Humour as Pragmatic Discourse in African Popular Culture: A Humanistic Approach to Selected Skits of Lasisi Elenu

This study explored humour as a pragmatic resource in African popular culture, situating it within the framework of the new humanities, using the comedy skits of Lasisi Elenu. With pragmatic tools such as contextual inference, implicature and facework, the study examined how humour functions not merely as entertainment but as a strategic communicative tool that navigates social realities, critiques power and fosters collective identity; also paying attention to how humour indexes shared cultural knowledge and performs illocutionary acts that often blur the lines between resistance and complicity. The study found that humour is an essential site for humanistic engagement with issues such as corruption, governance, gender roles and identity. The study revealed the socio-cognitive processes by which audiences interpret, negotiate and co-construct meanings in texts. Situating humour within the dynamic terrain of popular culture, this study positioned the New Humanities as a crucial framework for understanding how everyday communicative practices contribute to humanistic development in Africa. The paper concluded that humour is a subtle agent of socio-political transformation in ssociety.