ABSTRACT
Nigerian stand-up comedians’ routines feature frequent codeswitching between Nigerian Pidgin (NP) and English, and poke fun at ethnic, national, racial and gender stereotypes, and political and economic elites. Comedians’ privileging of NP (also known as Naijá) over English, on one hand, and other Nigerian languages, on the other, can be seen as contributing to the construction of a unified postcolonial Nigerian national public. At the same time, the linguistic form and rhetorical content of stand-up comedy performances index contentious social divisions and inequalities. Based on an analysis of codeswitching in select excerpts from two comedians’ routines, this article suggests that the mass-mediated Naijá Pidgin nation is characterized as much by Nigerians’ national and racial pride (and shame) as by their gender and class prejudices against one another.
