Toward The Application of Jokes and The Use of Joke Consultants in Health, Work Places, State Leaders’ Forums, And Educational Institutions in Africa

Abstract

From the period of the 1990s onward, there has been the proliferation of jokes and joke performances in verbal, public, and media settings across Africa. This is not unconnected to the fermented democratic atmosphere and the gradual but steady entrenchment of democratic values and freedom away from the earlier dictatorial military regimes of time past. Jokes have transformed the public space of modern isolated existence and have emerged to review, even solve a horde of physical and mental problems in its enablement of laughter even in the taboo topics or disaster moments. Jokes’ position to illuminate the harsh realities of contemporary existence, galvanize, and transform the vulnerable is fortified in view of the enigmatic being of liberal democracy in Africa, the existential narratives of civil strife, the state actors’ poetics of abstraction, the presence of violence, crime, and the politics of exclusion that characterize modernity. This work, using Elliot Oring’s model of “appropriate incongruity,” interrogates the expanding relevance of jokes in multidisciplinary fields in Africa with a view to reducing physical and mental lassitude and creating an atmosphere for better wellness and more active approach to work and life generally. The work recommends the establishment of associations for applied jokes, and the formation of joke seminars, joke rooms/offices, comedy carts, and lectures in medical schools and elsewhere by governments, corporate organizations, educational and health institutions.