Performative masculinities in Basketmouth’s stand-up comedy

Abstract

Stand-up comedy is the performance of culture and identities. The aim of this paper is to explore the performance of gender identity in Nigerian stand-up comedy. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the discourse construction of manliness in the comedy material of Basketmouth, a leading Nigerian stand-up comedian. To reach this goal, a purposive sampling technique has been adopted to narrow down the analysis to a routine in which Basketmouth focuses on gender. My analysis reveals that discourse strategies like quip, self-denigration, repetition, use of the illocutionary act, and veiling constitute the linguistic resources through which Basketmouth appropriates cultural assumptions about being male. The comedian uses his representations of masculinities to portray the realism of gender mapping in a typical African society, rather than the alternative and imaginative idealizations that critics of his comedy would have him perform.