published in 1985 by Victor Raskin. It is motivated by the need to formalise the grammar of jokes and define what linguistically makes up a joke. Raskin grounds his theory in Transformational Generative Grammar of Noam Chomsky and attempts to describe the notion of humour competence, which he fashioned after Chomsky‟s 22 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN theory of competence. SSTH, therefore, adopts an idealised homogenous speaker- hearer joking exchange. According to Attardo (1994:197), “the SSTH models the humorous competence of an idealized speaker/hearer who is unaffected by racial or gender biases, undisturbed by scatological, obscene or disgusting materials, not subject to boredom , and, most importantly, who has never „heard it before‟ when presented with a joke.” The term humour acts in the present study is adopted from Raskin (1985), although the analysis of humour acts in this study is not in consonance with what Raskin (1985) described as humour acts. The author treats the phenomenon in a decontextualized manner. The concept of acts in linguistic studies is usually investigated from functional perspectives, and as shown in some studies like Austin (1962) and Mey (2001), acts are the communicative imports of utterances recognised when the intentions of interactants are examined in the contexts of utterances. For Raskin (1985:3), humour act means “an individual occurrence of a funny stimulus” which is based upon the hearer‟s discovery of incongruity. According to Raskin (1985), a humour act is recognisable when hearers recognise speakers‟ intention to participate in humorous discourse, when the hearers resolve the incongruity and lastly, when the hearers laugh at the joke. For Raskin, humour act is only a concept which indicates amusement in interactions and which has no further communicative import. Apart from deriving mirth, humour could be used to indicate other intentions such as projecting socio-cultural meanings like gender, age and occupation (Holmes, 2006; Schmidt 2011; Matsumoto, 2009). Humorous stimuli could have other discourse and pragmatic function, apart from eliciting laughter which Raskin has described as a precondition for humour act. As argued in Chapter One, laughter may not necessarily be a marker for humour. In addition, grounding humour act in the discovery of incongruity is not sufficient since incongruity does not always lead to humour (Bardon, 2005; Attardo, 2009) and the social significance of humour does not end with generating laughter; humour could be a means of mediating culture and social beliefs (Mintz, 1985; Mesropova, 2003). Raskin (1979:326) argues that in studies on joke performance, “no formal analysis of the linguistics aspect has ever been undertaken.” Attardo (2011) affirms that his theory advocates a new approach to the semantics of humour. The ultimate aim of SSTH is to show that “a linguistic theory of humour should determine and formulate the necessary and sufficient linguistic conditions for the text to be funny” 23 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN (Raskin 1985:47). In sum, SSTH linguistically formalises and explains the why and how of humour in human language. Raskin founds his theory on script-based semantics. According to Raskin (1979:325), scripts are thought to represent the common sense cognitive structures stored in the mind of the native speaker… scripts are motivated and justified in terms of grammaticality-cum-meaningfulness-cum- appropriateness. The scripts are designed to describe certain standard routines, processes, the way the native speaker views them and thus to provide sematic theory with a restricted and prestructured outlook into the extra-linguistic world. In another study, the author redefines script as “a large chunk of semantic information surrounding the word or evoked by it” (Raskin, 1985:81). According to Attardo (1994:198) a script in its broadest sense can be defined as an “organised chunk of information about something. It is a cognitive structure internalised by the speaker which provides the speaker with information on how things are done, organised...” A script, therefore, is an innate cognitive structure which provides language users information on how things are carried out or structured. For instance, the word “book” evokes series of information and related words such as library, author, subject, reader(s), publisher, reading, learning, studying and chapters. The main thesis of SSTH is presented thus: A text can be characterised as a single-joke-carrying text if both of the (following) conditions are satisfied: i. The text is compactible, fully or in part with two different scripts ii. The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite... The two scripts with which the text is compatible are said to overlap fully or in part on this text (Raskin 1985:99) The first condition of the thesis presupposes that a joke text must be capable of two different overlapping scripts. Put differently, the text must have two semantic interpretations. The recipient must be able to read two distinct scripts to the sentences of the joke until the punchline is delivered. The first of the interpretations must be more conspicuous than the second (must be overt). The second interpretation must not be easily identifiable (it must be covert). The punchline of the joke brings the second interpretation to the hearer‟s awareness. The two meanings in the joke may be due to an ambiguous word in the joke or ambiguous structure of the joke text. 24 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN The second condition presupposes that the meanings or scripts which are found in the text must, in some sense, be opposite. This condition indicates that contrast between the scripts is vital and this oppositeness can be realised through situational, contextual or lexical antonyms. Raskin (1985) classifies this scriptic opposition into three broad types of real and unreal situations: actual versus non-actual situations, normal versus abnormal states of affairs, and possible versus impossible situations. In addition, he introduces what he calls the semantic script-switch trigger which prompts the change from one script to the other. This trigger is a contradiction or an ambiguity which is implicitly or explicitly present in the text. The joke below, from Raskin (1985:25) illustrates the thesis: Who was that gentleman I saw you with last night? That was no gentleman. That was a senator. The text activates two opposing scripts: senators are gentlemen and senators are not gentlemen. The oppositeness in these scripts contrasts normal state of affairs with abnormal state of affairs since senators are expected to be upstanding members of the society in that they are expected to behave gentlemanly. It is therefore abnormal not to consider them as gentlemen. It is the two meanings in the word gentlemen (when it occurs in the second instance) which triggers the switch from the script of man of honour or quality to just a man of contempt since the word gentleman can refer to just any man or to a man of honour. 2.3.1.1 The pragmatic aspect of SSTH Perhaps, because Raskin realises that humour is not just semantic and cannot be fully explained using a linguistic approach that does not consider contextual variables, he attempts to incorporate pragmatic aspects into his theory. In doing this, Raskin (1985) distinguishes between two modes of communication: the bona-fide (BF) and non-bona-fide (NBF) modes. In BF mode, communication is genuine and speakers are committed to the sincerity of their propositions while in NBF mode, speakers are not committed to the genuineness of what they say. Jokes belong to NBF mode though they may convey BF information (Attardo, 1994). Raskin notes that speakers, during conversations, normally switch from the BF mode to the NBF mode whenever they want to say a joke and this switch is signalled by certain linguistic 25 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN devices. It should be noted that Raskin‟s distinction of BF from NBF is similar to Apter‟s distinction of paratelic mode from telic mode. To emphasize the differences, Raskin (1985) notes that jokes do not only seem to violate Grice maxims but also they seem to follow different cooperative principles/ maxims. He argues that Grice‟s maxims account for the BF mode of communication in which speakers are sincere to the truth of their proposition. Since in the joking mode, speakers are not committed to the sincerity of their propositions, there is a need for a different set of maxims to account for jokes and other humorous utterances. Raskin (1985: 103), therefore, proposes maxims that are peculiar to joking exchanges and that cater for the NBF mode of communication. These maxims are as follows: 1. Maxim of Quantity: Give exactly as much information as necessary for the joke 2. Maxim of Quality: Say only what is compatible with the world of the joke 3. Maxim of Relation: Say only what is relevant to the joke 4. Maxim of Manner: Tell the joke efficiently Raskin (1985) strengthens his argument for the NBF mode maxims by noting that speakers can easily back out from the truth of their propositions by saying, for instance, I was only joking, it was just a joke, or by using any other linguistic marker that indicates an utterance is a joke. 2.3.1.2 Criticisms of SSTH SSTH has been well received among researchers since it is a formal theory which makes predictions, gives the grammar of jokes, distinguishes between bad and good jokes and which can be falsified. However, a major weakness of SSTH is that it assumes that script opposition is the main and only factor which elicits humour. It does not include contextual variables in explaining humour and it is limited to only instances where interlocutors share the same linguistic competence. The SSTH also fails in one of its claims in that it accounts for a joking situation where the speaker has “never heard it before” (Attardo 1994:197). This claim presupposes that when jokes are repeated, the recipients will not find it funny. However, language users do repeat jokes severally, and do find repeated jokes funny and enjoyable. In addition, Raskin and his followers could not agree on the definitions of the technical terms like script, script overlapping and script opposition (Attardo, 1994; Ritchie, 2004; Krikimann, 2006). 26 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN The pragmatic aspect of SSTH, the NBF maxims, presupposes that interlocutors have a language interpreting mechanism which is used solely during humorous exchanges and which is different from the one used for non-humorous exchanges. In other words, his distinction of BF from NBF postulates two different cognitive-pragmatic apparatuses, the first for the generation and interpretation of humorous stimuli and the second, for the generation and interpretation of non- humorous stimuli. The implication of this is that human cognitive ability for humour is different from the one for non-humorous utterances, and this is not so. In Grice (1975), maxims are also used to account for humorous utterances and this shows that Raskin‟s distinction of BF from NBF may not be necessary. Yus (2003) and (2004) show that the same cognitive mechanism is used to interpret both jokes and non-joke texts. Another weakness of the theory is that it evolved from using only short canned jokes as the primary source of data. It is limited in its application to humorous narratives which are not short jokes and which do not depend on delivery of punchline for their humour. On this, Krikmann (2006: 31) asserts that “Raskin‟s script-based semantic theory of humour does not aim to cover humour in general, but only verbal humour (or in practice, only punchline jokes).” 2.3.2 General theory of verbal humour (GTVH) GTVH is a further pragmatic specification of the SSTH by Attardo and Raskin (1991). Because they included aspects of pragmatics and textual linguistics in their rework of SSTH, Attardo and Raskin (1991) claim that the GTVH accounts for any type of humorous text. GTVH is a mesh of SSTH and Attardo‟s (1988) five level joke representation model, which identifies five levels for analysing a joke: surface, language, target and situation, template and basic. Attardo (1994:222) describes the GTVH as “broadening” the “scope” of SSTH and including other areas of linguistics such as “textual linguistics, the theory of narrativity, and pragmatics.” In broadening the scope of SSTH, Attardo and Raskin (1991) introduce Knowledge Resources (KRs), which interlocutors may employ when they want to generate and interpret a joke. The KRs are made up of the following parameters: i. Language (LA): language refers to the linguistic choices made by the joke teller. 27 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN ii. Narrative Strategy (NS): the NS deals with how a joke is presented to an audience, specifically, the narrative genre adopted by the teller. iii. Target (TA): this KR selects the butt of the joke. It contains the name of groups or individuals who are the butts of a joke and the stereotypes attached to them. iv. Situation (SI): the situation of a joke is what the joke is about or centres on. Attardo (1994: 225) opines that “the situation of a joke can be thought of as the props of the joke: the objects, participants, instruments, activities and so on. There is no joke without this parameter.” v. Logical Mechanism (LM): the LM deals with the cognitive aspect of jokes. It is the faulty logic that is found in jokes. LMs include simple juxtapositions, false analogies, garden-path phenomenon and figure ground reversal (Attardo, 1994). vi. Script Opposition (SO): just as it is in SSTH, SO demands that a joke must have two scripts and these scripts must be in a contrasting relationship. GTVH defines a joke as containing all the KRs: {LA, SI, NS, TA, SO, LM}. With the definition, the GTVH can generate an infinite number of jokes by combining different values of each parameter (Attardo, 1994). An important aspect of the GTVH is hierarchical organisation of the KRS. The foundational principle is that a certain KR will be determined by another KR, such that a high ranking KR determines a lower KR. Attardo (1994) presents GTVH hierarchical ordering as follows: SO-LM-SI-TA- NS-LA. According to Attardo (1994:227), “parameters determine the parameters below themselves and are determined by those above themselves. Determination is to be intended as limiting or reducing the options available for the instantiation of the parameter.” 2.3.2.1 Criticisms of the GTVH As a theory of humour, it is expected that the KRs of GTHV should discuss the peculiarities of humorous texts. However, the KRs highlight general textual characteristics. The contents of the GTVH are not exclusive to humorous texts and it can be argued that they identify what is found in non-humorous texts. For instance, the SI is made up of features that can be found in any other non-humorous text. Also, NS and LA are characteristic of non-humorous text and any text can be classified using 28 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN these parameters, for example political speeches or manifestoes, sermons, and classroom discourse. In addition, the SO and LM, which seem to be the cardinal parameters of the theory, are also features of figurative as well as rhetorical language use, which may not evoke any humorous effect. This is why Ritchie (2004) and Krikmann (2006) observe that the KRs lack conceptual definiteness. Like the SSTH, the GTVH does not draw on contextual variables too, which a pragmatic account of joke should do. For instance, there are different cultural demands which influence jokes and joking across different social groups. A theory of joke, which offshoot is pragmatics, should be able to say who can say a joke, to whom, under what circumstances and how it can be appropriately said. Although Attardo (1994) claims that the GTVH include pragmatics, the theory does not show how a joke can be pragmatically used. It does not show that jokes could be covertly or overtly used to disguise the intention of its users. It does not account for other communicative and pragmatic significance of jokes in conversations. Although GTVH is meant to cover for the weaknesses of SSTH, it also falls short in some areas where SSTH is weak. First it is limited in its concept of humour. Like the SSTH, for its development, the proponents examined only short canned or punchline jokes. It leaves out other genres of humour, like conversational humour in its theoretical expositions. To cater for conversational humour, the SI parameter, which is limited to situation in the joke, has to be expanded to include the situation of the joke. The difference between situation in the joke and situation of the joke is that the first is about the circumstances, events, happenings or exchanges given in the joke while the second accentuates the circumstances, events, happenings or exchanges that produce the joke. The situation of the joke deals with the interlocutors, their utterances before and after the joke, their location and activity when the joke is said. When this is done, conversational humour genres such as witticisms and retorts may be accounted for. 2.4 Jokes Jokes are the commonest genre of humour. A joke could take the form of a story, one-liner, anecdote, riddle, pun, banter, witticism or any figurative device like metaphor and simile (Attaro, 1994; Dynel, 2009). To Schmidt Schmidt (2011:615), a joke is “a discrete unit” which functions as “a piece of oral art and as a speech act.” Richie (2004:15) conceptualises a joke as: 29 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN a relatively short text which, for a given cultural group, is recognizable as having, as its primary purpose, the production of an amused reaction in its reader/hearer, and which is typically repeatable in a wide range of contexts… a text is a joke if it appears in a published form explicitly labelled as being a joke (e.g. a joke book, a website of jokes, examples in academic paper on jokes), or if we have experienced it being delivered in circumstances which imply that others regard it as a joke. In linguistics, two types of jokes are identified: canned and conversational/situational jokes. Canned jokes are commonly considered as “the prototypical form of verbal humour, produced orally in conversations or published in collection” while conversational/situational jokes “are spontaneous or pre-constructed interactional humour, different from canned jokes” (Dynel, 2009:1284-1285). Several of the linguistic studies on humour focus on explicating the structure, content and use of canned jokes, with very few examining conversational jokes (Attardo, 1994; Ritchie, 2004; Lew 1997). Based on the mechanism of humour in jokes, scholars have also identified two basic types of jokes: referential and verbal jokes, both of which are forms of verbal humour (Attado 1994; Ritchie 2004). Referential jokes are based on the meaning of the text and do not depend on the linguistic form while verbal jokes depend on the linguistic forms of their texts (Attardo, 1994). A joke has two parts: the set-up and punchline (Hocket, 1977; Sherzer, 1985). Attardo and Chabanne (1992) observe that set-ups of jokes may contain a narrative, a dialogue or a narrative and dialogue. The punchline is the final part of the joke text which creates a surprise effect (Giora, 1991) and/or which depicts an incongruity with the set-up (Suls, 1972). The joke below illustrates the structure of jokes: Teacher: George not only chopped down his father‟s cherry tree but also admitted doing it. Now, Akpos, do you know why his father didn‟t punish him? Akpos: Because George still had the axe in his hand. Set-up: Teacher: George not only chopped down his father‟s cherry tree but also admitted doing it. Now, Akpos, do you know why his father didn‟t punish him? Punchline: Akpos: Because George still had the axe in his hand. Lew (1997) identifies different types of verbal jokes. Some of the types of jokes identified are lexical, lexico-syntactic, syntactic, phonological and orthographic. 