It is surprising how little writing one finds on comedy in African cinema. If we recall that African cinema has historically defined itself by its “seriousness” of political, cultural, or artistic intent, we might understand why, for that tradition, comedy is viewed as indulgent or undignified. But for Nollywood, comedy has been standard fare for some time. In fact, one of the highest grossing video films, Kingsley Ogoro’s Osuofia in London (2004), a farce about a bush hunter who travels to London, is considered a classic Nollywood blockbuster. The film is a variation on the perennial story of the village fool who travels to the city only to find himself comically bewildered by urban life. In the films under review here, London is replaced by Lagos—no less a global metropolis—but the humor is much the same. In Femi Adebayo’s Jelili, the town trickster is banished to Lagos, where ironically he finds himself the victim of big city tricksters. In Tope Daramola’s Ipaja si Idumota ninu BRT (Impaja to Idumota on the BRT), a pair of scoundrels are run out of town, and though one finds work as a ticket collector on the Lagos bus (Bus Rapid Transit), his antics remain unchanged. The protagonist of Muyideen Ayinde’s O o M’Eko (You Don’t Know Lagos) is not a trickster, but a naive fool who is framed for murder and flees to Lagos where he falls in with a gang of Area boys.

Each of these films turns on the scene of the protagonist’s arrival in Lagos, which opens onto all manner of slapstick humor. These scenes work to cast the country bumpkin as an illiterate, unable to decipher the city’s incoherent spaces, inscrutable social networks, and unspoken laws. The protagonist’s estrangement reflects the general alienation one never ceases to feel in a city like Lagos, where uncertainty has become a generalized condition of everyday life. The village fool is humorously tormented for not being “in the know,” and yet his clowning around defamiliarizes what the urban viewer already knows all too well. That is to say that comedies of this sort are as revealing as they are distracting. Of course, as a genre, comedy produces its levity by distracting viewers from the potential gravity of its subject matter. And yet it is perhaps precisely for this reason that comedies are able to probe the most controversial fault lines of Nigerian society.

In the postcolonial African city, innumerable lifeways converge and diverge in the “incessant provisionality and innovation” that Abdou Maliq Simone says is characteristic of urban Africa (1998:76). Improvisation is necessary in all dimensions of daily life where no condition is permanent. In Lagos one provides for one’s own water, electricity, and security, a fact that led the geographer Matthew Gandy to quip that Lagos, a city characterized by political and economic instability, petro-capitalist development, and a severe contraction of the public sphere is a “self-service city” (2006:388). For those living in Lagos, this translates into a shared sense of personal vulnerability and apprehension about the uncertainty of what is to come. Onookome Okome calls Lagos “the anxious city,” noting that the metropolis “is anxious about its own status in the global tide of goods and services and other kinds of exchange, and its citizens are insecure and anxious of their place within it” (2004:71). This all makes Lagos a rich site within the popular Nigerian imagination.

The comedies in question play on this popular vision of the city. Jelili opens in a small town that is quickly losing patience with the young trickster Jelili (Femi Adebayo), who time and again disturbs the peace. Jelili hampers the babalawo’s ceremonial offerings, convinces daughters to defy their fathers, disrupts the private liaisons of young lovers, and lusts after unavailable women. His mother takes steps to reform her son’s behavior but her efforts are undercut by the boy’s father, who cautions that Jelili is only acting out of youthful rambunctiousness. One night, at a crossroads, Jelili spies the babalawo, his comic nemesis, planting a sacrifice. Jelili quickly invokes a praise of the orisa Esu and devours the offering, but the sacrificial food disagrees with his stomach and he is permanently afflicted with flatulence. The family sees no other option for this grotesque trickster but to send him to Lagos with his uncle Akanni (Kareem Adepoju). Upon arriving in Lagos, Jelili’s absurd attempt to mimic Lagosian fashion—he wears a mishmash of native ankara cloth, a Nike baseball cap, and futuristic sunglasses—singles him out as a “J.J.C.” (Johnny Just Come), and he falls prey to the tricks of a pidgin-speaking Igbo man (Afeez Oyetoro). The ensuing rivalry brings the two tricksters in confrontation with the authorities, though with luck and a little pleading they always manage to escape. However, when Jelili’s sexual appetite lands him in trouble with a local don, his luck runs out. He is severely beaten and sent back to the village.

The narrative arc is much the same in Ipaja, though the village, the city, and the characters are not as carefully developed. Lamina (Odunlade Adekola) and Lamidi (Olu Olowogemo) are a couple of layabouts who amuse themselves by disturbing the peace and harassing young women. After filching police uniforms from a clothesline, they set up a mock checkpoint on the road and, wearing the ill-fitting police uniforms, begin to demand money and favors from passersby. The joke crosses the line, and when the real local police give chase, only Lamidi escapes by hitching a ride to Lagos. He fails comically at his first jobs in the city, but finally lands work as a BRT operator—this after he admits that he had crashed his last car! The scenes on the BRT bus act as a showcase for the improvisational skills of various comedians who are clearly improvising instead of working form a script. Among Yoruba filmmakers, this is a common practice adapted from Yoruba theater tradition that underscores the actors’ imagination, wit, and delivery. The actors play off one another, creating pandemonium on the BRT, and, as the theme song exclaims, “all sorts of stuff happens!” (Orisirisi lo n sele o!) with varied comedic success.

