It is not news to anybody that the comedy landscape in Nigeria has tremendously changed. Back in the day, comedy shows used to be a big thing. Standup comedians like Basketmouth, Bovi, I Go Dye, and more used to rule in the space and every December period especially, stand-up comedy was the hot ticket. These days, that is not really the case. Skit makers are the new thing in terms of comedy. People don’t buy tickets to comedy shows the way they did in the past. What people enjoy more and who has the most fans it seems these days are skitmakers.
Now, veteran comedian Basketmouth during a new interview with The Will Downtown opened up about the differences he sees between comedians and skitmakers. He gave his very honest thoughts on the matter, here is what Basketmouth said.
During the interview, Basketmouth was asked “One thing that has changed is how comedy is done in Nigeria. So there is standup comedy, and there are skit makers. Did you ever envision that the web play disparity would exist between stand-up comedy and skit makers?” Basketmouth said:
Yeah, actually. As I said, I have foresight. So about seven years ago, I told my guys comedy was about to die. When I said that, I didn’t know how it would happen or what would trigger it, but I knew we would experience changes. At the time, I thought that it would be because of the massive inflow of comedians in the industry because we started having some crazy guys coming in to replicate someone else’s material and charge cheap rates.
So it made the new comedians lazy. Comedy is about originality, but many people weren’t original anymore, clients were getting tired of hearing the same joke repeatedly, and many people replicating what we had done. At that point, I was like, this is not going anywhere. Then the next thing, skit makers started coming up, and the pandemic came. I think I was the first person that started the whole skit thing. I want to believe myself, and Bovi started making skits about 12 or 13 years ago to promote my London shows. Eventually, people began using skits for content, which is now a thing.
“Have skit makers replaced comedians?”
Skit makers cannot replace comedians; it’s impossible. I say this with all due respect to every talent out there. They are not stand-up comedians, and most can hardly host a show professionally. So the fact that comedy is not bubbling like it used to doesn’t mean it is dead.
The comparison between stand-up comedy and skits is all about consumption. Skit makers mostly do slapstick comedy, and that is because people want to see exaggerated butts and whatnot. They have a lot of views on Facebook. But [the truth is] stand-up comedy is not always quick; you need to listen. Who wants to waste their data and listen to you go all cerebral on them? They want quick laughs. Kudos to the ones that are doing it. I won’t call them stand-up comedians, but they are really feeding the consumers what they want, and that’s why they impress me. It’s good because there is a market for everybody at every point in time. There was a time that Standup comedians were the thing, but now they are more tuned to skit makers. Now you see the skit makers hosting a couple of gigs, and I’m happy that I’m not actively in that space because of my foresight [laughs].