30 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN In another study, Dynel (2009) categorises different types of conversational jokes, some of which are retorts, teasing, banter, putdowns and anecdotes. Other studies like Sacks (1974), (1978), (Gu nther, 2003), Tannen (2005), Holmes (2006), Knight, (2008) and Schmidt (2011) investigate the use of jokes in conversations. Of particular interest is Sacks (1974), which notes that the occurrence of a joke in interactions has three parts: the preface, the telling and the response phase. Two phases identified by Sacks (1974) are relevant to stand-up comedy performance. Just like conversational joking, the telling of jokes in stand-up performances involves only one speaker turn- the stand-up comedians‟. Any form of speaking from the audience interrupts the joke telling. The response phase in stand-up comedy is also similar to the response phase in conversational joking. There could be spontaneous laughter or protest. Spontaneous laughter indicates that the audience get the joke immediately while protest indicates that the comedians fail to tell a funny joke or the comedians do not tell the joke effectively. Protest is marked by hecklings and other disaffiliative responses. The other studies note that the use of jokes in conversation transcends the inducement of amusement in the recipients. A joke may mark speakers‟ style, social identities and other social meanings. The next section examines some linguistic studies which have highlighted how jokes have achieved other perlocutionary goals apart from eliciting laughter. 2.5 Functional studies on jokes Studies like Mintz (1985), Moreall (1987), Holmes and Marra (2002), Csaszi (2003), Holmes (2006), Knight (2008), He (2008), Matsumoto (2009), and, Lin and Tan (2010) have underscored the social dimensions of jokes and humour in conversations. Morreall (1987) notes that humour is used as a strategy for well- adapted behaviour since no one will want to be the target of humour. Likewise Mintz (1985) sees joking as a public affirmation of cultural beliefs and re-examination of such beliefs since jokes subvert social stance. Knight (2008) shows that jokes are used for strengthening social bonds among participants who use jokes in their conversations. In another study, Matsumoto (2009), working on painful self-disclosure, demonstrates that humour is used as a strategy for coping with negative life changes among the elderly. In similar vein, Csaszi (2003) observes that humour, especially jokes centred on catastrophes like the terrorist attack on the World Trade Centre, is used as a means of coping with disaster. While 31 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN analysing humour in a Chinese film, He (2008) remarks that humour results from the interaction between linguistic process and contextualised reality. Similarly, Lin and Tan (2010) note that culture shapes the trajectory of humour in a society. Therefore, one of the ways to identify the prevailing ideologies of a society is by investigating the use of humour and laughter in the society (Lin and Tan, 2010). Homes (2006) investigates the use of humour in the workplace. She argues that speakers use humorous comments to construct and affirm their professional identities. For Holmes, humour is easily jointly constructed among people who are familiar with each other‟s sense of humour. On the other hand, Holmes and Marra (2002) opine that humour serves as a discursive boundary marker in social interactions. Holmes and Marra (2002) note that humour makes salient some aspects of social identity as it signals awareness of ethnic and gender boundaries. 2.6 Conversation joke-telling and stand-up joke-telling Following Schwarz (2010), a distinction between stand-up monologue and conversational dialogue can be drawn on the one hand and joke telling in stand-up comedy and conversational joke-telling on the other. In the first instance, the difference lies in the number of person(s) that holds the floor during a joking exchange. In stand-up monologue, a single comedian performs in monologues of successions of short joking stories and one-liners, without the audience interrupting by way of turn taking. While in conversations, participants take turns to speak. Stand-up joke-telling is a monologue while conversational joking is a dialogue. The differences that exist between these two joking genres result from the fact that only one speaker turn, which is for the stand-up comedians, exists in stand-up monologue. However, Attardo and Chabanne (1992) accentuate that comic monologues are often difficult to distinguish from jokes from a textual point of view. They note that stand-up monologues are chains of punchlines and that stand-up comedians do not rely on the audience to contribute clear cut back channel utterances in the joke telling. Since they have the exact jokes in mind, a script for their performance, the stand-up comedians could narrate their jokes without audience clear cut contributions, unlike the joke teller in conversational joking. In conversational joking, the hearers could respond in a number of ways, for instance, they could join the joke teller in saying the punchline or ask the joke teller to say another joke. 32 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Furthermore, on conversational joking, Norrick (1993) notes that laughter often overlaps with the speech of the joke teller. According to Schwarz (2010), laughter overlapping can also be applied to stand-up comedy performance. When a comedian presents his/her jokes, the audience could anticipate the humorous peaks in the comic narration, thus they might begin laughing before the comedians relinquish the floor. Other similarities of conversational joking and stand-up joking include use of repetitive and formulaic structures, use of discourse markers (Schwarz, 2010), the use of both set-up and punchline in a joke structure, and the elicitation of the same perlocutionary effect- laughter. Furthermore, in emphasizing the areas of differences and similarities in stand- up joke telling and conversational joking, Schwarz (2010:88) asserts The stand-up comedians try to involve their audience in a different way. They address them directly and try to keep their attention and earn their appreciation, but they do not wait for their response. As soon as they realize that the audience is not reacting, they have to change their way of performing so as not to lose their attention. They do not have the time to pay attention to individual persons, so they cannot rely on back channelling in the same way that a joke teller in a small group does. In addition, it is possible to differentiate joking in stand-up comedy from conversational joking based on the number of participants, particularly, the recipients. In this view, stand-up comedy is seen as a public joking genre because the number of the addressees is not fixed and because there is no previous social relationship between the participants. Conversational joking, on the other hand, is a private joking genre in that the number of hearers is fixed and closed; in addition there is usually a previous social relationship between the participants. However, stand-up comedy is also personal and unmediated just like conversational joking, in that the comedian is present, face-to-face with the hearers, since it is not mediated like other genres of media humour like newspapers cartoons and broadcast sitcoms. 2.7 Joke performance in stand-up comedy Mintz (1985), McIlvenny, Mettovaara and Tapio, (1993), Greenbaum (1999), Roberts (2000), Rutter (2000), Mesropova (2003), Glick (2007), Katayama (2009), Scarpetta and Spagnolli (2009) Schwarz (2010), Morris (2011), and Adetunji (2013) represent a number of scholars who have worked on stand-up comedy performances. 33 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN These scholars examine stand-up comedy from different perspectives like arts, rhetoric, semiotics and linguistics. To start with, Roberts (2000) argues that stand-up comedy is a prerogative art. She places stand-up performances on the same plain with other art genres like music, paintings and drawing. Greenbaum (1999), Glicks (2007) and Morris (2011) are studies which draw from rhetorics and semiotics in analysing stand-up performances. Greenbaum (1999) maintains that stand-up narratives are rhetorical and are designed to persuade the audience to adopt certain ideological positions. The stand-up comedians persuade their audience by adopting different discourse strategies like ethos and karios. For Morris (2011), the performance space of stand-up comedy is a contact zone where a comedian may “successfully challenge deeply held beliefs” of the audience members. Comedians use “concrete and personal stories, active voice, and repetition of ideas, bodily and facial gestures” in the performance space to achieve their rhetorical goal (p. 38). Glick (2007) explains stand-up performance as a semiotic process in which the comedians use different voices to foreground incongruity in their joke performances. In this semiotic process, the comedians set up relevant background information. Rutter (2000) identifies the functions of comperes in stand-up comedy. The author observes that the introduction by comperes frames a series of comedy sets into a single performance. In another study, Katayama (2009) compares the Japanese version of stand-up comedy (Manzai) with the American stand-up comedy. Katayama observes that humour in American stand-up comedy occurs from the common ground between the comedian and the audience while in Japanese, it occurs from the performance distance that exists between the stand-up and their audience. Mesropova (2003) brings up gender issues in stand-up performances. The author notes that Russian female stand-up comedians‟ routines are pervasively marked by highly negative men-denigrating motifs, even though the female comedians perform routines that are written by men. Both McIlvenny, Mettovaara and Tapio, (1993) and Scarpetta and Spagnolli (2009) adopt conversational analysis methods in analysing stand-up performances. They identify different conversational devices like laughtraps, listing, membership category, fillers, surveys and pags in their studies. Scarpetta and Spagnolli (2009) view stand-up comedy as an interaction. They also describe it as an institutional form of talk-in-interaction in which series of joking stories are presented to the audience. 34 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Giving the following reasons, Scarpetta and Spagnolli (2009: 5-6) assert that stand-up performances are instances of institutional form of talk-in-interaction: i. They have specific goals tied to the participants‟ institution relevant identities: the comedian and audience gather together to have fun by laughing at the performer‟s punchlines (Glick, 2007; Schwarz, 2010 and Mintz, 1985). Roberts (2000) observes that whatever “kills” laughter in a performance is noted by the comedian and it is not repeated. ii. There are constraints on what can be considered as permitted contribution. As a social practice, stand-up comedy permits only the comedian to hold the flour through-out the time of the performance. The audience can contribute only by producing affiliative or disaffiliative responses, but cannot reciprocate the performers‟ jokes as it would have occurred in ordinary conversations (Schwarz, 2010; McIlvenny, Mettovaara and Tapio, 1993). Affiliative responses are positive in that they encourage the comedians to continue their acts while disaffiliative responses are negative in that they tell the comedians that their acts are not humorous and unacceptable. Schwarz (2010), Mintz (1985) as well as McIlvenny, Mettovaara and Tapio (1993) recognise that the audience do not just only participate by listening and watching the comics performing but also react to what the comics say or how the comics act by giving feedbacks through their responses. iii. The response formants can readily be done together. Cases when individuals make themselves audible are often remarked upon by the comedians. McIlvenny, Mettovaara and Tapio (1993) observe that the response formants in stand-up comedy performances are similar to what is obtainable in political oratory. iv. The interactions in stand-up comedy performance are carried out and made recognisable through specific practices which show coherence, orderliness and meaningful succession of sequences of acts or move. The stand-up practice also allows on-going progression of the performance such that it indicates the kind of activity the participants are jointly engaged in. Scholars agree that stand-up comedy performance has become a social practice which has its own peculiar features. 35 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 2.8 Timing in joke performance The notion of timing in the performance of jokes is very significant. Joke tellers, and in this case stand-up comedians, must determine how to effectively manage time during the performance of their jokes. Attardo and Pickering (2011:233) observe that “in humour, timing is everything.” Similarly, Audrieth (1998) comments that timing can make the difference between a joke that is extremely effective and one that fails. To Audrieth, timing relates to the delivery of the punchline. Timing is concerned with the amount of time delayed between the end of the setup of a joke and the delivery of its punchline. When the time is too short or too long, the impact of the punchline is lessened. Too short a time makes the joke to end abruptly, and this does not give adequate time for the recipient to process the joke. On the other hand, too long a time may make the recipients to lose interest in the joke. The idea of timing in joke delivery entails apportioning the right rhythm, speed and pause to each part of the joke. Attardo and Pickering (2011), having reviewed different definitions of timing in humour, recapitulate timing as distribution of pauses, distribution of the elements of the joke text (the build-up and the punchline) and as interaction with other speakers. Attardo and Pickering imply that timing involves not only apportioning the right speed or seconds to each part of the joke, but also observing the recipients of the joke and allowing them the necessary time they need to get the joke. This is why Suls (1983:54) emphasizes that in the presentation of a joke, “the joke premise must be told in such a way that the listener has enough time to generate an expectation and therefore be surprised by the punchline.” Suls (1983) further notes that when recipients of jokes are provided with too much time, they will be able to predict the punchline of the joke, and when they are provided with too little time they will have no expectation at all and the joke will lose its surprise effect. In stand-up comedy performance, timing begins the moment the comedians step into the stage. The audience, who would have been awaiting their presence, normally give a loud affiliative response at the sight of the stand-up comedians. A professional stand-up comedian allows the audience to calm down before beginning her/her routine. S/he also measures effectively the time when to start the performance and when to move to a new joke. At each joke interval, professional comedians allow their audience to fully express their reactions to their jokes and then calm down before moving to the next joke. Professional comedians also determine the speed at which 36 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN they render their jokes, when to use a pause and the length of pauses and the kind of speed with which to render each joke. Schwarz (2010) identifies the use of repetitive structures, formulaic expressions, hesitation markers, hedges and planned pauses as timing issues during sand-up performances. If these language cues are to be used, the comedian must determine the time to use them during performance. Apart from forming an intrinsic part of a performance, timing is also used as a interactional strategy by the comedians. Comedians usually pause to observe the reception of their jokes. Adetunji (2013) observes that pausing has been found useful in humour performance for activating shared co-textual and contextual backgrounds. 