Paper short abstract:

Socio-cultural affiliations and nuances of artistic people define their identity, ethos, and ultimately, their worldviews. This paper seeks to investigate the dialectics of the cultural ideological leanings and representations of African comedians domiciled in the western world.

Paper long abstract:

Comedians are social actors that engage in playacting that is influenced by their worldviews which are reflectors of individualism or communalism, but with evident shift towards the contexts they identify with. Thus, the context the comedian favourably leans towards is the 'we' and the one that shows distance stance to her is the 'you'. Generally, African Comedians project ideologies by the juxtaposition of realities in the western world with the 'perceived' realities in Africa. This study seeks to study the dialectal stance of ideological representations in the jokes of African comedians residing in the United States of America, such as Noah Trevor, Michael Blackson, and Godfery. That is, the research is limited to the intercultural investigations of the comic performances of African comedians that mostly practice in western world as they express ideological representations about their African ties in their realities and experiences where they are domiciled. Triangulation method is adopted for the analysis of the data that are purposively selected. Matouschek, Wodak & Januschek's (1995) schema, and an eclectic submission on subversive dialectics are adapted for the analysis of the data. The analysis is expected to describe forms of cultural and political dialectics shown in the ideologies of the two contexts of the comedians as evident in their language use, especially from discourse-historical perspective.