A Sociopragmatic Analysis of Selected Episodes of Bovi’s Comedy

Student: Gold Joseph Dick (Project, 2025)
Department of English and Literary Studies
University of Calabar, Calabar, Cross River State

Abstract

Stand-up Comedy, a form of entertainment employs language and social interaction to
create humour. Bovi’s comedy utilizes sociolinguistic norms, pragma-linguistic
features, and cultural references to entertain and comment on societal issues. Extant
linguistic studies on Bovi’s comedy concentrated mainly on semantic analysis of
expressions in Bovi’s comedic performances. However, little attention was paid to the
socio-pragmatic dynamics of Bovi’s comedy. This study was, therefore, designed to
examine the socio-pragmatic dynamics of humour in selected episodes of Bovi’s
comedy, with a view to determining the discourse issues, linguistic resources and
humour strategies in the routines.
The notion of socio-pragmatics was adopted as the framework for this study. The
descriptive design was used. Purposive sampling was deployed for the selection of
four episodes of Bovi’s comedy based on their preponderant engagement of socio-
political issues. The data were subjected to socio-pragmatic analysis.
Five discourse issues were identified; religious, political, social, security and ethno-cultural discourse. These discourse issues were to mirror the key socio-political problems in Nigeria.

Keywords
comedy issues discourse analysis episodes humour socio-pragmatic selected social linguistic
Filters
Institutions