2.9 Studies on Nigerian stand-up comedy Adetunji (2013), Ayakoroma (2013), Adekunle (2014) and Nwankwo (2014) are studies which have investigated Nigerian stand-up comedy. Adetunji (2013) views Nigerian stand-up comedy as a realisation of and use of the English language as a second language phenomenon. He asserts that his study “explores the situation of English in a „peripheral‟ (non-native speaking), „Outer Circle‟ (ESL) environment, by examining aspects of the pragmatics of Nigerian humour, specifically the interactional context of its stand-up comedy” (Adetunji 2013: 1). Adetunji (2013) investigates the performance of four male comedians- Ali Baba, I Go Dye, Basketmouth and Gordons, and one female comedian- Lepacious Bose. He observes that his choice of one female comedian as against four male comedians is to reflect the gender disparity in the number of professional stand-up comedians. Adetunji (2013:5) asserts that the female comedians “are not up to one- fifth of the total number of Nigerian stand-up comedians”. Ayakoroma (2013), which chronicles the history of stand-up comedy in Nigeria, corroborates Adetunji‟s assertion in that in his list of about thirty artistes who have performed as stand-up comedians in Nigeria, only two female comedians are mentioned. As findings, Adetunji (2013) identifies linguistic coding, stereotyping, call and response, formulaic expressions, self-deprecation and shared experiences as strategies adopted by Nigerian stand-up comedians in their performances to initiate humour. However, he fails to relate these strategies to the concept and theories of humour. For instance, he fails to show how stereotyping makes people laugh. Also, under linguistic coding, he asserts that Nigerian stand-up comedians alternate codes, but he fails to 37 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN show what humour lies in code alternation and how code alternation makes the audiences in the stand-up performances laugh. It is not only in joke performances that interlocutors stereotype people in the society. Stereotyping also occurs in other genres of communication such as news broadcast, dance and music. Also, in everyday conversations, interlocutors alternate codes. These instances do not however lead to humour. These observations strengthen the fact that there is need to re-examine the strategies employed by Nigerian stand-up comedians and relate them to the purposes for which they are used, joke performance in the Nigerian context. In a different study, Ayakoroma (2013) presents the historical development of Nigerian stand-up comedy. The study observes that stand-up comedy genre which began in the country in the 1990s is not totally new to the country as there had been some forms of entertainment in the broadcast media which are similar to stand-up performances. For instance, the author observes that traditional court performers are actually stand-up performers in that they also aim at eliciting humorous responses from their listeners. Ayakoroma (2013) does not touch on the linguistics aspects of Nigerian of stand-up comedy. Another study on Nigerian stand-up comedy is Adekunle (2014), which examines the stand-up performances of three Nigerian stand-up comedians, Gordons, Basketmouth and I Go Dye. Adekunle (2014) adopts a literary approach in investigating the satiric devices and the performativity techniques of these the comedians. Adopting psychoanalysis and performance theory as his theoretical orientation for analysis, the author concludes that the comedians orient three types of satire in their performances - political, social and religious. He also notes that the comedians use symbolism, caricature, subtle irony and humour to present serious national issues while their performances are characterised by vocal dexterity, mimesis, blazer costume, subject-constrained facial and bodily gestures, audience-dependent improvisation and interactivity. Although Adekunle (2014) identifies the satiric import of stand-up comedy performance, his analysis presents a marginal contribution to humour research in that the study does not include any literature on humour and like Adetuniji (2013), does not include humour analysis. The author selects psychoanalysis and performance theory as the theoretical frameworks, which seem appropriate, but because there is no reference to Freud‟s (2002) seminal work on humour in Adetunji‟s review of 38 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN psychoanalysis, there is no analysis of humour in the study. Adekunle (2014) does not account for humour in Nigerian stand-up comedy. Unlike Adekunle (2014), Nwankwo (2014) commences his study of Nigerian stand-up performance from the angle of the discipline of humour, thus he relates his analysis to the approaches to humour studies. In his comparative analysis of four Nigerian stand-up comedians, AY, Klint-da-Drunk, I Go Dye and Basketmouth, he observes that all the comedians elicit performance-audience-interaction using adjacency pairs, deploy embodied action and narrative dexterity through the manipulative use of NP. He however observes that the stage presence, entrance, appearance and delivery of the comedians differ. On their delivery, he observes that Basketmouth, I Go Dye and Klint-de-Drunk denigrate their personalities while AY imitates the elitist mannerism of the pastors he satirises. He also explores the use of embodied processes like mimesis, movement, gestures, facial expressions and speech. On their embodied actions, Nwankwo (2014) remarks that Klint-de-Drunk adopts the role of a drunkard while others play multiple snap-shot roles, for instance, AY dresses flamboyantly, uses different costumes, and uses the stage space extensively to dramatize the actions of the butts he caricatures. Although Nwankwo (2014) presents a thorough comparative study of the performances of the selected comedians, his study is not without some short-comings. Since the focus of his study is theatrical, the linguistics aspects of stand-up performances are left out in his analysis. Even though he refers to the choice of language and the mannerism of narration of each of the comedians, the study does not include a linguistic analysis of the performances. Also, Nwankwo (2014) claims to investigate all aspects of the stage presence of the comedians; however, given that the sources of his data are recorded versions of the performances, one wonders how the investigation of the entrance and exit patterns of the comedians in their shows will be possible since the recorded versions of their performances are always edited and are usually without the moment of entrance and exit of the comedians. Another shortcoming of Nwankwo (2014) and Adekunle (2014) is that they are gender biased in that the two studies do not include any female comedian‟s routine in their analyses. Even though there are more male comedians than female comedians, the studies ought to have included, at least, a routine of a female comedian. Apart from the observations made above, it is important to also note that these studies on Nigerian stand-up comedy neglect investigating intentions in stand-up 39 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN joking contexts. The previous studies do not also consider the humour strategies employed by Nigerian comedians. In this study, the joking contexts found in Nigerian stand-up comedy are identified and the stand-up comedians‟ intentions in these joking contexts are also described. 2.10 Theoretical orientations This section presents the basic tenets of the linguistic theories that inform the analysis. These theories are relevance theory, pragmatic acts theory and contextual belief theory. The basic principles of these theories are combined to form the theoretical model developed for the purpose of this study. 2.10.1 Relevance theory (RT) RT views communication as a cognitive process which involves human ability to entertain representations of other people‟s thoughts, desires and ideas on the basis of concrete stimuli like utterances and gestures. RT was developed by Sperber and Wilson (1986). Studies like Blakemore (1992), (2002), Wilson and Sperber (2004), Yus (2006) and (2011) have explicated the basic tenets of RT. Wilson and Sperber (2004) describe communication exchanges as ostensive-inferential communications, which involve the use of ostensive stimuli designed to attract the audience‟s attention and focus it on the initiator‟s intention. Only ostensive stimuli create expectations of relevance. For ostensive stimulus to become relevant, it must be mutually manifested to the communicators. RT is a theory of inference and it views inference as a mental operation which is used to assess communicators‟ intentions. Inference is affected by contextual factors like assumptions (from experience, about the world and those derived from situation of exchange), socio-cultural factors and preceding utterances. Inference entails identifying the logical forms of utterances, constructing their propositional content and generating hypothesis about intended explicit and implicated interpretation (explicature and implicature respectively) (Blakemore 1992; Wilson and Sperber 2004; Yus 2006 and 2011). To sum up RT, Wilson and Sperber (2004:256) present two basic principles: i. Communicative principle of relevance: every ostensive stimulus conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance. 40 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN ii. Optimal relevance: an ostensive stimulus is optimally relevant to an audience if and only if: a. It is relevant enough to worth the audience‟s processing effort; b. It is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator‟s abilities and preferences. With the first principle, it is noted that the degree of relevance of an utterance is variable and context dependent. The principle implies that only utterances in which their speakers make manifest their intentions to the addressee are relevant. With the principle of relevance, the authors view “both the speaker and the hearer as actively participating in the verbal exchange, with the former devising his utterances with the view of achieving optimal relevance, and the latter formulating an interpretation of what he has heard, relying in this enterprise on the assumption that optimal relevance has been aimed at, if not achieved” (Jodowiec 1991:242). 2.10.1.1 RT approaches to humour Studies that have applied RT to humour are incongruity approaches (Attardo, 2011). These studies present humour as having a pragmatic component. The pragmatic component is cognitively accessed in terms of implicit and explicit assumptions, and it is directed by the principles of relevance. Yus (2003) formalises the application of RT to humorous utterances. Yus (2003:1300) notes that “humorous discourses involve specific interpretive paths favoured by the retrieval from the context of assumptions related to the communicator‟s communicative strategies.” Yus (2003) opines that, following the principle of relevance, hearers may have to carry out supplementary mental efforts if an utterance is not informative enough, irrelevant or untrue. He suggests that humorous exchanges demand such an extra processing effort. Extra processing efforts may be needed because joke-tellers might withhold relevant information, choose to be obscure, ambiguous, or irrelevant so as to create incongruity. Thus, in RT, humorous utterances “are explained in terms of favouring certain relevance-seeking interpretive steps, with the aid of mutually manifest assumptions such as the speaker‟s attempt to create humorous effects” (Yus, 2003:1301). Yus (2003) notes that interpretive stages like decoding, inferencing, extraction of logical form, ambiguity resolution, reference assignment, enrichment and the 41 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN recovery of implicatures and explicatures are exploited by humourists so as to derive humorous effects. Yus (2003) proposes that there are two interpretations which could be got from a joke: the first accessible interpretation is got from the build-up of the joke, while the second interpretation is got from the punchline. Yus (2003) suggests that the first interpretation (the overt one) selected by the addressee is one of the several interpretations that could be derived from the joke, and it is the most accessible to the hearer given the mutually manifested assumptions and interpretive steps. Yus (2003) tagged all the possible interpretations from the first part of the joke as Multiple-Graded-Interpretations part of the joke (MGI) while he labelled the reading from the latter part of the joke text, which is hidden until the punchline is given, Single-Covert-Interpretation part of the joke (SCI). Since the hearer has already got the overt MGI of the joke, the realisation of the SCI surprises and amuses him/her. With the SCI, the hearer identifies that (s)he has been led up the garden-path by the teller. Other studies that have applied RT to jokes describe realisation of humour in line with the MGI/SCI dichotomy; for instance, Jodowiec (1991) and Curco  (1996; 1998). Jodowiec (1991) proposes that a joke possesses two hypotheses. The first is specific hypothesis (H1), which is got from the activation of context(s) in the set-up of the joke. The second is an unexpected interpretation (H2), which is got after the punchline of the joke has been given. Jodowiec opines that both H1 and H2 are in line with the principle of relevance and are explicatures got from the joke utterance. In addition, Jodlowiec identifies two assumptions in jokes: the immediately available assumptions (C1), what Sperber and Wilson (1986) call initial context; and the assumptions made accessible when the punchline of the joke is given- (C2). The C1 directs the hearer towards the intended interpretation of the H1 while the C2 directs the hearer towards the interpretation of the punchline (H2). On her part, Curco  (1996) analyses how a joke-teller leads the hearer to entertain two opposing assumptions: the Key Assumption (KA) which is a proposition consistent with the first interpretation of the joke, and, the Target Assumption (TA) which is a proposition consistent with the second interpretation of the joke. Curco ‟s KA is a strongly implicated premise while her TA is an accessible, though initially unaccessed, assumption in the context of interpretation (Yus, 2003). 42 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN However, Yus (2003) notes that it is not in all instances humorous texts fit into the MGI/SCI dichotomy. Some instances of humour realisation rely on hearers‟ ability to extract contextual assumptions and use them to yield appropriate contextual implications. It is in line with this that Galinanes (2000) argues that in humorous novels, apart from creating external and internal incongruities, writers create strong implicatures within the context of the novels. Galinanes (2000) observes that humorous discourses are based on presuppositions and moral, social, cultural and genetic assumptions shared by the narrator and reader. These assumptions and presuppositions are manipulated playfully by the writer and are readily available to the reader. Humour is, thus, created by writers when they keep juxtaposing events, speech and actions of characters, which are opposing to the assumptions they set up in the plot and assumptions the readers derived from their encyclopaedic knowledge. A major short coming of the RT applications to humour is that the proponents have to contend with the fact that the principle of relevance cannot be violated (Attardo, 2011). Several scholars working within the parlance of humour have shown that speakers deliberately violate Grice‟s maxims, especially the maxims of relation and manner, so as to initiate humour (Attardo, 1994; Lin and Tan, 2012). Yus (2003) argues that the violation of maxims do not fit the RT approach and that in RT, Grice‟s view of cooperation as basis for successful communication is not regarded as necessary, since optimal relevance can be achieved without needing any underlying principle in force. 2.10.2 Mey’s pragmatic acts theory (PAT) The concept of pragmatic acts presupposes that language is being actively utilised to achieve certain purposes which may not be overtly stated in the use of language. However, for the action to which language is put, there is need for a “situational setting up in which the context of the acting carries more weight than the spoken act itself” (Mey 2001: 210). Two concepts are important in PAT, common scenes and affordances. Mey (2001:218) describes common scene as “more than just a context, understood as a common background, or platform of communication.” It is about “the underlying presuppositions making this context very possible”. It is the understanding of the common scene that ultimately influence the actions performed in communication 43 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN exchanges. Common scene is akin to Levinson‟s (1979) activity type theory in that the concept of common scene is used to accentuate the social limitations as well as lack of restrictions that a speech situation offers language users. Mey (2001) uses the term affordances to denote what participants can achieve in the common scene. The affordances in a common scene create a platform for the participants to interact. Pragmatic acts do not necessarily involve the use of speech acts since as much as situated speech acts constitute pragmatic acts, gestures and other nonverbal cues, when situated, could be pointers to intended pragmatic acts. As a theory of intention, PAT considers the verbal and nonverbal cues that could be used to perform specific pragmatic acts, and the verbal and nonverbal cues that could create the conditions for performing such pragmatic acts. Mey (2001) emphasizes that PAT, as a theory of action, appeals to the underlying orientation among participants in discourse, which manifests itself in their interactional goals. Mey (2001:227) describes pragmatic acting as “contextualised adaptive behaviour” and pragmatic act as “an instance of adapting oneself to context as well as (on the basis of past situations and looking ahead to future situations) adapting the context to oneself.” Mey argues that an instance of communication becomes an act when it is situated in contexts and such situated communications are actions in that they are adaptive behaviours through which interlocutors influence each other and their environments. PAT does not explain language from the “sovereign speaker- hearer” angle, but focuses on “the environment in which both speaker and hearer find their affordances, such that the entire situation is brought to bear on what can be said in the situation, as well as on what is actually being said” (Mey 2001:221). PAT explains the way pragmemes are presented in speech situations. Pragmemes are prototypes of situated language use and are realised through individual pragmatic acts (ipras or practs and allopracts) whenever language users adapt themselves to context and whenever they adapt contexts to themselves. A pragmeme is “a generalized pragmatic act regarded as the only force associated with making utterances” (Odebunmi 2008:76). Mey (2006:751) describes practs as individual pragmatic acts which realise a particular pragmeme and an alloprat as “a different realisation of a particular pragmeme”. With PAT, there is no need for conditions and rules for actualising individual speech acts or the rules of grammaticalness or correctness (Mey, 2001; 2006; Kecskes, 2010). PAT resolves the problem of differentiating illocutionary force from 44 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN perlocutionary force, which is associated with speech act theory. Speech acts are viewed as occurring and interacting with other acts in order to enhance the realisation of participants‟ intentions. Mey (2001) indicates that there are two parts to a pragmeme: the activity part and textual part. The activity part is made up of language and paralanguage which interlocutors draw upon to communicate. The activity part “lists the various choices that the language user has at his or her disposal in communicating…. The language user may choose one or several of the available options” (Mey 2001:222). These include speech acts, indirect speech acts, conversational acts, psychological acts, prosody, and physical acts. The activity part functions as the contextualisation cues. According to Grumperz (1992), contextualisation cue are meant to guide the hearers to the speakers‟ intentions. The textual part refers to the context in which any pragmatic act is situated and it includes inference, reference, relevance, voice, shared situational knowledge, metaphor and metapragmatic joker. The metapragmatic joker is very important in that it directs attention to something happening on the metapragmatic level (Mey, 2006). According to Odebunmi (2008), it is the interaction between the activity and textual parts the results in practs and allopracts. It is also in the context that the activity part is situated. 