Izuu Nwankwọ
Biographic Data
| ID | 150011 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Izuu Nwankwọ |
| GIVEN NAMES | Izuu |
| FAMILY NAME | Nwankwọ |
| SIGNATURE | NWANKWỌ I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3312-8636 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Playing to the out-group: Discovering stand-up comedy’s ‘other’ audiences
Remix and Revision: Encounters between Africa and Europe in Contemporary African Popular Culture
Playing with Difference: Oyibo Lip-Sync Performances of Nigerian Popular Culture on TikTok
On the limits and prospects of African humour
Dismantling Colonial Laughter: Tracing Emergent African Diaspora Stand-Up Comedy in French and German
This study redirects attention from English-speaking African diaspora stand-up productions to French and German language expressions of purposively selected comedians with recent immigration history from Africa performing within mainland Europe. Through a socio-historical interrogation of specific colonial histories and joke themes, the paper comparatively explores the French language stage acts of Fary Lopez, Samia Orosemane (France) and Cécile …
Punch up, punch down o! All I know is there is punch’: Jokes about Africa(ns) in cross-cultural contexts
Jokes concurrently produce humour and offence owing to differences in cultural considerations of funniness and taboo. With growing audience diversity and online dissemination of live events, stand-up comics are exposed to increased scrutiny for irreverent anecdotes. Yet, ‘punching up’ has become an acceptable form of benign transgression. This is more so in cross-cultural contexts where differences heighten offence, because jokes do not just make…
The Indigenous Origin of Intermediality in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy
Intermediality, a conflation of different artistic media into one event, is typically considered to have developed in the West. In this paper, we argue that intermediality existed in pre-colonial performance traditions across Africa, where various modes of artistic enactments merged into one were preferred to enactments partitioned into different generic categories. This study identifies multiple artistic genres inherent in Nigerian stand-up art,…
Politics, Jokes and Power in Africa: The View From Stand-Up Comedy
The history of stand-up comedy in Africa has often been tied to developments in popular culture, language, and performance. In this article, I take a different perspective by identifying the interactivities of politics and comedy, and how the actions, endorsements, and even censure of national leaders across different nations buoyed up stand-up performances on the continent. With specific examples from different countries, the explications in thi…
Ambivalence in the stand-up acts of Nigeria’s Klint da Drunk and Mr Paul
In a progressively permissive world, stand-up art is experiencing repressions and censure for its dependence on potentially politically incorrect jokes. Stand-up’s primary purpose is to instigate laughter, but its greatest ambivalence is that its mirth comes primarily from abuse/insult. Through performance analyses of the humor acts of Mr Paul and Klint da Drunk, this paper discusses their use of non-traditional stand-up forms, underscoring how t…
Self-censorship and Shifting Cognitions of Offence in the Stand-up Acts of Basket Mouth and Trevor Noah
With social media taking stand-up routines beyond their hitherto localised environments, there is growing irritation and backlash against comedians who supposedly tell unpleasant (or offensive) jokes. The ensuing decontextualisation creates a crisis wherein new media enables the kind of viewership that is less participatory, and thus more critical. As a result, jokes which ordinarily are framed within liminal moments of permissibility are increas…
Joke performance mechanics in Nigerian stand-up comedy
Stand-up comedy in Nigeria today has become not only big business but popular entertainment. It is, indubitably, one of the most obvious of the entertainment industry boom the country has recorded since the 1990s. The overwhelming patronage it has received transcends the deep ethnoreligious divisions within Nigeria and has ensured the prosperity of its practitioners. In this paper, through a histo-cultural perspective, I interrogate the performan…
Incongruous liaisons: Routes of humour, insult and political (in)correctness in Nigerian stand-up jokes
Nigerian humourists have always told risible jokes within myriad pre-colonial satirical acts and now, stand-up comedy. Scholars rarely study the menacing backlash against ostensible “inappropriate jokes” which largely ignores the fact that humour is derived mostly from offence. This paper sets out to study this threat by interrogating how four comics—I Go Dye, Basket Mouth, Klint da Drunk and AY—deploy self-censorship in averting offence. The spe…
