Recycling of jokes major challenge of the comedy industry, says “Baba de Baba’’

The major challenge facing the comedy sector is that several comedians are fond of repeating and recycling jokes created by others at functions rather than being creative and original.

Chidi Uzoma, popularly known as “Baba De Baba’”, told our reporter on Monday that many contemporary comedians had become lazy.

They only feast on the sweat of others instead of putting on their own thinking caps on how to excel in the profession, Baba de Baba said.

This copyright infringement had become the norm among the loafing comedians and had made several fans lose track of the real creators of many jokes, he said.

The comedian said that such ‘stolen’ jokes becomes trite and stale due to over flogging by the lazy ones among them.

“Fans also lose trends of the originators of particular jokes after many comedians must have turned them into their swan songs,’’ he said.

Baba de Baba said that it was always painful to him whenever he observed that many comedians were not creative but only interested in copying others jokes.

“The entertainment business is too expensive to maintain; so stakeholders should always go for exclusivity that will differentiate and distinguish them from the crowd.

“So if you sit down to create a joke for your audience and another commend relates same at another platform it becomes boring and stale.

“Our fans will not appreciate those things; we should be able to tell who owns a joke,’’ he said.

The comedian noted that because of lack of creativity by comedians in the industry, most members of the public used to regard them as “never do well” people in the past.

“And parents were not encouraging their children to venture into the industry; but now; the reverse is the case.

“Since the educated ones have started coming into the fold, things have begun to change for the better but there is still room for improvement,’’ he said.

The comedian advised the inventors of jokes to always protect them from being stolen by the lazy ones.

According to Uzoma, his jokes are inspired by God and happenings in the society, saying, “I joined the industry because I hate seeing people angry.

“I do reasonable and informed jokes and I have over 50 videos and two audio CDs that run on television stations and the social media’’.

He said that the video CDs were a collection of his performances on “Standup Nigeria’’ comedy.

“It was titled “Baba De Baba in Standup Nigeria’’ while the audio is a Comedy Quake with Baba De Baba’’, and it has parts 1 and 2,’’ he said.

Uzoma said that the sector had been helping him to make ends meet.

“I am making small money pending when I will blow’’.

It was reported that Uzoma was a computer science graduate from the Ile-Ife Polytechnic before venturing into comedy.

He has over 20 awards from Nigeria and abroad to his credit.