2.10.3 Context According to Leech (1983), context is made up of any background knowledge assumed to be shared by participants of a discourse. Such background knowledge contributes to how hearers interpret speakers‟ meanings. Hanks (2006) notes that language and verbal exchanges are informed and shaped by social and interpersonal contexts in which speech occurs. Odebunmi (2006) views context as the spine of meaning, without which, speakers‟ intentions and meaning of a communicative event cannot be identified. To him, context consists in beliefs or assumptions about temporal, spatial, social, physical and cultural settings and actions. Odebunmi (2006) presents a model of context that identifies two levels of beliefs: language and situational. The language level accentuates that meaning and identification of intentions is possible if interlocutors have access to the same language while the second level amplifies the need for common code and experience for the processing of meaning and intentions. Collective 45 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN assumptions about code and experience secure the uptake for meaning and identification of intention in any interaction. Odebunmi (2006:26-33) further specifies and explicates three aspects of situational level beliefs and these are presented as follows: i. Shared knowledge of subject topic: with this aspect of situational level belief, Odebunmi (2006) emphasizes the need for interlocutors to have adequate knowledge of the discourse topic or subject. ii. Shared knowledge of word choices, referents and references: this aspect of situational level belief underscores the relevance of language competence, both linguistic and communicative competence of the interlocutors, for successful communication. Odebunmi (2006) stresses that interlocutors must have same knowledge of lexical items, referents, references and collocational rules. iii. Shared socio-cultural and situational experiences, previous or immediate: with this aspect of situational level belief, Odebunmi (2006) gives prominence to both cultural and situational aspects of language. He states that “interactions move on smoothly when participants have common socio-cultural and situational experiences” (Odebunmi, 2006: 30). Odebunmi‟s (2006) opinion is that these beliefs or assumptions held prior to or during the communicative event come into and facilitate the communicative event. Similarly, as exemplified in Mey (2001), the shared situational knowledge empowers the participants to find affordances, identify what can be said and interpret what is actually said. In Mey (2001) and (2006), context is specified as the textual part of the pragmatic act model. It includes co-text and the interactional situation. It is in the context that the processes of inference, reference assignment and the search for optimal relevance are carried out. Mey also uses the term common scene, to describe what is meant by context in PAT. Mey (2006:749) asserts that common scene is typical of social situation, which is “a situation whose participants are on some kind of shared footing.” Common scene entails the notion of common ground and what participants in a conversation understand as common ground. 46 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 2.11 Theoretical model: humour acts The theoretical model adopted for this study is termed humour acts. One of the reasons for using ideas from RT and PAT as the foundation of the model for analysing the performances of Nigerian stand-up comedians is that these two theories of meaning are theories of intention. Both of them recognise that for meaning to be inferred, hearers must identify the intentions of the speakers. Mey (2001) subsumes this under the communicative principle by noting that it is impossible not to communicate in any communicative exchange. The communicative principle helps to accentuate that although stand-up comedy is geared towards making the participants laugh, the stand-up comedians‟ utterances communicate other meanings to the audience. Both theories recognise the need for contextualisation cues to be situated in a communal context, which is specified by Odebunmi (2006), for intentions to be identified. In RT, contextualisation cues are termed stimuli while in PAT, they make up the activity part. In RT, context refers to informative sources from which interactants gather assumptions in any communicative exchange while in PAT context refers to common scenes where interactants find their affordances and instantiate their acts. In RT terms, context is cognitive while in PAT, it is social and situational. Adopting these views will enable a dialectal movement in the analysis of the stand-up comedy performance. It will help in noting that the situational use of language in stand-up comedy licences stand-up comedians‟ humour acts. It will also help in identifying how the comedians, with each joke, create different contexts that are used in interpreting their joking stories. A joking story indicates comedians‟ intention for different humour acts. In addition, it will help to identify the cognitive (pragmatic) strategies employed by the comedians in constructing their jokes. The notion of common scene is vital here. There is the need to define the common scene of the stand-up comedy narration which gives the comedians and their audiences their affordances. Common scene refers to the presuppositions underlying stand-up comedy performances (these have been discussed in Sections 2.6 and 2.7). In the Nigerian stand-up context, these presuppositions also include the multilingual/multicultural nature of Nigeria, Nigeria‟s troubled political and social life and the emerging national culture. In Humour acts, common scene and assumptions underlie both the use of verbal and nonverbal cues in the humorous narrations of the stand-up comedians. Both 47 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN the assumptions and the common scene of the performance influence the comedians‟ narrations as well as the audience interpretation of the narrations. For instance, from the situational level of stand-up comedy performance, both comedians and audiences derive their institutional identities from the collective assumption on how they should behave in the performance. It also informs the kind of affordances they experience in the interaction: only the stand-up comedians should say the joke while the audience should laugh at the joke. Even though the participants draw assumptions from the same situational context, there is need for communal manifestness. Communal manifestness denotes that mutual attention must be established and reciprocal presence must be acknowledged between stand-up comedians and their audiences before any humour acts can be instantiated. It should be noted that in the Nigerian stand-up comedy, where the stand-up comedians and audiences may not have the same informative sources in terms of first language and culture, there is need for the comedian to make communally manifest, all aspects of their identities that are vital to the humour acts being performed. Stand-up comedians make such information communally manifest through their use of verbal and nonverbal cues. The concept humour acts presupposes that apart from instantiating humour in their audiences, stand-up comedians use their joking stories to achieve certain goals. They could indicate their intentions to start a joke, talk about themselves, the audience or report a social actor to the audience, so as through shared laughter, they will accentuate what is socially acceptable or unacceptable. Humour acts also take into cognisance a number of conceptual orientations in humour research, which are explained below: i. Jokes are products of human interactions: Attardo (1994), Yus (2003) and Martin (2007) see joking as a successful interpersonal and/or communicative exchange. Studies on stand-up comedy have presented stand-up comedy joke narrations as successful communicative exchanges between the stand-up comedians and the audiences. Humour acts take place as a result of the communicative exchanges between stand-up comedians and their audiences. ii. Jokes convey some information. Attardo (1994) opines that there is no joke without a specific message in it since a joke must be about something. In essence, a joke says something about someone or a group, or comments 48 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN on an action or an event. Stand-up comedians might use their jokes to talk about themselves, their experiences, other individuals or their societies. iii. Because jokes convey information, their uses have pragmatic import. Language users present jokes to recipients to make known their intentions. It is in view of speakers‟ intentionality, that Schmidt (2011) describes a joke as a discrete speech act. iv. A joke narration, regardless of its length and structure, is a discrete language unit and as such, should be analysed as a unit of discourse. It is in this sense that Jodowiec (1991) defines a joke as an ordered sequence of utterances which are planned as a unit and Schmidt (2011) describes a joke as an independent unit of language that functions as an independent utterance. v. As an utterance, the joke depends on the context(s) of its performance for its meaning. For any joke-exchange to take place there must be a Speaker- S (comedian), Hearer-H (audience) and Intention-I (act) that S wants to convey to H. The audience receive the joke within the contexts of its performance, and infer the acts transmitted via the joke. The audience understand the joke far above the literal meaning of the words and sentences that make up the joke utterance. The comprehension of the joke by the audience is signalled by their responses. vi. To convey their humour acts, speakers make use of certain strategies, which may be covert or overt. Humour acts model is presented in Figure 1 below: 49 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Fig. 1: Humour acts model Encyclopaedic knowledge S SK (Participants-of-the-joke), SCK, SKC Joke utterance Participants-in-the-joke Activity-in-the-joke Conversational acts: Speech and pragmatic acts Prosodic cues Physical acts Body moves Physiognomy Bodily expression of emotions Dressing Voice Layer A Context-in-the-joke Layer B Context-of-the-joke Layer C Source: Researcher 2.12 Aspects of humour acts The humour acts model is three layered. It shows that jokes in stand-up performances are embodiments of three levels of contexts, all of which interact as the stand-up comedians present their narrations to their audiences. The comedians draw assumptions, issues, actors and events from the shared encyclopaedic knowledge and context-of-the-joke and situate them in the context-in-the-joke. The layers are explained in the following sections. 2.12.1 Layer A: Context-in-the-joke Layer A, the innermost layer of the model, is the core of the model. It is the part that provides the elements which function as contextualisation cues for deriving the stand-up comedians‟ humour acts. These cues also suggest the kind of assumptions that the comedians make manifest in their interaction with the audience. The 50 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN participants of the interaction, stand-up comedians and audience, make use of these verbal and nonverbal signs to relate the joke to their background knowledge (Layers B and C) in order to retrieve the needed assumptions to construct and interpret each joke. It is from Layer A that the comedians communicative intentions are identified. The comedians use the features of Layer A to initiate and execute their humour acts. The features in this layer represent the various choices comedians have at their disposal in communicating their acts and adopting their strategies. The comedian may select one or several of the existing options or may decide to do away with them totally. As verbal and nonverbal cues, their pragmatic significance is to attract the audience‟s attention and focus it on the comedians‟ humour acts. In RT terms, they function as ostensive stimuli; therefore, they create precise and predictable expectation of relevance in the contexts of stand-up comedy performance. Whenever they are made manifest to the audiences, they are capable of altering the audiences‟ assumptions about the world or their collective culture. 2.12.1.1 The joke utterance The term joke utterance is used here to refer to the exact linguistic code and wordings used by the comedians to convey their jokes to the audience. This contextualisation cue is adopted from GTVH. It presupposes the concept of language in joking exchanges, which according to Attardo (1994), contains all the information necessary for the verbalisation of a joke. It entails the lexical and structural choices made by stand-up comedians while saying or performing their jokes. The task in the analysis is not just to examine the propositional contents of the jokes, their implied premises, but also to see how these are juxtaposed with the joking contexts. 2.12.1.2 The participants-in-the-joke The participants-in-the-joke are the people or characters in the joking stories of stand-up comedians. In any joke narration, there is need to pick-out the referring expressions and assign the proper referents to them. Jokes usually come with participants who represent real life characters. These participants-in-the-joke are reflective of social actors or groups in the society. How they are presented in the joke, the actions and statements assigned to them are pointers to the participants-of-the-joke (the comedian and the audience) attitudes to them and ultimately humour acts of the 51 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN comedian. The comedian might choose to present certain participant in his joke as wise and smart or foolish and stupid; such presentation would be used to justify the comedian‟s act of criticising, justifying or praising such a participant in the joke. In this model, participants-in-the-joke include all the individuals (especially the targets) who are mentioned in a joking story. GTVH only recognises targets in jokes, however, when stand-up joking stories are examined, it will be realised that there are usually more than one character in their narrations. When comedians mention individuals as parts of the participants-in-the-joke, the audience will activate background assumptions like stereotypes and attitudes about such individuals while interpreting the jokes. The kinds of actions and speech alluded to the target are suggestive of how such a person or group of persons is perceived by the-participants- of-the-joke. The target may be presented as stupid, foolish, wise, cunning, gentle, weak or strong. Identifying the participants-in-the-joke helps to separate them from the interlocutors, the-participants-of-the-joke, who are involved in the joking exchange. With such categorisation, the model accentuates that stand-up comedy narration falls within the realms of secondary speech situations. Secondary speech situations are made-up of utterances in “which the speaker reports to the hearer on somebody else‟s linguistic behaviour” (Jodowiec 1991:244). In stand-up comedy narrations, comedians engage in an activity through which they report another activity to their audience, such that two different activity types are taking place correspondingly. Jodowiec (1991:244) captures this by noting that in jokes, “two sets of speakers and hearers are involved: on one hand, the joke teller and his audience, on the other, the characters in the joke and the overall joke production/comprehension, one embedded in the other.” Differentiating participants-in-the-joke from the participants-of-the-joke is significant for conceptualising the interpersonal relationship in the stand-up joking exchange. By this distinction, a joking relationship, which exists between the stand-up comedians and their audience, is established. By convention, the stand-up comedians and their audiences are brought into what Radcliffe-Brown (1940) terms joking relationship, a situation in which two individuals can make fun of each other. According to Radcliffe-Brown, a joking relationship maybe symmetrical- one in which “each of two persons teases or makes fun of the other”; or asymmetrical- one in 52 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN which “A jokes at the expense of B and B accepts the teasing good humouredly but without retaliating” (1940:195). The interpersonal relationship between the stand-up comedians and audience falls within the purview of asymmetrical joking relationship since the comedians are permitted to poke fun at the audience, with the audience not taking offence at the comedians joke on them. However, given that in stand-up joking relationship, the participants-of-the- joke gather together to laugh at the participants-in-the-joke, the joking relationship of stand-up performance can be described as tangential. Tangential joking relationship refers to joking instances where two parties laugh at another individual, who is not part of the on-going interaction. 