Calabar Humaphors: An Analysis of Selected Jokes in Nigerian Stand Up Comedy

Abstract

Nigeria's stand-up comedy bears some uniqueness that sets it apart as distinctively Nigerian. It mirrors certain societal resemblance and awake in the audience reactions towards such: acceptance or rejection, tolerance or outright repudiation. One of the ways through which this is done, is by the use of Calabar humaphors. This paper sets out to study these humaphors using the metaphor theory. This theory, apart from expressing human experience, also projects some realities and convincing resemblance between different concepts of life. Sample-expressions have been selected from recordings of nine selected comedy events, examined and analyzed for their semantic peculiarity. Findings show that through the instrumentality of this kind of metaphors, certain linguistic, social and cultural concerns of the people have been misconstrued and satirically fore-grounded, thereby eliciting audience reaction and discourse. The work concludes that the comic presentation of the Calabar man is either misplaced or theatrical and does not have a true representation of the Calabar people.

Key words: Humaphor, metaphor theory, stand-up comedy.