Re-engaging master narratives: Re-encountering Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax
Just like Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax is a parallel narrative of Prospero’s encounter with characters of other skin colour and gender. Both plays, like many others, represent successful efforts in countering the hitherto master narrative, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. They speak back to and destabilize it through different versions that, at once, query and mitigate Shakespeare’s. Using the idea of counter-narrative and writing…
An Alternative Cinema for the People
Self-censorship and Shifting Cognitions of Offence in the Stand-up Acts of Basket Mouth and Trevor Noah
With social media taking stand-up routines beyond their hitherto localised environments, there is growing irritation and backlash against comedians who supposedly tell unpleasant (or offensive) jokes. The ensuing decontextualisation creates a crisis wherein new media enables the kind of viewership that is less participatory, and thus more critical. As a result, jokes which ordinarily are framed within liminal moments of permissibility are increas…
Punch up, punch down o! All I know is there is punch’: Jokes about Africa(ns) in cross-cultural contexts
Jokes concurrently produce humour and offence owing to differences in cultural considerations of funniness and taboo. With growing audience diversity and online dissemination of live events, stand-up comics are exposed to increased scrutiny for irreverent anecdotes. Yet, ‘punching up’ has become an acceptable form of benign transgression. This is more so in cross-cultural contexts where differences heighten offence, because jokes do not just make…
Playing with Difference: Oyibo Lip-Sync Performances of Nigerian Popular Culture on TikTok
Incongruous liaisons: Routes of humour, insult and political (in)correctness in Nigerian stand-up jokes
Nigerian humourists have always told risible jokes within myriad pre-colonial satirical acts and now, stand-up comedy. Scholars rarely study the menacing backlash against ostensible “inappropriate jokes” which largely ignores the fact that humour is derived mostly from offence. This paper sets out to study this threat by interrogating how four comics—I Go Dye, Basket Mouth, Klint da Drunk and AY—deploy self-censorship in averting offence. The spe…
Dismantling Colonial Laughter: Tracing Emergent African Diaspora Stand-Up Comedy in French and German
This study redirects attention from English-speaking African diaspora stand-up productions to French and German language expressions of purposively selected comedians with recent immigration history from Africa performing within mainland Europe. Through a socio-historical interrogation of specific colonial histories and joke themes, the paper comparatively explores the French language stage acts of Fary Lopez, Samia Orosemane (France) and Cécile …
Politics, Jokes and Power in Africa: The View From Stand-Up Comedy
The history of stand-up comedy in Africa has often been tied to developments in popular culture, language, and performance. In this article, I take a different perspective by identifying the interactivities of politics and comedy, and how the actions, endorsements, and even censure of national leaders across different nations buoyed up stand-up performances on the continent. With specific examples from different countries, the explications in thi…
Re-engaging master narratives: Re-encountering Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax
Just like Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax is a parallel narrative of Prospero’s encounter with characters of other skin colour and gender. Both plays, like many others, represent successful efforts in countering the hitherto master narrative, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. They speak back to and destabilize it through different versions that, at once, query and mitigate Shakespeare’s. Using the idea of counter-narrative and writing…
An Alternative Cinema for the People
Re-engaging master narratives: Re-encountering Shakespeare’s The Tempest in Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax
Just like Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, Esiaba Irobi’s Sycorax is a parallel narrative of Prospero’s encounter with characters of other skin colour and gender. Both plays, like many others, represent successful efforts in countering the hitherto master narrative, Shakespeare’s The Tempest. They speak back to and destabilize it through different versions that, at once, query and mitigate Shakespeare’s. Using the idea of counter-narrative and writing…
Incongruous liaisons: Routes of humour, insult and political (in)correctness in Nigerian stand-up jokes