2.12.1.3 The activity-in-the-joke The activity-in-the-joke has to do with the actions or events reported in the joke. The activity in the joke is what the joke is all about or the activity type reported in the joke. There is need to juxtapose how the event or action reported in the joke is carried out in the world of the joke with how it is normally carried out in reality. This element, thus, draws from the assumptions derived from the encyclopaedic knowledge as well as the culture of the participants-of-the-joke. The way the activity in the joke is reported may not be in consonance with how such activity is carried out given the encyclopaedic knowledge or the collective culture of both the comedians and their audience. There may be some sort of incongruity between the event or action reported in the joke and how the event or action should have been reported given the background knowledge. Examining how the activity-in-the-joke is presented is very important because it denotes crux of the action given in the joke. The comedian may use the activity-in- the-joke to suggest certain stereotypes, especially when the butt of the joke is associated with specific social groups. 2.12.1.4 Conversational acts Conversational acts refer to the linguistic strategies and conversational devices that the comedians employ to engage their audiences. Conversational acts include expressions like interrogative utterances and nonverbal cues like pauses which the comedians employ to elicit audience participation in their performances. They also include expressions that foreground direct reference to audience and the nonverbal 53 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN devices that are used to indicate that the participants-of-the-joke are also included in the participants-in-the-joke, for instance, pointing. Parts of the conversational acts are the speech acts and pragmatic act instantiated in the comedians‟ routines. When these are considered within the affordances of the context-of-the-joke, their pragmatic force would include the humorous effects they have on the audience. 2.12.1.5 Prosodic cues Prosodic cues refer to aspects of speech such as intonation, volume, tone, stress, pitch, rhythm, pause, voice quality and length. Baker and Ellece (2011) describe them as suprasegmental features of connected speech and note that they can reveal something about the speaker or their intentions. For instance, volume may indicate emotional state while intonation can be used to distinguish a declarative statement from an interrogative one. Grumperz (1982) notes that prosody is used by speakers to signal what activity they are engaged in. It is also used by speakers to indicate “the metacommunicative frame they are operating within” (Tannen, 2005: 33). Thus, these prosodic cues are contextualisation cues. Grumperz (1982; 1992) suggest that these elements of speech can be employed in different ways and be used to convey certain meanings which may be different from the linguistic meanings of the words on which they are assigned. Since these cues are conventions for signalling speakers‟ intention, it is important to consider them in the analysis to see how they have been used by the comedians to enhance the performance of their joking acts. 2.12.1.6 Physical acts (nonverbal cues) Physical acts include body moves, physiognomy, bodily expressions of emotions and the manner of dressing. They are nonverbal cues that are used in communication and they include body languages like hand gesture, posture, touch, pointing, stage movement and facial expression. Communication cues like styling choice, such as, hair or clothing style are also subsumed under physical acts. These nonverbal cues, usually, become meaningful when considered with utterances in the context of their use. They enhance the meaning of linguistic expression as well as speakers intended meaning (Tannen, 2005). According Grumperz (1992), these 54 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN nonverbal acts are parts of contextualisation cues. Grumperz argues that they play an important role in affecting participants‟ perception of discourse-level coherence, and thus, they influence the interpretation of discourse in which they are used. Gestures and other nonverbal cues are parts of the semiotic resources that the comedians draw from to enhance the performance of jokes. They are also used in conveying the intended humour acts of the comedians. Thus, in the analysis, their use will be examined. The physical acts will be examined using ideas from multimodality theory, a methodological framework which draws from discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, semiotics and mediated discourse analysis (Kress, 2010; Noris 2004). Norris (2004) version of multimodality is adopted in the analysis because it is a model of multimodal theory that is based on both semiotics and interactional sociolinguistics. 2.12.1.7 Voice Voice, according to Mey (2011) and Bal (2006), has to do with “who speaks” in a narration: is it the narrator, the author of the story or one of the characters in the story. Voice is a basic strategy employed in enhancing the effects of a narration on the recipient of the narrative text. Voice is cardinal to storytelling because it is through it that stories are told. With voice, story tellers create characters, keep the characters alive and apart and even create their points of view (Mey, 2011). Comedians may present their narrations in different voices by creating different participants-in-the- joke, allotting different voices to the participants-in-the-joke using different strategies, and, allowing these participants to speak to the audience with their individual voices. The concepts of dialogism and monologism are important in analysing voicing. A text is dialogic when it is made up of several voices. A text is thus seen as an interaction of multiple voices and several modes of discourse. The voices in the text are not blended into a single perspective and they are not overshadowed by the voice of the author or narrator. With the dialogic voice, a text expresses plurality of consciousness which is held together in the narration. Monologic voice on the other hand, is directly oriented to its topic or purpose. It is thus made up of a single voice, which speakers use to project themselves. Monologism is made up of a single consciousness and it presents views or beliefs from a single perspective- the dominant perspective (Bal, 2006; Morson, 2006; Waghmare, 2011). 55 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 2.12.2 Layer B: Context-of-the-joke This layer denotes the communicative situation of stand-up comedy performance; it is the locus of stand-up comedy interaction. It is here the goals of stand-up comedy interactions are initiated, achieved and sustained. It is the context of humour performance. The context of the joke licences the use of the joke, without it, there is no performance of jokes. As the situation of language use, it dictates the roles of the participants-of-the-joke. It is from this layer that the participants-of-the-joke derive what to do and how to do it, and, what to say and how to say it. As the common scene, it specifies the social context in which stand-up performances take place. The context-of-the-joke has as its foundation the background knowledge of the participants-of-the-joke. It underlines the fundamental assumptions that enhance the success of stand-up comedy interactional goals. These assumptions are shared situational knowledge (SSK), shared cultural knowledge (SCK) and shared knowledge of code (SKC). Mintz (1985) suggests that background knowledge in terms of language, culture and situation must be shared for successful stand-up comedy performance. To conceptualise the context-of-the-joke in the humour acts model, Odebunmi (2006) contextual belief theory is adopted. 2.12.2.1 The shared cultural knowledge (SCK) Culture sums up the beliefs, history, events, actions, attitude and behaviour of a group of people. According to Martin and Ringham (2000: 46), “the term culture designates the sum total of knowledge, attitudes and values which inform a society or characterise an individual”. Since culture informs attitude, it influences language use and pragmatic interpretation of utterances. As an embodiment of values and beliefs, culture presents participants with numerous underlying presuppositions which facilitate the success of their interactions. This is why, in any communication exchange, the participants must share the same cultural presuppositions or make them explicit. Although the mechanism of humour is universal and transcultural, the realisation of humour and the success of its use depend on the cultural presuppositions held by the participants. Studies like Norrick (1986), Staley and Derks (1995) and Holmes and Marra (2002) have pointed out that culture determines what counts as funny and that participants must share the same cultural values for them to enjoy 56 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN humour. Likewise, Yus (2003), (2004) and Schwarz (2010) have noted that in stand- up comedy there is need for the participants to have the same cultural beliefs. It is important to note that the Nigerian stand-up comedy, the source of data for the current study, is an offshoot of a multicultural society. Thus, Nigerian stand-up comedians must find a way of negotiating the possible cultural plurality of their audiences via the resources in Layer A. The comedians make use of the cues in Layer A to explicitly activate cultural assumptions between themselves and their audiences by building their narrations around popular Nigerian political, social and cultural topics and events. 2.12.2.2 The shared situational knowledge (SSK) Situational knowledge is a fundamental assumption in the interpretation of utterances. The situation of an utterance refers to the kind of activity that causes the utterance. In interactions, participants must draw from the situation to interpret the logical form of utterances and to deduce the speakers‟ intentions. This calls for mutual knowledge of the situation by the participants. The term shared situational knowledge is used to refer to the mutual awareness about the stand-up performance that both the stand-up comedians and their audience possess. For stand-up performance, SSK demands that the participants-of-the-joke must be aware of how the stand-up performance is carried out, their roles as well as their institutionalised identities and how they can contribute to the stand-up interaction. SSK also entails that the participants-of-the-joke recognise the constraints on their roles and how they can manipulate such constraints to achieve their goals. For instance, the institutionalised nature of stand-up performance does not permit the audience to speak in the interaction, except when the comedians elicit responses from the audience. However, whenever the comedians are performing and the audience do not find their performance humorous, the audience bypass their institutionalised role as passive participants and give out heckles. 2.12.2.3 The shared knowledge of code (SKC) Before participants can communicate through a language, they have to have linguistic and communicative competence in the language. Applying this to stand-up comedy performance, SKC demands that the comedian performs their joke with a linguistic code that is well known to the audience. It is the communal knowledge of 57 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN linguistic code between stand-up comedians and their audiences that licenses comedians‟ choices of language, language varieties as well as linguistic expression. Comedians who use inaccessible linguistic code to the audience cannot achieve communication in their performances. In the Nigerian multilingual context, the SKC becomes a nimble tool for selection of language code. The SKC dictates the language in which the Nigerian stand-up comedians will perform. 2.12.3 Layer C: Encyclopaedic knowledge (EK) The function of this layer is to show that humorous language use still takes place within the purview of non-humorous language use, since they are uttered with the same linguistic forms. Thus, the same principle that underlines the use of humorous utterances underlines the use of non-humorous utterances. The implication of this is that the same interpretive steps or processes are needed for the interpretation of jokes and non-joke texts. Thus, there is no need for separating bona-fide mode of communication from non-bona-fide mode since interpretation of utterances in both modes undergoes the same inferential process. The encyclopaedic knowledge layer depicts that the knowledge of language and the experiential knowledge of activities, events, happenings in the society and human society are rudimentary to the knowledge and use of humour. In stand-up comedy narrations, the stand-up comedian extracts issues from Layer C and then situates such issues in Layer B, where in turn they bear their own contexts (what is obtainable in Layer A). It is in Layer B that the assumptions for the interpretation of humorous utterances are activated. A major function of Layer C is to show that the encyclopaedic knowledge, which represents linguistic competence and experiential knowledge, supplies the needed information to make expressions meaningful and interpretable. Linguistic expressions do have both conventional and contextual values. In the model, the conventional values of the linguistic expressions used by the comedians are supplied in Layer C while the contextual values are supplied in Layer B. 58 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 2.13 Summary This chapter presents the review of relevant literatures to the present study. It also presents the theoretical framework. The next chapter presents the research methodology. 59 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN CHAPTER THREE METHODOLOGY 3.0 Introduction This chapter presents the methods that were adopted for collection of data and investigation of humour acts and strategies in Nigerian stand-up comedy performances. 3.1 Research design This study adopted qualitative analysis to explain the performances of Nigerian stand-up comedians. As a qualitative research, it employed pragmatic principles to describe the intentions of Nigerian stand-up comedians and how such intentions are realised through their narration of jokes in the contexts of their performances. In order to analyse the routines of Nigerian stand-up comedians, a theoretical model, humour acts, was developed. The model drew from the principles of relevance theory, pragmatic act and general theory of verbal humour. Because these theories did not cater for physical aspects of communication like gestures, layout and dressing, multimodal theory was adopted to describe nonverbal aspects of stand-up performance. 3.2 Data collection The data used for this study were derived from the performances of Nigerian stand-up comedians. The performances of Nigerian stand-up comedians were made available in video-compact-disc (VCD) and audio-compact-disc (CD) recordings. There were also several platforms like social and broadcast media through which Nigerian stand-up comedians made their routines accessible to the public. As a descriptive research, the study used a large corpus of data collected and transcribed from VCD recordings of the popular Nigerian comedy show, Nite of a thousand laughs (NTL) which was produced by Opa Williams. NTL was selected because, according to Ayakoroma (2013), it was the earliest and most popular source of Nigerian stand-up comedy. In addition, it was a platform which featured both 60 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN famous and upcoming stand-up comedians. Gordons‟ the Comedyberluscon also provided performances which were analysed in the study. The VCDs were played with VLC media player, a piece of software for playing videos. VLC was chosen because it enabled measuring the length of time for each of the routines. Also, it enabled the researcher to take pictures of the comedians‟ routines. The snapped pictures were used to illustrate nonverbal cues in the routines. 3.3 Sampling size and technique The goal of this study was to investigate the performances of Nigerian stand- up comedians. The researcher started by watching and listening to the recorded performances of the comedians and those that were broadcast on the media. At the initial stage, different platforms of Nigerian stand-up comedy were observed. These platforms were Made in Warri, Stand-up Nigeria, AY Live, the ComedyBerlusconi and the NTL. The source of data was later limited to NTL because it was the most popular and the oldest source of Nigerian stand-up comedy. Thus, the performances which were sampled for analysis were those that were found in the NTL. The data that were selected for analysis were purposively selected. The selection was limited to recent volumes of the NTL, which were produced between 2009 and 2013. This was because Ayakoroma (2013) observed that the earlier versions of the NTL featured people who were not comedians. In addition, while watching the volumes of the NTL, it was discovered that several of the stand-up comedians that appeared in the earlier volumes no longer perform as stand-up comedians, and some comedians repeated their joking stories. Thus, limiting the selection to recent editions of the NTL helped to select only the routines of practising and professional stand-up comedians and avoid analysing the repeated joking stories. The selection was taken out of the last eight editions of the NTL that were available at the time of data collection, these editions were volumes 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24; out of which four volumes were alternatively selected. The selected volumes were 17, 19, 21 and 23. The number of comedians who performed in each of these volumes ranged from 6 to 8, with some of the comedians featuring thrice in the volumes while the others appeared only once. From NTL, routines of 16 male comedians and one female comedian were used as illustrations in the analysis. The gender disparity in the number of comedians reflected the gender demography of the 61 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN professional stand-up comedians, as there were more male stand-up comedians than female. In support of the gender disparity in demography of the stand-up comedians, Adetunji (2013) opined that the female stand-up comedians were not up to one-fifth of the total number of Nigerian stand-up comedians. Also, Ayakoroma (2013), who chronicled the advent and development of Nigerian stand-up comedy, mentioned only two female stand-up comedians. However, to make-up for lack of adequate female stand-up comedians in the selected volumes, two other female comedians were selected from another platform of Nigerian stand-up comedy which was the Comedyberlusconi, produced by a stand-up comedian, Gordons. The Comedyberlusconi was a comedy show which was actually titled Island Comedy with Gordons and friends. The title the Comedyberlusconi was chosen for this study because it was the title printed on the VCD and its cover. The total number of female comedians from whose routines extracts were taken was 3. The male comedians were Gordons, Eneche, I Go Dye, Elenu, Basktmouth, Mc Shakara, Buchi, Youngest Landlord, Princewill, Bovi, Seyilaw, Federation Mallam, Funnybones, Simcard and I Go Save; while the female comedians were Lepacious Bose, Princess and Helen Paul. Table 2 below shows the volumes of NTL and the Comedyberlusconi in which the stand-up comedians appeared. Table 2: Presentation of comedians’ appearances Comedian No. of routines Volumes 1. Gordons 3 NTL 17, 19 and 21 2. Eneche 1 NTL 17 3. Elenu 1 NTL 17 4. I Go Dye 3 NTL 17, 19, and 21 5. Lepacious Bose 1 NTL 17 6. Basket Mouth 2 NTL 17 and 19 7. MC Shakara 1 NTL 17 8. Buchi 2 NTL 17 and 23 9. Princess 1 Thecomedyberlusconi 2 10. Helen Paul 1 Thecomedyberlusconi 1 11. AY 1 NTL 19 12. Bovi 3 NTL 19,21 and 23 13. I Go Save 1 NTL 19 14. Youngest Landlord 1 NTL 21 62 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 15. Princewill 1 NTL 21 16. Seyilaw 2 NTL 21 and 23 17. Federation Mallam 1 NTL 21 18. Funnybones 1 NTL 23 19. Simcard 1 NTL 23 Total 19 comedians 28 3.4 Method of data analysis The transcribed data were subjected to pragmatic analysis. The transcribed data were first examined vis-à-vis the performances in the VCD. Thus, the researcher was able to make observations about how the comedians carried out their joke performances. The analysis began with identifying the features of the narrative aspects of the performance, after which the humour strategies were identified and analysed. The last part of the analysis catered for the humour acts in the performances. For illustrations, samples were taken from the transcribed data and were presented in the analysis. The performances were presented in Nigerian Pidgin (NP), which might be alternated with English. An English translation was thus provided for the utterances that were not rendered in English after each excerpt. The excerpts indicated the nonverbal cues of the comedians and also, the audience reactions to the comedians‟ routines. 