5 - “God Too Laughs and We Can Laugh Too”: The Ambivalent Power of Comedy Performances in the Church

Summary

This chapter, “God Too Laughs and We Can Laugh Too”: The Ambivalent Power of Comedy Performances in the Church, investigates the trend in Nigerian Pentecostal churches where comedians intersperse various church programs with comedy performances. In this chapter, I look at performance of power beyond acquisition and contestation to how power identity of an authority figure can be affirmed publicly and contested privately. Comedy performance has consistently been treated as a site of resistance by the marginalized subject, but my study of comedy in Pentecostal churches shows some complications in this functionalization of the art form. Using both ethnographic methods in my fieldwork with various interviews with “gospel comedians” (as some refer to themselves), I consider exchanges that constitute power identity whose radicality is not found in the public sites but in the backrooms where negotiations take place between the artist and the producers.