Conversational Implicature in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy: A Pragmatic Analysis

Nigerian stand-up comedy is a vibrant popular cultural form that deploys complex pragmatic mechanisms to generate humour from the contradictions, absurdities, and social tensions of everyday Nigerian life. This study analyses conversational implicature as a primary humour-generating mechanism in Nigerian stand-up comedy, examining how comedians exploit the Gricean maxims to produce meaning beyond what is literally said. A corpus of video performances by ten prominent Nigerian stand-up comedians recorded between 2022 and 2024 was assembled, with scripted routines transcribed and annotated for implicature instances and the maxims implicated in each case. Qualitative pragmatic analysis draws on Gricean and Neo-Gricean frameworks alongside recent work on the pragmatics of humour. Results show that flouting of the maxim of quantity, saying less than is required to create inferential work for the audience, is the most frequently deployed implicature mechanism, accounting for thirty-nine percent of coded humour instances. Flouting of the maxim of relevance through apparent non-sequiturs that require cultural background knowledge to resolve is the second most common mechanism and is strongly correlated with ethnically targeted humour routines. The study identifies a specifically Nigerian implicature pattern in which proverb and idiom citation creates multi-layered implicature accessible at different depths to different audience segments. The findings have implications for the pragmatics of humour and for understanding how Nigerian comedians construct culturally shared audiences. Keywords: conversational implicature, Gricean maxims, Nigerian comedy, pragmatic analysis, humour.