63 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN CHAPTER FOUR NARRATIVE ASPECTS OF THE SAMPLED NIGERIAN STAND-UP PERFORMANCES 4.0 Introduction Since stand-up comedy performance is carried out by the narration of jokes in comedy venues, it is important to examine the pragmatic aspects of the techniques of narration in the performances under study. In addition, since comedians adopt nonverbal cues in their performances, it is important to explore how the nonverbal cues contribute to the success of their performances. This chapter is, therefore, dedicated to the analysis of voice and nonverbal communication cues that enhance the narration of jokes in Nigerian stand-up comedy performances. 4.1 The use of voicing In the humour acts model, the concept of voice is used to refer to the person who speaks during the performance. Nigerian stand-up comedians adopt the resources of language to present to their audience multiple voices while performing their jokes. Voice is thus a strategy adopted in the narration of their jokes. Through it, the audience are presented with the participants-in-the-joke voice. As a strategy, voicing enables the audience to hear the characters in the joking stories speak in the narrations. Through voicing, the comedians create an interpretive frame, through which the audience interpret the utterances of the comedians as belonging to either the comedians or the participants-in-the-joke. Voicing is a form of semiotics of sounding in a particular way in order to foreground either the comedians‟ comic images or participants-in-the-joke as characters in the narrations. The presentation of different voices by the comedians is achieved by different linguistic strategies, which have the following rhetorical and pragmatic import for the performance of jokes. i. The use of voicing enhances the audience perception of comedians as creative performers. ii. Voicing strengthens the mechanism of garden-path phenomenon and surprise effect in the narration of the comedians. With different voices in a narration, 64 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN the audience are made to see the joking stories as real and representative of real-life situations. iii. The adoption of voices presents the comedian as someone who is just telling what s/he has observed. Through it, the comedians distance themselves from the events, actions, and actors in the narrations. Voicing strengthens and enhances the explicitness of the common ground between the comedian and the audience. A major background belief from the SSK is that the comedian will narrate funny stories to the audience. For these stories to be accepted by the audience, the comedians have to lead them in a garden-path. The audience, however, will not ordinarily accept to be led in any garden-path if the comedians do not use the narrative voice strategy to evoke a feeling in the audience that the jokes are about individuals who speak in their narrations. It is proposed in this study that there are two kinds of voices in the Nigerian stand-up comedy performances: the first is the comic voice and the second is the voice of the participants-in-the-jokes. The comic voice is the narrative voice adopted by stand-up comedians to perform their jokes. Nigerian stand-up comedians impersonate a comic image through which they speak to their audience. The comic voice is an extension of the comic image that they want to portray. With their comic voice, they present their institutional identity and negotiate shared beliefs in their jokes. The comic image is exhibited when the personality of the comedian is contrasted with the participant-in-the-joke. In a performance, a comedian may present more than one joke, with each joke having its own characters. The comedians may begin their performance with their comic voice. Whenever they want their audience to identify the characters in their jokes, they will switch to participants-in-the-joke voice. The strategies that Nigerian stand-up comedians employ to articulate voicing are identified and illustrated in the following sections. 4.1.1 Code selection and code switching in Nigerian stand-up performances The term code is used here to refer to the language or language variety that is employed by the stand-up comedians in their narrations. Code selection is vital to the success of the performance of stand-up comedians because it is a primary contextualisation cue in the performance of jokes. The act of code selection is 65 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN informed by the SLK. Nigerian stand-up comedians strategically select NP as the language of their narration NP. NP, therefore, indicates the comic voice. Code selection and switching are illustrated in the Excerpts below [Excerpt 1, Princewill] Praise the Lord! do we have Christians in the house? Praise the Lord!! Praise the Lord (AR) hallelujah En-hen Jesus is a Christian something happen for church for Sunday I come here to share with you because if una dey there 5 somebody here for help me beat the pastor (Pointing to the audience) as the pastor was preaching, he say “ladies and gentlemen, right about now close your eye because an angel is passing and if you open it, he will blind it.” I come dey wonder how he take know because na two two eye we get 10 I no see angel, pastor dey see angel He say “ We want to pray!” everybody close eye, you trust Yoruba people as pastor dey pray, he dey collect money from offering as he dey pray, dey draw, and me Warri boy, 15 I no dey ever close eye, my eye shine bright like thief man torch I dey look am, he dey collect money (begins to demonstrate picking money from one spot to another) as he dey look na so his eye just jam my eye (begins to step backward from the centre of the stage) Na him pastor say “blessed are you that see but do not talk” (AL) As a sharp warri boy that I am now reply 20 I say “for they shall receive their share of the money equally” (intensified AL) [Translation: Line 4: Something happened in church on Sunday/ I am here to share it with you because if you were there/ someone here would have helped me to beat the pastor/Line 10: then I wondered how the pastor was able to see an angel because I have two eyes like him/ I could not see the angel but the pastor could see the angel/ line 14: as the pastor was praying, he was pilfering the offering/ as he was praying, he was pilfering, and I as a Warri boy/I did not close my eyes, my eyes were bright like the torchlight of a thief/ I was looking at him as he was pilfering the offering / as he was looking around, his eyes and mine met/then the pastor said blessed are you that see but do not talk/ as a smart Warri boy, I replied/ for they shall receive their share of the money equally.] 66 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN In Excerpt 1, the comedian begins his narration in English. The use of English at the start of the joke narration contradicts the expectation of the audience. The audience would have expected that Princewill would start his narration in NP. The choice of English is strategic for the effectiveness of the joke. In the comedian‟s script, the major participant-in-the-joke, is a pastor, and the activity-in-the-joke, praying, is a common event in Christian gatherings in Nigeria. In several churches in Nigeria, the English language is adopted as the medium through which the congregation and clergy carry out their religious rituals. The comedian‟s choice of English at the start of the narration is motivated by this background information from the SCK. His use of English at the start of his narration is to suggest the social status of a participant-in-the-joke. In addition, his code choice reflects the language choice in the activity-in-the-joke, since English is the language of liturgy in mega churches in the country. Thus, his choice of English is meant to activate and strengthen an assumption from the SCKthat English is commonly used in Nigerian churches as language of worship. In line 4, the comedian switches to NP. The code switch is motivated by context-of-the-joke. It strengthens the assumption that the language of stand-up comedy performances in Nigeria is NP and it indicates the actual point where the joke to be performed begins since the use of NP denotes the comic voice of the comedian. Lines 8 and 9 are rendered in English. The switch of code from NP to English denotes voicing. It indicates a change in the voice that is speaking in the narration, from the comic voice to a participant-in-the-joke voice, the pastor‟s. The narrative significance of this switch is to foreground the pastor as a character in the narration and as a social actor in the activity-in-the-joke. Since collection of offerings in churches and praying “on” them are common rituals in churches, the switch to indicate the pastor‟s voice makes the audience to view the joke as plausible. Thus, the switch, together with the assumptions from the SCK enhances the garden-path of the build-up of the joke. There is also a switch to NP in lines 10-12, which indicates a switch of voice, from the pastor‟s to the comic voice. This switch reinforces the consistent use of NP as the language of Nigerian stand-up comedy performance. Having repeatedly switched from English to NP and NP to English, in line 21, the comedian switched from NP to English to project the voice of another participant- in-the-joke. This time, the participant is the comedian himself. As a participant-in-the- 67 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN joke, the comedian could have used NP to convey his own speech; however, in order to keep with the strategic use of voicing, he switches to English. The switch in line 21 reinforces that the stand-up comedian as a performer is different from the stand-up comedian as an individual. The comedian reports his speech as a participant-in-the- joke with English, so as to give voice to all the participants-in-the-joke. By presenting his utterance as a participant-in-the-joke in English, he strengthens the assumptions that English is the language used in Christian religion practices in Nigeria. In Excerpt 1, the types of code switching based on the languages involved are English-NP and NP-English switches. There are also NP-Indigenous Language(s) and NP-sociolect/idiolect switches in other routines. In the switch involving the indigenous language, the comedian switches from NP, the language which indicates the comic voice, to either one of the numerous native languages in Nigeria or a language variety associated with a social group based on ethnic or occupational affiliations. The pragmatic import of this kind of switch, apart from indicating a change of voice in the performance, is to set up background beliefs, from the SCK, like stereotypes associated with such social group (or individual). When the switch involves an idiolect or sociolect, it indicates that it is the voice of a participant-in-the- joke, rather than the comedian, that is speaking in the joke narration. For instance, in the performances of some Nigerian stand-up comedians, the comedians switch to the speech mannerisms of some well-known pastors in Nigeria. Excerpt 2 illustrates the NP-Yoruba Language and NP-sociolect/idiolect switches. [Excerpt 2, Seyilaw] My uncle‟s been in the UK for over 16 years men Come dey carry im pikin, last born, 6 years old pikin dey carry am go school Pikin just see where police dey, just dey begin shout “HELP!” Na him police say “pull over, your hands to the car please, 5 Your hands to the wheels. Now put your hands where I can see them. Get down from the car put your hands on the car” Dem separate my uncle legs, search am See say he no hold anything, arrested my uncle for 2 hours Dem dey ask the pikin “Do you know him?” 10 Say “I don‟t know him” (AL) My uncle come dey look “aah …aah” (Removes his hat and looked around in shock) 68 U IVERSITY OF IBADAN “Aah…Aah …e mi mo ma… Ah, I am the ah…ah” He no even get English accent sef, after 16 years “I am the father! (AL) 15 Emi ni emi ni, I‟m the father aa h aa h” Dem dey ask the pikin, he said “I don‟t know him, you can see his accent, he didn‟t speak like us” Hey! My uncle no talk. After like three hours dem come release my uncle 20 The pikin say “well, he‟s my dad, I just hate him men, I told him I don‟t want to go to school, he is forcing me” [Line 2: he was taking his last child/ his 6 year old child to school/ the child saw where policemen were and began to shout for help/ then the police said to him to pull over and place his hands on the wheels/ Line 8: the policeman separated my uncle‟s leg, searched his body/ saw that he had no weapon on him, arrested my uncle for 2 hours/ they asked the child “do you know him”/ line 12-13: my uncle was shocked and he began to stammer “I… I… I myself…”/ he did not even have English accent after 16 years/ Line 16: I myself, I myself I am the father/ the police asked the child/ Line 20: my uncle kept quiet/ after about three hours, they released my uncle/ the child said… ] Excerpt 2 is from the performance of Seyilaw which is interspersed with the use of English and NP. The continuous alternation of English and NP in the performance is done to reflect the features of the context-in-the-joke. These features include the activity-in-the-joke, the location of the activity and the participants-in-the- joke. With each switch to NP, the comedian changes the voice in the narration to that of the comic voice, while whenever he switches to English, he indicates that the voice in the narration has changed to that of participants-in-the-joke. In line 5, the switch to English, which was sustained till line 7, indicates that it is the British policemen that are speaking. In line 8, the comedian switches back to NP to indicate the comic voice, the comic voice was sustained till line 10 where the comedian allows a participant (the British police) to speak in his narration by using the English language. The same voice strategy is used in line 11. In line 12, there is a switch to Yoruba language which also indicates that it is a participant-in-the-joke that is being heard, this time, the comedian‟s uncle whose experience is being narrated. The switch begins from line 12, from NP to Yorub a, and it is marked by the exclamatory expression “ah”. In line 13, the comedian continues with the Yorub a emphatic noun phrase structure, “emi mo ma”, which depicts the comedian‟s uncle voice- a character-in-the-joke whose tribal 69 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN affiliation is Yorub a. By using Yoru ba language, the comedian projects to the audience that it is a participant-in-the-joke that is speaking and not the comedian. The comedian, furthermore, to emphasize that it is a participant‟s voice, switches to a peculiar pronunciation which is associated with Yorub a speakers, “am” /jm/ and “father” /f:d:h/, in lines 13 and 15 and this pronunciation is indicative of the speakers‟ tribal affiliation. The switch to the Yoruba language and the use of Yoruba accent to articulate the words “am” and “father” is meant to make explicit from the SCK the stereotypes attached to Yoru ba people. Thus, the comedian stereotyped Yoru ba people as incapable of overcoming phonological interference in their English pronunciation. Also, by poking fun at his uncle and stereotyping Yoru ba people, the comedian achieves a surprise effect in the audience. Part of the cultural beliefs from the SCK is that it is wrong for people to make fun of elders, and given that the comedian is also a Yoruba  person, the audience would not expect him to poke fun at his own ethno- linguistic group. Thus, the joke on his uncle and the stereotyping of his ethno- linguistic group contradicts cultural expectation. The audience will find this incongruous with the SCK and such incongruity gives a surprise effect that is needed for humour. Code selection subsumes code switching. The language situation in which code selection or switching takes place helps to differentiate the two in this study. Code selection and switching are viewed as being determined and shaped by the humour act context. Code selection is motivated by the dynamics of context-of-the- joke while code switching is shaped by the dynamics of the joke to be performed, the context-in-the-joke. The crux of code selection in context-of-the-joke is to project a comic image through a comic voice. The comedians choose a language that their audience has associated with humour. Thus, they choose NP, which has been associated as the code for comic voice in stand-up performances. In the case of the female comedians, they could start with English language. Conversely, the crux of code switching is to mirror the voice of a participant-in-the-joke, a feature of context- in-the-joke. In code switching, therefore, the code to be chosen is motivated by who the participant-in-the-joke is, her /his social status or roles and ethnolinguistic affiliation. Since stand-up comedians have to assign codes to each of the participants- 70 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN in-the-joke in their narrations, they switch codes during their performances. Their code switching, thus, becomes metaphoric and a discourse-related phenomenon, in that a switch signals that the voice in the narration has changed to that of a participant- in-the-joke. For instance, if a stand-up comedian presents a participant-in-the-joke as educated, s/he may assign educated Nigerian English variety to such a character, or if a participant-in-the-joke is presented as belonging to an ethnic or social group, the stand-up comedian may assign to such character the speech pattern that is associated with such a group, for instance, if the character is a Yorub a man, the comedian may assign to him an English variety that is marked by large-scale transfer from Yoruba language. Code selection is determined by the institutional constraints of Nigerian stand- up comedy performance. These constraints are motivated by the multilingual nature of the country, which would be reflected in the audience. The audience are usually made up of people from various ethno-linguistic groups in Nigeria. Therefore, in code selection, stand-up comedians must take into cognisance the need to reach audiences from different ethnic groups. This need influences the use of languages that cut across the numerous ethnic groups of Nigeria. 