A Theory of Linguistic Creativity in Nigerian Stand-Up Comedy: Humour, Sociality, and the Performance of Identity

This dissertation develops an original theory of linguistic creativity in Nigerian stand-up comedy, examining how comedians exploit the phonological, grammatical, and pragmatic resources of Nigerian English, Pidgin English, Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo to produce humour, perform social identity, and negotiate the ideological tensions of Nigerian cultural life. Stand-up comedy is among the most dynamic forms of contemporary Nigerian cultural expression, with performers including AY Makun, Bovi, Basketmouth, and a rising generation of younger comics reaching audiences of millions through live performance, streaming, and social media. Despite this cultural prominence, the linguistics of Nigerian stand-up has not received systematic theoretical attention. The dissertation combines a corpus of performance transcriptions from 40 Nigerian stand-up comedy shows, selected for linguistic diversity and regional spread, with a theoretical framework integrating linguistic creativity theory, performance linguistics, sociolinguistics of humour, and African cultural performativity theory. Analytical chapters examine the phonological comedy of accent mimicry and tonal manipulation in multilingual jokes, the morphosyntactic creativity of Pidgin English comic performance, the pragmatics of Nigerian English humour including the management of impoliteness and taboo, and the identity politics of ethnic and regional stereotyping in comedy discourse. Original theoretical contributions include a model of multilingual creative performance in Nigerian stand-up, a theory of the social contract of ethnic comedy in Nigerian cultural contexts, and a concept of comedic code-switching as a distinct performance register. Keywords: linguistic creativity, stand-up comedy, Nigerian Pidgin English, humour, performance identity.