Why are Nigerian male skit makers obsessed with dressing up as women for comedy?

But for male skit makers whose trade is female personalities, a new opportunity to offer humour was presented.

One of the videos by these skit makers has been viewed more than a million times on X (formerly Twitter). The actor, Chinedu Ikedieze, has joined the challenge in exaggerated makeup, a skimpy skirt and a very awful wig.

As TikTok has become the de facto public town square for the Gen-Zers, there has been an explosion of male skit makers cosplaying as women, presenting a kind of false, exaggerated representation of otherwise normal activities many women engage in.

“Men cosplaying as women has been going on for centuries. With ancient Greeks, it was rooted in patriarchy,” the feminist thinker, Ololade Faniyi, who this year wrote the essay, An African Feminist Manifesto, said.

For her, the expression veers from otherwise acceptable tradition when it becomes stereotypical and loses its political or spiritual significance. “Sango priests transgress gender when they dress in typical women’s dresses to worship their orisa. What becomes problematic is the adoption of drag by male comedians, who when out of drag are not making any political statement, and only create stereotypes about women for likes and laughs,” she said.

In their video, Nasboi and Lasisi want to be women, the comics who go by the monikers, Nasiru Bolaji and Nosa Afolabi, seek to be women for a day. So they don dresses and wigs and enter a Women’s World where they experience cramps and have to forgo heavy food in the evenings. But the situation gets dire as the skit comes to its climax after Nasboi asks for a new car from a male love interest, a rapist who subjects him to sexual assault. The skit abruptly ends, leaving the audience asking what the joke’s punchline had been. That women who ask for cars could be raped?

“What you see here is a sort of toxic empathy, a phrase coined by Lisa Nakamura. With toxic empathy, you see violence enacted on the gender you are cosplaying, you see the comments degrading the character you are playing,” Faniyi said. “But because you do not actually live in the body you are playing, the abuse becomes easier to ignore or laugh over, because for you, it is never a big deal.”

Critics have blasted the return of this brand of comedy to the mainstream as part of a concerted effort to deny the ability of women to offer humour as humans sometimes do. “I don’t know why men have consistently turned to female clothes to drive home some humour when many Nigerian men will tell you that women are not funny, except in the ‘Women are funny,’ sort of way,” the editor of a women’s website said. “I have seen harassment of female comedians in posts. We also see it in terms of longevity in actual female skit makers.”

In an interview with Technext, one such comic, Joseph Onaolapo, who goes by Jay On-air, and has content like How Angélique Kidjo Performs and Mothers Being Extra defended his portrayals of women.

“I find women very interesting and I didn’t know it was going to be a thing. I’m not trying to exaggerate. I’m not trying to make fun of anybody,” he said.

Faniyi considers him one of the more ethical creators in the category who has offered nuance and not opted for consistent caricature. “You see their intentionality and a portrayal that is not caricature. But that is a very small percentage,” she noted.

She added that it’s the stereotypical streak that crosses the line. “Why are they only interested in the sexual, stereotypical aspect? Why are the characters they play presented as shallow, greedy?” she said. “These comedians do not and have never made an attempt to understand what it means to be a woman, speak up for any causes, and as soon as their cameras are off, they go back to being men; men who degrade women. These comedians are only replicating what is already ingrained in their social conditioning.”

The women’s website editor argued that this moment in Nigerian comedy would otherwise be a great opportunity for women to rise through the ranks and build their own careers, but the opportunities for them have been hijacked by the men. “Why don’t you just get a female comedian?” she said.

But in the periphery of this debate, there is the conversation around the strict binary expression of the gender systems across the country, “especially in a context where mocking femininity is acceptable, but actual expressions of non-conforming gender or sexuality are not,” Faniyi offered.

But she cautioned that “there is a very thin line between undercover resistance and blatant mockery. They are doing the latter, and what they consider harmless funny entertainment is doing so much harm to women and queer people.”

As the gender debate has come into sharper focus online, feminists have raised alarm about female social media users who denounce hard-won progress in women’s rights as eradicating so-called “privileges women earn in a patriarchal society.” Some of these accounts, which Faniyi argued might be run by men, are in tangent with the rise of the caricature skit.

“On Nigerian Twitter, we see men doing what I call digital catfishing, driven by both misogyny and desperation about male privilege slipping away. They create fake profiles, posing and creating personas of ‘pick-me’ women, or false scenarios of ‘fear women’ that validate their own biases. And just like the skit caricatures, it has become a pandemic of its own,” she said.

For the women’s website editor, it all ties into the ancient myth that femininity itself is the oldest joke, an afterthought. “You have a man tie gele, and pretend to be all these sorts of women at events and at work and that is the joke. What women say, what women do is the joke,” she said.