4.1.2 The use of mimicry Mimicry is another strategy which Nigerian stand-up comedians use to articulate voice in their performances. In the deployment of mimicry, the comedians adopt both the linguistic and non-linguistic modes of communication that are peculiar to the butt of their jokes. They imitate the speech mannerisms and gesticulations of the person or the social group they have selected as the butt of their joke and present the caricatures of such to their audience. Mimicry presents the comedian to the audience as a creative and versatile artiste. Some of the acts of mimicry found in the performances are: i. Mimicry of the speech patterns and gesticulations of some popular Nigerian music artistes; for instance AY mimics Dbanj and Timaya both of whom are popular contemporary musicians, he also mimics Alex O and Chris Okotie, both of whom are older generation Nigerian musicians. ii. Mimicry of the speech mannerisms of the clergy; for instance, Buchi performs his jokes as if he is sermonising in a Christian gathering and AY 71 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN deliberately imitates the speech and gesticulating patterns of Chris Okotie and Chris Oyakilome, both of whom are popular Nigerian pastors and television evangelists. iii. Mimicry of the disabled, for instance, Youngest Landlord and Seyilaw caricature and poke fun at the walking mannerism of cripples; Elenu mimics the speech pattern and gesticualtions of people with low intelligence quotient. iv. Mimicry of the English pronunciation patterns of some ethnic groups in Nigeria; for instance, Federation Mallam replicates the stress, intonantional pattern and accent of Hausa speakers of English and Seyilaw mimics the English pronunciation pattern of Yorub a  people. v. Mimicry of the articulations of a child learning to speak, for instance, Helen Paul presents her jokes with mimicry and depiction of a little child. The adoption of mimicry has pragmatic import for the technic of voicing. Whenever a comedian mimics, the mimicry becomes a symbol of the person(s) being mimicked. Mimicry thus performs a referential function in that it points to the person that is being mimicked. The comedian adopts this act to dissociate himself from the actions or statements that are made in performance during the period of mimicry. Technically in any mimicry act, the voice that speaks is not the comic voice but the voice of the participant-in-the-joke who is being caricatured, since the mimicry is an iconic sign of the person being mimicked. Apart from its iconic function for indicating a change in voice in the narrations of comedians, mimicry is also used to signify social solidarity between the comedians and the audiences. Anytime the comedians mimic, and their performances produce affiliation with the audience, there is an indication that both the audience and the comedian share the same ideational experiences in that they both view the action of the participant-in-the-joke who is being mimicked as incongruous. Besides, mimicry presents the action of the target as socially incongruous. The SSK and SCK, which underlie their ideational experience, help them to express similar attitudes which are used to interpret the mimicry of the comedians. However, should the mimicry fail to generate any affiliative response, it would indicate that there is no shared ideational experience between the comedians and the audience. The use of mimicry in the stand- up performances brings about a social resonance of whoever is being mimicked. The 72 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN social resonance brings about shared feelings which immediately have effect on collective background assumptions and the joke narration. In the context-of-the-joke, mimicry has similar significance with echoic irony in conversation. In this sense, mimicry carries the import of an ironic distortion, which presents the act of mimicry as a satire. Any mimicry act actually distorts the original act so that the audience see the actual act as absurd since the mimicry indicates a switch from what is expected (when the speech pattern, gesture or action was initial performed) to what has become unexpected (the repeat of the pattern in the stand-up comedy venues). In other words, it moves from the plane of the expected and congruous to that of unexpected and incongruous. This is why any mimicked cue in the context of humour production enhances and expands the effects of humour. Excerpt 3 and the Plates below illustrate the use of mimicry in Nigerian stand-up comedy: [Excerpt 3, AY] Come imagine somebody like Dbanj na police (bends down to pick a pair of sunglasses and wears it) The next thing, you go just see Dbanj, For check point (p) (walks on the stage demonstrating Dbanj‟s movement while performing) “Ho:l:d!!! it!!! (P) (stretches out his hands pointing and moving on the stage) AL En hen! (P) (AL) 5 What did you say? You are talking to me? Baba! e! ma run down! (P) (AL) I‟m talking to you, you are still sitting down If you are still sitting down, you are sitting on a lo::ng (points the microphone to the audience) Thing!” 10 Audience: thing! “File!” “Who are you giving 20 Naira? Me ? Olor un maje ! Ol or un maj e! ” (moves his hand over his head to indicate his rejection of 20 Naira) (P) (AL) Or come imagine someone like, like my friend, Oyakilome as police 15 The next thing, you go just see cars dey come like this (slower) “pa:rk your: car: (P) (AL) 73 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN I say pa::rk your:: car:: (P) (AL) Step! Out! (faster rate) keep moving, keep moving, keep moving When I‟m through with you, people will say yeah” (AL) (CL) 20 [Translation: Imagine somebody like Dbanj as a policeman/next you will see Dbanj/ at police checkpoint/ Line 5: exclamation/ Line 8: you father will run down/ Line 11: leave it! Line 13: God forbids, God forbids] Plate 4.1 AY portraying Dbanj Plate 4.2 AY portraying Dbanj II HO:L:D!!! IT!!! En hen! (lines 4-5 of Excerpt 3) AY intensifying his portrayal of Dbanj by putting on a pair of dark glasses, pointing the index finger to the audience and moving around the stage 74 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Plate 4.3 AY portraying Chris Oyakilome pa::rk your:: (line 18) AY without glasses so as to portray another target, Chris Oyakilome Plate 4.4 AY portraying Chris Oyakilome II ca::r As revealed in Plates 4.1-4.4, the comedian makes use of different body moves while mimicking different participants-in-the-joke. The physical acts he adopts for mimicking Dbanj, a popular Nigerian hip-hop artiste, are those that the audience can identify as the performance mannerism of the artiste. Similarly, the gestures he adopts while mimicking Chris Oyakilome, a popular Nigerian Pentecostal pastor, are those 75 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN that the audience can identify as the gesticulations of the pastor while he preaches in his television broadcast. AY does not only mimic the gesticulation of these participants-in-the-joke, he also mimics their speech mannerisms. The butt in the first part of the joke is Dbanj, and to depict Dbanj in his caricature, AY puts on a pair of dark glasses. AY uses a pair of dark glasses because Dbanj always appears in his live performances and in public events with his pair of dark glasses. Also, AY adopts some expressions which are found in the lyrics of Dbanj‟s music and parodies them: “fi le”, “long thing”, and “hold it”. Plate 4.1 coincides with line 1 while Plate 4.2 coincides with lines 4-5; these are got from the performance of the joke on Dbanj. Similarly, Plates 4.3 and 4.4 coincide with Line 18, which forms a part of the performance of the joke on Chris Oyakilome. Just like his use of expressions that are found in the lyrics of Dbanj, AY also makes use of statements which are commonly used by Chris Oyakilome in his popular TV broadcast, Atmosphere of Miracles. Some of these expressions are “keep moving”, “when I‟m through with you”, and “say yeah”. In mimicking the acts of Dbanj and Chris Oyakilome, AY creates iconic references to the people he mimics. These references resonate certain social attitudes in the audiences and these attitudes are used to judge the actions of the butts, who are viewed through the lens of the comedian‟s performance. In another way, as echoic irony, the mimics distort what has been viewed as perfect, proper and socially acceptable- the actual speech and physical acts of the butts of the jokes. The distortions satirise the speech and physical acts of the butts and it is then reconsidered by the audience and seen as socially incongruous. As iconic images of the butts, the mimicry points to the butts and represents their voices and actions. 4.1.3 The use of reported speech (RS) Leech (2006) describes reported speech (RS) as the language used by speakers to report the utterances of others. Bublitz and Bednarek (2006) and Hubler (2011) view RS as a metapragmatic act which is used to characterise reported propositions and the actual speakers of reported propositions or to distance oneself from the reported propositions. In this study, RS is viewed as a metapragmatic act which is indicative of the voice of the source of the RS. In this sense, in its use, the audience in stand-up 76 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN performances associate the reported utterance, not to the comedian but to the source. Although, comedians may not necessarily use other strategies to indicate a change in voice, their adoption of RS meta-represents the voice of the source of the utterance. To adopt RS, the comedians usually “frame” the utterance which is being reported with expressions that contain “a verb of saying”. These verbs are absorbed as referential “instruments” for attributing the reported statements, not to the comedians, but to the participant-in-the-joke whose speech is being reported, and by extension, the social group s/he represents (Hubler, 2011: 111-112). RS is a common feature of Nigerian stand-up comedy and its adoption in the performances has the following significance: i. RS helps the comedians to adduce utterances to the participants-in-the- joke. By adducing utterance to participants-in-the-joke, the comedians rhetorically distance themselves from the propositions and actions in their RS. The audience too, would attribute the proposition or action in the RS to a participant-in-the-joke. They would view the stand-up comedians as reporting what they have heard the participant-in-the-joke saying. ii. By adopting RS, the comedians enhance the textual features of their jokes. RS helps comedians to bring into their narrations previous conversations or action. In the RS, the comedians say to their audiences what has previously being said. With RS, the stand-up comedy performance is an avenue where several other texts are presented. By using RS, the texts of the comedians become rich with intertextuality. iii. Reporting the speeches of participants-in-jokes enhances the audience‟s perception of the activities-in-the-joke and participants-in-the-joke as realistic. This strengthens or contradicts the audiences‟ background assumptions about the activities being narrated by the comedian and the participant-in-the-joke as real social actors. As a metapragmatic act, RS in the stand-up comedy performance can be divided into two types: the marked and unmarked RS. The marked RS is denoted by a saying verb which indicates that the RS does not only reflect the source of the utterance but also indicates the attitude of the comedian to the source, and the comedians‟ view of the RS. On the other hand, the unmarked RS only indicates that 77 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN the utterance being reported is another speech situation that has been brought into the stand-up comedy performance. The unmarked RS is denoted by a saying verb which does not suggest attitudes or behaviours. For the unmarked RS, the comedians use the NP reporting verb say which translate to English “say” (or past tense said), depending on the tense of the matrix sentence. In most of the performances, the comedians construct their jokes in a way to show that they are part of the participants-in-the-joke, that is, they are involved in the events or activity reported in the jokes. Whenever the comedian is part of the participants-in-the-joke, s/he begins the matrix sentence of the RS with the first person singular pronoun. To differentiate their speech as a participant-in-the-joke from their speech as a narrator of joke, they frame their RS with the first person singular pronoun plus the reporting verb. For instance, “I come say…; I say…” (Bovi); “I provoke give my father say…” (Gordons) and “I say men…” (Sim Card). To show that the RS belongs to a participant-in-the-joke, apart from the comedians, the comedians use the third person pronoun plus the reporting verb. In some instances, the comedian may decide to use a referring expression like a title, label or the name of the participant-in-the-joke whose speech is being reported. For instance, “na oyinbo people come dey say” (Seyilaw); “God said…” (Basketmouth), “my papa say…” (Mc Shakara); “he say…” (Federation Mallam, Princewill, Bovi); “he go say…, some comedian, them go come stage dey say…” (Youngest Landlord). The marked RS are illustrated with exacts below: [Excerpt 4, Gordons] I remember when! I wan come marry, I wan go meet my father-in-law, When the guy see my outlook Na him he halla “are you he that is to come or Should we wait for another” (AL) 5 [Translation: I remember when I wanted to get married/ when I went to meet my father-in-law/ when the man saw my appearance/ he yelled “are you he that is to come or / should we wait for another”] [Excerpt 5, I Go Save] Girls, Why e bi say una like to dey frustrate us, Wetin we do, una boys, wetin boys do una?, We go say “okay make we just make the women happy” 78 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Una begin call us names “mumusco, mug un , maga” (AL) [Translation: Ladies, why is it the you like to frustrate us/ what did we do, we men/ what did men do to you/ we would say we want to make laddies happy/ then you begin to tag us with different names, stupid, foolish, gullible] [Excerpt 6, Eneche] If you tell a woman say “good evening mommy” She would acknowledge you “oh my son thank you” In Excerpt 4, the comedian uses the reporting verb “halla” which translate to the English reporting verb yell. In the context where Gordon has used it, “halla” also denotes furiousness, anger, rejection and refusal. The comedian uses “halla” to indicate that he was angry with his father because his prospective father-in-law did not endorse his relationship with his fiancée because his father was poor. In Excerpt 5, the comedian uses two reporting verbs, “say” and “call”. In the use of the first reporting verb, “say”, the comedian does not show any other pragmatic import to the RS. However, when he uses “call”, he indicates that the ladies whose utterances are to be reported, are actually tagging them and being rude by the use of the nomenclature with which they refer to men. In Excerpt 5, Eneche, uses the verb “acknowledge” as the reporting verb to show the woman‟s positive attitude to the salutation directed to her. 4.2 Conversational acts Conversational acts, in the stand-up discourse, are strategies comedians adopt during their narration to involve their audience in the stand-up comedy interactions. These cues range from the use of explicit linguistic expressions to nonverbal acts and phonological cues. Recognising the presence of the audience and their roles as participants in the stand-up comedy performances enhances the realisation of the institutional goals of both the comedians and their audience. The success of any joke performance is judged by the responses of the audience. If the audience give affiliative responses, the joke performance is seen as felicitous. Should the audience give disaffiliative responses, the joke performance is seen as infelicitous. In the following sections, the conversational acts found in Nigerian stand-up comedy are identified. 