By contrast, comedy is interwoven with romance in O o M’Eko. Saliu (Odunlade Adekola) is a sweet but foolish man who is dedicated to his one love, Folake (Bisi Komolafe), though her mother has promised her to a wealthier, uglier man named Adigun (Olu Olowogemo). In spite of it all, Saliu and Folake continue to rendezvous under the orombo tree to flirt and kiss. One night, they are followed by Adigun’s lackeys, who are intent on shooting Saliu, but the assassination is botched and they shoot Folake by mistake. Saliu is presumed to be the killer and must flee to Lagos, where he is immediately confronted by the chaos of the city. The actor Odunlade Adekola is at his best in the slapstick comedy that ensues, and the scene becomes truly representative of the staged arrival that is characteristic of this genre. He disembarks at a busy bus stop looking clueless among the march of commuters and out of place in his grubby farmer’s clothes. He awkwardly accosts a stranger, whom he misrecognizes as Sarafa, a rude boy from his village. At a roadside vendor, he tries on fashionable sunglasses, gesturing wildly and remarking that “The sun has set!” (Ile ti su!). At the bus garage he is bewildered by the flow of commuters coming and going and is nearly toppled by passing market traders with huge loads on their heads. In the market he is offered an “original” (i.e., authentic) Blackberry phone at a reduced rate and, believing he has met a foolish trader, he negotiates the price down to a mere 9,000 naira. But the trader has the upper hand and exchanges the phone with a lump of fufu before handing over the box.

Each film participates in reifying a developmentalist notion of space, whereby the village stages belatedness and the city represents the perpetual present of global modernity (see Fabian Reference Fabian2002). Their narratives revel in rehearsing these stereotypes and make no conscious attempt to challenge what is presented as conventional knowledge about rural and urban Africa. Still, O o M’Eko stands out for its construction of the village as a place where romance and intimacy are possible. In Jelili and Ipaja, the pranks of the village are magnified in the city until the characters find themselves engaged in outright criminal activity. (For example, Lamidi’s arrival in Lagos initiates a parallel narrative about handsome, rich men who kidnap women on the road). None of the films produces a coherent image of the city’s spaces. It is generally true of Nollywood that the choice of location depends on the constraints of production, not the portrayal of a specific vision of Lagos. One obvious exception is the giant statue at old Shangisha toll gate, Three White Cap Chiefs, a notable landmark in Lagos where characters inanely offer food or prayers to their ancestors.

Like Nigerian melodramas, these comedies elicit strong reactions in viewers (see Larkin Reference Larkin2008; Williams Reference Williams1991), albeit in ways that differ significantly. Comic scenarios are designed to shock and outrage audiences but without the same moral inertia as melodrama. They push the limits of disgust and suspend the repercussions of crossing that line, meaning we can take pleasure in being grossed-out. Yoruba comedies about rural‒urban migration portray a hyperbolic reality that is always made more exaggerated by the character’s bodily gestures. That is to say that Yoruba comedies incorporate a good deal of slapstick humor, especially when the protagonist first arrives in Lagos. The character’s bewilderment is one that many of Lagos’s visitors and residents can relate to, and yet we cannot always relate to the comic protagonist who is often too foolish (O o M’Eko) or too grotesque (Jelili) to evoke anything more than laughter or disgust.

Audiences’ tastes inevitably vary, but Yoruba comedies seem to hold very low cultural esteem in Nollywood, perhaps precisely because these films elicit gut reactions rather than appealing to the mind, the spirit, an idea of tradition, or a sense of moral education. For Nollywood’s critics, these films eschew a social responsibility to educate and are dismissed as light fare that dumbs down viewers and makes them passive consumers. However I argue, on the contrary, that comedies are uniquely capable of addressing problems that are persistent and shared. As I have suggested, the exigencies of life in Lagos are only one example. Gender roles create another fault line and are a rich source of humor. In Jelili, several men (and Jelili) enter a beauty pageant, dress in women’s gowns, and parade on the catwalk before the most respected members of the community in a playful violation of gender roles. The men are placed under the tutelage of women, who put them through rigorous training in walking, dressing, and behaving like women. The titillation of transgressing social norms is at the root of such humor, but the scenario also draws attention to the unquestioned values inscribed in gender. (For example, the men in drag are mocked because they cannot correctly answer questions about how to be a good wife).

These comedies are animated by accident and happenstance, and the astonishment they produce. They feed our fascination with danger, especially the dangers of the metropolis, but in such a way that we know every danger will be overcome. The comic protagonist escapes at the last second, ideally in an abrupt, accidental escape that astonishes viewers and enhances the pleasure of flirting with danger. Chance works in comedy as the occult does in horror and drama. In the more serious Nollywood genres, occult forces are often behind a protagonist’s misfortunes, and a higher power usually intervenes to remove malevolent obstacles. The pattern is so prevalent as to constitute a key narrative convention of Nollywood. Critics have interpreted the preoccupation with occult forces as a symptom of social instability and the suspicious accumulation of wealth in petro-wealth economies like Nigeria’s. But comedies are notable for their lack of supernatural and occult elements. Chance supplants the supernatural as a logic of narrative structure. It is by chance that the protagonist is thrown into catastrophe, and it is often abrupt coincidence that delivers the protagonist. Folake is accidentally shot and Saliu is mistakenly held responsible, leading him to flee to Lagos. When pursued by the police, Lamidi is accidentally hit by a motorist who happens to be driving to Lagos and offers Lamidi a ride. Of course, comic characters are often tricksters who must be brought in line for social order—and narrative closure—to prevail. The downfall of such characters is an inevitable outcome, but its cause can still be felicitous or coincidental.

The films under review suggest that the lower genres of popular culture do much more than produce passive distraction for unengaged viewers. These three video films fall in with a larger corpus of English and Yoruba comedies that deal with migration—both the translocal and transnational variety—and the nervous humor that accompanies the meeting of incongruous cultures, sensibilities, gender roles, languages, and livelihoods. Comedy of this sort is often self-contradictory, proving to be as ideologically regressive as it is at times subversive. With more attention from film criticism we might come to understand better the place of this long-overlooked genre in canonical and popular African cinema.