Nigerian humourists have always told risible jokes within myriad pre-colonial satirical acts and now, stand-up comedy. Scholars rarely study the menacing backlash against ostensible “inappropriate jokes” which largely ignores the fact that humour is derived mostly from offence. This paper sets out to study this threat by interrogating how four comics—I Go Dye, Basket Mouth, Klint da Drunk and AY—deploy self-censorship in averting offence. The spe…
Joke performance mechanics in Nigerian stand-up comedy
Stand-up comedy in Nigeria today has become not only big business but popular entertainment. It is, indubitably, one of the most obvious of the entertainment industry boom the country has recorded since the 1990s. The overwhelming patronage it has received transcends the deep ethnoreligious divisions within Nigeria and has ensured the prosperity of its practitioners. In this paper, through a histo-cultural perspective, I interrogate the performan…
Ambivalence in the stand-up acts of Nigeria’s Klint da Drunk and Mr Paul
In a progressively permissive world, stand-up art is experiencing repressions and censure for its dependence on potentially politically incorrect jokes. Stand-up’s primary purpose is to instigate laughter, but its greatest ambivalence is that its mirth comes primarily from abuse/insult. Through performance analyses of the humor acts of Mr Paul and Klint da Drunk, this paper discusses their use of non-traditional stand-up forms, underscoring how t…
Self-censorship and Shifting Cognitions of Offence in the Stand-up Acts of Basket Mouth and Trevor Noah
With social media taking stand-up routines beyond their hitherto localised environments, there is growing irritation and backlash against comedians who supposedly tell unpleasant (or offensive) jokes. The ensuing decontextualisation creates a crisis wherein new media enables the kind of viewership that is less participatory, and thus more critical. As a result, jokes which ordinarily are framed within liminal moments of permissibility are increas…
Punch up, punch down o! All I know is there is punch’: Jokes about Africa(ns) in cross-cultural contexts
Jokes concurrently produce humour and offence owing to differences in cultural considerations of funniness and taboo. With growing audience diversity and online dissemination of live events, stand-up comics are exposed to increased scrutiny for irreverent anecdotes. Yet, ‘punching up’ has become an acceptable form of benign transgression. This is more so in cross-cultural contexts where differences heighten offence, because jokes do not just make…
The Indigenous Origin of Intermediality in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy
Intermediality, a conflation of different artistic media into one event, is typically considered to have developed in the West. In this paper, we argue that intermediality existed in pre-colonial performance traditions across Africa, where various modes of artistic enactments merged into one were preferred to enactments partitioned into different generic categories. This study identifies multiple artistic genres inherent in Nigerian stand-up art,…
Politics, Jokes and Power in Africa: The View From Stand-Up Comedy
The history of stand-up comedy in Africa has often been tied to developments in popular culture, language, and performance. In this article, I take a different perspective by identifying the interactivities of politics and comedy, and how the actions, endorsements, and even censure of national leaders across different nations buoyed up stand-up performances on the continent. With specific examples from different countries, the explications in thi…
On the limits and prospects of African humour
Dismantling Colonial Laughter: Tracing Emergent African Diaspora Stand-Up Comedy in French and German
This study redirects attention from English-speaking African diaspora stand-up productions to French and German language expressions of purposively selected comedians with recent immigration history from Africa performing within mainland Europe. Through a socio-historical interrogation of specific colonial histories and joke themes, the paper comparatively explores the French language stage acts of Fary Lopez, Samia Orosemane (France) and Cécile …
Playing to the out-group: Discovering stand-up comedy’s ‘other’ audiences
Remix and Revision: Encounters between Africa and Europe in Contemporary African Popular Culture
Playing with Difference: Oyibo Lip-Sync Performances of Nigerian Popular Culture on TikTok
Sociology (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Humor Studies and Applications (10 works) · Literature (10 works) · History (8 works) · History (8 works) · Media studies (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Comedy (5 works)