Skit Makers Stealing Content From Comedians – Omobaba

Nigerian comedian, Fagade Olufemi Ademola, aka, Omobaba says there is a major problem in the nation’s comedy industry.

He stated this during an interactive Twitter session with Daily Trust.

Omobaba affirmed in the session titled “Evolution of Comedy in Nigeria” that the main problem in the industry was plagiarism.

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According to him, many stand-up comedians have done different skits before the emergence of social media.

These skits are now used by some skit-makers without acknowledging the original owners of the story.

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.”