79 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 4.2.1 The use of pauses Pauses, according to Baker and Ellece (2011:89), “are silences or gaps in a conversation which occur as a result of the current speaker stopping”. Brown and Yule (1983) note that pauses are readily identifiable in discourses since they constitute gaps or silence in interactions. On the use of pausing in Nigerian stand-up comedy performance, Adetunji (2013) observes that pauses are linguistically coded. Illustrating with a joke performance by Basketmouth, Adetunji (2013) identifies four types of pauses using length of time: significant, emphatic, normal and micro pauses. Adetunji sees a pause as a pragmatic resource for activating shared co-textual and contextual knowledge. To adopt Adetunji‟s (2013) classification of pauses may be awkward in explaining the use of pauses in a study like the current one, because Adetunji analyses the use of pauses in only one performance by a stand-up comedian while in this study, the analysis is focused on describing the performances of nineteen stand-up comedians. Given that the comedians have different personalities, they allot different timing to the pauses they employ in their narrations in different performances. For instance, at the start of I Go Dye‟s performances, the pauses employed are usually longer (often more than a second) and as his performances progress, the time allotted to the pauses becomes shorter. Unlike I Go Dye, Buchi allots longer time to pauses. At the start of his performances, his pauses take not less than two seconds and as the performances progress, the pauses may take a longer or shorter timing depending on the joke. Youngest Landlord uses pauses shorter than a second, unless he deliberately pause to elicit responses from his audience, which may take just a little more than a second. Excerpts 7 and 8 below are used to illustrate the use of pauses in the sampled performances. [Excerpt 7, Eneche] Calabar good evening, I bring you greetings from the political power of the middle belt, the talent and food basket of this great nation, the heartbeat of Africa. Calabar una fine, una city fine.! 5 In short, when I enter calabar, I come dey think say whether I don enter abroad, 80 UNIVERSITY OF IB DAN the city neat, make una clap for una self (P) (AC) [line 5: Calabar, you are beautiful, your city is beautiful/… When I got into Calabar/ I began to think that I was abroad/ the city is neat/ clap yourselves] Eneche‟s pauses in lines 1-7 are less then a second. However, in line 8, he adopts a pause that is longer than a second. A longer pause is adopted in line 8 because the comedian is requesting an affiliative response from the audience in the line, therefore, the longer pause is employed in order to allow the audience to respond to the comedians‟ request. Another reason for this longer pause is that the line marks the end of the comedian‟s commencement act. Thus, apart from using the pause to allow the audience to respond, he uses the pause to allow the audience to carry out the needed cognitive switch to process the subsequent joke of the routine. [Excerpt 8, Elenu] I can see the Lord is doing somethings here,. There is a girl! here!, you are a student of Unical.  (P) (AL) First semester, you had 2 carry overs. (P) (Intensified AL) Second semester, you had 3 carry overs. (P) (AL) Infact! the just concluded semester, 5 you carried over you department. (P) (Intensified AL) The Lord is asking me to tell you to withdraw! otherwise, you carry over the school and carry to the village!! (P) (AL, AC) In Excerpt 8, Elenu also uses pauses which are shorter than a second (lines 1 and 5). However, he employs longer pauses in the Excerpt (lines 2-4, 6 and 8), much more than Eneche. Elenu uses more pauses than Eneche because his performance receives more affiliative response from the audience. At each point where the audience gives laughter, Elenu has to pause before he continues his script. From the foregoing, it can be concluded that the comedians employ pauses differently. What motivate the use of pausing are their performance style and the rate of affiliative response from the audience. Their performance style is dictated by how much they want the audience to be involved in the interaction, how they want to present their joking stories, the nature of their joking stories and the points at which they present the punchlines to the audience. Regardless of these factors, Nigerian stand-up comedians make use of pauses at certain junctures, usually at points when they need to take a breath and at points 81 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN where they present the punchlines. This preponderance can be used to classify their pauses. Therefore, the comedians‟ pauses are grouped into three. The first pause is the normal pause which may be up to a second or less than a second. It is primarily used by the comedians to take a breath at phrasal or clause boundaries. The other two types of pauses are transition-relevance-place pause (TRPP) or a non-transition-relevance- place pause (NTRPP), both of which are longer than a second. The NTRPP in the Nigerian stand-up performances have only textual functions. The pauses are used by the comedians just to catch a breath while narrating their jokes. They are adopted for the ease of narration. Like the normal pause, the NTRPPs are found at the end of phrases, clauses and sentences. The NTRPP has the same significance with the normal pause but differs from it in that it takes a longer time than the normal pause. The TRPPs, on the other hand, are pauses that contribute to the goal of stand- up performance, which is the initiation of humour. In addition to their textual functions, the comedians use the TRPPs strategically at some points in their narration: when the punchlines in the jokes are given, and, when they want to switch from one joke to another. In the first usage, the comedians use the pauses to evaluate the effect of their jokes and see if the jokes elicit affiliative responses. When pauses are used this way, they act as back channel mechanisms. In the second instance, the pauses are used at points when the comedians want to switch from one joke to another. Technically, the comedians use the pauses to afford the audience the needed period to carry out a cognitive switch from one joke to another. The comedians are not consistent with the timing of the pauses, therefore, the timing depends largely on each comedian‟s style for each joke narration. The TRPPs serve as a conversational strategy to involve their audiences as they are adopted to allow the audience to respond to the jokes. They function as technique for building adjacency pairs and back channelling strategy in Nigerian stand-up comedy performance. With the TRPPs, the comedians are able to evaluate the effects of their narrations. Through the TRPPs, the comedians observe if their jokes are well received. Both the TRPP and NTRPP mark the textual structure of the narration. The TRPP takes place when the punchline is given or when the comedian is about to switch from one joke to another. It thus marks the boundaries of the relevant parts of the narration. The NTRPP occurs at the end of grammatical units like phrases, clause and sentences. 82 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN 4.2.2 Prosodic cues Nigerian stand-up comedians also employ prosodic elements in the narration of their jokes. The prosodic patterns found in the Nigerian stand-up performances are explained and illustrated in the following sections. 4.2.2.1 The use of pitch Pitch is primarily viewed as auditory sensation or a perceptual characteristic of speech (Roach, 2009; Baker and Ellece, 2011). Both Brown and Yule (1983) and Tannen (2005) note that pitch is employed to signal discourse structure, emphasis, contrast and attitude. In Nigerian stand-up comedy, some comedians use pitch changes to bring the conversations in their narrations “alive”, in that, they use a change in pitch to signal a change in voice. Some comedians usually change their pitch during narration and the change of pitch corresponds with the point where they assign utterances to different participants-in-the-joke. Pitch, in this way, functions as one of the devices for indicating a change in voice in the narrations of the comedians. The change in pitch in this manner presents to the audience that it is not just only the comedians that are speaking to them, but also the participants-in-the-jokes are actually interacting. In this use, changes in pitch are meta-functional. This meta-functional use of pitch is exemplified in Excerpts 9 and 10 [Excerpt 9, Bovi] I dey Abuja, my wife dey Lagos I dey gist! with babe! just dey smile! My wife just calls me, I pick just pick [gesticulates receiving a call with right hand] “Baby whats up?” < “Who you dey smile give for there?”(P) (AL) 5 >I come turn, she say < “no dey look round I no dey there” (P) (AL) (AC) >when you are married, you go connect with your partner (CL) Come dey check my phone whether camera dey wey she take dey see everything wey dey happen [Translation: I was in Abuja, my wife was in Lagos/ I was smiling and talking with a lady/ then my wife called me, I answered the call/ babe how are you/ who are you smiling at/ then I began to turn, she said you need not look around, I am not where you are/when you are married, you will be attached to your partner/ then I began to 83 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN check my phone to see if there is a camera in it with which my wife was using to see everything that was happening where I was] [Excerpt 10, Bovi] I friend girls for this Lagos When I enter, I no get anything so I no dey fear! I just dey toast girls anyhow! Na im I go toast one girl wey for my mind she get money She just! gree! ah! and small thing wey I don dey hustle dey gather! 5 When dis girl enter relationship she wan! wreck! me She stubborn! I stubborn! (AL) so na war < “Bovi!, you will buy! me! something! (closes eyes, gawks and gesticulates with hand) < I say “I‟ll buy you no:thing:! (AL, AC) [Translation: I dated ladies in this Lagos/ when I arrived in Lagos, I had nothing so I was not afraid/ I was just asking ladies out/ then I asked a lady who, to me, seems to be rich to go out with me / she gave me a yes and then the little things I had been working hard to get/ when this lady entered the relationship with me, she wanted to ruin me/ she was stubborn, I was stubborn, so we always quarrel] In Excerpt 9, the comedian employs a change in pitch in lines 5, 6 and 7. The changes in pitch coincide with reported speeches in the narration. In line 5, he increases his pitch level so as to show that the utterance which is said with a higher pitch belongs to a participant-in-the-joke, his wife. In addition, choosing a higher pitch for the interrogative utterance, “who you dey smile give for there”, helps the comedian to express the attitude of his wife. The increase in pitch in Line 5 is metaphorical in that it indicates that the participant-in-the-joke to whom the statement is assigned is annoyed. In line 6, Bovi, drops the pitch which was employed in line 5 to a lower one. The pitch of line 5 corresponds with the pitch he has been using for his narration. Thus, the lower pitch signifies the comic voice which is being used for narration. The increased pitch in line 6 also indicates that the utterance belongs to his wife and it also expresses the attitude of the wife; while the lower pitch adopted for line 7 signifies that the comedian has returned to the comic voice of his narration. In Excerpt 10, in line 8, there is an increase in pitch. The increase corresponds with a change of voice, and the attitude of a participant-in-the-joke, his girlfriend. In line 9, rather than returning to the pitch that is being used for the narration, the comedian uses a higher one to indicate that as a participant-in-the-joke, he disagrees with his wife. Thus, indicating his attitude to the imperative of his wife, on one hand as a participant-in- 84 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN the-joke, and his attitude to the demands of a participant-in-the-joke as a stand-up comedian. 4.2.2.2 The use of accent The term accent is used to refer to prominence given to a word by the use of pitch (Roach 2009). It is distinguished from stress, which refers to all sorts of prominence including prominence resulting from increased loudness, length, sound quality, or the efforts made by a speaker to produce a stressed syllable (Roach, 2009). Brown and Yule (1983) suggest that accent is used in sentences to give new information. Whenever, a word is accented, the speaker places emphasis on such a word and draws the focus of the listener to such a word as new or important. Such a word may form the topic of the discourse. In Nigerian stand-up comedy performance, comedians make use of accent. In their use of accent, they place emphasis on the accented words and such emphasis helps the audience to identify the focus of the comedians in each narration. Excerpts 11 and 12 below illustrate instances where accent is used. [Excerpt 11, Gordons] Now! anywhere you see poverty!! Jump am pass! (AL) We were so poor!, even poor people they call us poor! (P)(AL) [Translation: Now, whenever you perceive poverty/ run away from it/ we were so poor that poor people were calling us poor] In Excerpt 11, the comedian uses accents; he places emphasis on the following words “now”, “poverty”, “pass” and “poor”. By placing emphasis on “now”, he indicates that he is about to introduce a new joke in his narration. The accents on “poverty” and “poor” indicate that the joke to be said is connected to the notion of poverty. The extract is a prelude to the comedian‟s joke on how his impoverished background denied him favour from his prospective father-in-law. [Excerpt 12, I Go Dye] And the beginning of suffer na anybody! wey dey sleep te! wake-up 10 o‟clock na sign of poverty [heckle- yes thank you] how boy, mature! boy! Go just sleep for midnight! wake-up! around! 9 o‟clock! poverty!! 85 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN Smart! people always wakeup around 6 o‟clock hardworking! guys! [Translation: And poverty begins when someone begins to wake up late/ waking up at 10 o‟clock is a sign of poverty/ how will a man, mature man will sleep at midnight/ then wake up around 9 o‟clock, poverty/ smart people always wake up around 6 o‟clock/ hardworking men] Similarly in Excerpt 12, the comedian uses the accent on the words which suggest the focus of his narration. The comedian had earlier talked about why it is good to be rich and how being rich befits an individual. In the extract, he focuses on the reason why a man may become poor. He uses the accents to lay emphasis on words like “te” (long and late), “mature”, “boy”, “wakeup”, and “poverty”, to draw the audience‟s attention to them and show that they constitute the key words that suggest the subject of his narration. Also, the accent helps him to achieve the comparison he makes between people who wake up at 9 a.m. and people who wake up at 6 a.m. In the two extracts, the comedians make use of accent on some words. The accents help to identify these words as the loci and foci of their narrations. Another contextual significance of accent is that it indicates the comedians‟ attitude to the concepts that the accented words represent. In Excerpts 11 and 12, the accents show that the comedians denounce poverty and anyone who is associated with attitudes which can lead to poverty. 4.2.2.3 The use of intonation Jowitt (1991) posits that intonation is the fluctuation in pitch over utterances of connected speech and that it combines with accent to suggest the meaning of utterances. Intonation is one of the prosodic cues that speakers use to indicate new information as against given information in a discourse (Brown and Yule, 1983). Also intonation depicts the attitude and emotion of the speaker, as much as it assists him/her to give prominence to a syllable or word (Roach 2000). Although the comedians in the selected performances present their routines in Nigerian Pidgin, there are instances when they adopt intonation to indicate attitudinal meaning and enhance the musicality of their performances. For example, a comedian may use a prominent rising or falling intonation as a means of placing emphasis on an expression in his/her monologues. In the stand-up performances studied, some 86 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN comedians make use of a sequence of two opposing patterns, such that the intonation variation of two utterances in a sequence forms an adjoining pair. The adjoining pair is made up of two opposing patterns; if the first pattern is rising, the second will be falling and if the first pattern is falling, the second will be rising. The adjoining pair is exemplified in Excerpts 13 and 14: [Excerpt 13, Princewill] So we two plan! say anyhow we write the WAEC If we no pass we go spy as we brain no gree make we pass The spy suppose gree make we pass [Then the two of us planned that we just have to write WAEC/ If we don‟t know the answers, we will cheat since our brains are too dull for passing exams/ cheating will at least help us pass] [Excerpt 14, Gordons] Every! body! for this country now dey talk about change! Change! Change! We need change! We need change! I say wetin! [Trans: everybody in this country is now talking about change/ change, change/ we need change we need change/ I wonder why] In Excerpt 13, Princewill makes use of the adjoining pair which is made up of the rising pattern and then the falling pattern. Similarly, in Excerpt 14 Gordons makes use of the adjoining pair which is made up of the rising and then the falling tone. He also makes use of the falling tone sequentially. Textually, the use of these intonational patterns is to enhance the musicality of their narrations, in that it creates a flow of discourse by mapping information (new and given) construed as tone groups in the comedians‟ monologues, such that the audience will be able to easily identify a continuity in the comedians‟ presentations. It also helps to engage and sustain the audience‟s attention in the narrations. Should the comedians adopt only a single pattern whenever intonation is used, the narrations would become monotonous and very predictable. Apart from functioning together in the sequence, each of the intonational patterns has its own textual function. The rising tone conveys to the audience that the comedian is not done with what he wants to say while the falling tone conveys an idea of finality. 87 UNIVERSITY OF IBADAN In addition, the Nigerian stand-up comedians in the sampled performances also use intonation to express attitudes and emotions. In this sense, they adopt intonation to achieve their institutional goals. Specifically, when they use intonation attitudinally, they use it sarcastically to mock the target of their narration or to express their reservations about the behaviour of the targets in their narration. An example of this is seen in the last line of Excerpt 14 where Gordons adopts both the rising and falling tunes. Unlike the previous tunes in the Excerpt, the tunes on the last line indicate that he rejects the persistent demand for change which he has reported. Excerpt 15 illustrates an instance where a comedian uses intonation sarcastically. [Excerpt 15, Eneche] Na in I see one woman just dey come < Eh, Eneche so you are in Makurdi, sorry, you are in Calabar? I say we came for night of thousand laugh