Plagiarism major problem in Nigeria’s comedy industry – Omobaba

Seasoned Nigerian comedian, Fagade Olufemi Ademola, popularly known as Omobaba,  has noted that the main problem in the comedy industry is plagiarism.

He made the statement during an interactive Twitter Spaces session with Daily Trust themed, “Evolution of Comedy in Nigeria”.

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He said many stand-up comedians have done different skits before the emergence of social media, which are now used by some skit-maters without acknowledging the original owners of the intellectual property.

The comedian said, “You can only tell a story from where you joined the story. We have to start from the level of the people having this argument (where skit-making started from).

“Let’s start from Flatmates. From Flatmates, if they decided that they want to turn a one-hour sitcom into skits, all they need to do is to bring every one-minute scene that is funny in that one hour and post it on social media. It will tell a story. It will tell a short story and it will become a skit.

“So, for a majority of standup comedians, skit-making has been there all along. People don’t just upload what they have done in the past on social media to show they have done different types of skits.

“We do skits on stage. From the days of Bovi, Basketmouth, and the rest, were shooting skits back-to-back. It was not on social media. So most of the standup jokes are being converted to short skits now without credit being given to a majority of the comedians that own the true story.

“Some are even being converted to cartoons, animations, and these are stories written by standup comedians and they are not getting credit for them.”