How Layi Wasabi Shows Artists Do Not Have to Dumb Things Down

Nigerian online comedian Layi Wasabi, whose real name is Isaac Olayiwola, is one of those artists whose works send their fans into a frenzy of overanalysis. Even when said works have been made with little conscious deliberation, fans lend themselves giddily to a meaning-mining adventure. To paraphrase one enthusiastic fan’s analysis about one Layi video: the lawyer Layi plays in his skits has started meeting his clients at bars. Get it? He has now been called to the bar.

In all likelihood, the comedian had intended no such association. But he has grown a reputation for making “smart comedy,” and so it’s easy for his fans to parse meaning where none had been intended. Layi’s success as a comedian, even though his style runs opposed to the dominant aesthetic, raises a question about the consumption habits of the Nigerian public. It is often said that the Nigerian public has no patience for art or entertainment with “bookish” tendencies, or, to phrase it differently, art that is too clever and isn’t patently self-explanatory. But as Layi shows, that may not be true.

When I first spoke with Layi in June last year, he had about 20,000 followers on Instagram and about the same tally on Twitter. Though his talent even then was unmistakable, he was nowhere as ubiquitous as more established Nigerian comics like Taaoma and Mr. Macaroni. A year later, at only 22 years old, he is now one of Nigeria’s most successful online comedians. Now he has nearly a million followers on Twitter and Instagram cumulatively. To prove his star power, these days and nearly every week, he is the cynosure of Twitter conversations. Most of the social media chatter about the comedian looks a certain way: people telling you how markedly different Layi is from the pack. One compliment often showered on the comedian is that his comedy contains no nudity or vulgarity. As much as it is a compliment for the comedian, it also doubles as an implicit rebuke against the many other online comedians whose skits are heavily sexually charged.

But it is not the sexlessness of Layi’s skits that stand him out. That honor falls to his comedy’s cerebral style. Consider its overall noiselessness, which is quite at variance with the live-wire extroversion common to most Nigerian skits. The typical Nigerian comic skit is full of sonic energy. Sabinus’ videos have a theme song which is as sprightly as it is didactic. In Mr. Maraconi’s skits, the character he plays is often speaking at a raging decibel, his angst usually aimed at any of the ill-fitting suitors his daughter has brought for his inspection. And there is never a shortage of background chatter in many Nigerian skits, as skit-makers often incorporate into their videos popular phrases—“Funke”; “apostle will hear of this”—and a slew of dramatic sounds. For example, when a character is slapped, it is usually accompanied by an exaggerated sound of a violent strike.

The dramatic phrases and sounds which shadow the words and actions in these skits do the work of heightening the comic effect and providing cues for the viewers to break into laughter. As though a Pavlovian trigger, you know it is time to laugh when, for instance, the instrumental music comes on at the end of a Sabinus skit. Oases of silence do not exist in most of what comprises Nigerian online comedy. For most of these online comedians, sonic activity is crucial to the successful takeoff and landing of the punchline.

Conversely, Layi’s skits embody good library manners, their defining feature a quiet introversion. Unlike the skits made in the popular style, Layi’s are sans background chatter, and sans dramatic phrase and sound. Take for instance one skit where he parodies the frustration familiar to many Nigerian undergraduates who have to complete their final-year thesis under an exacting supervisor. In the skit, the student Layi plays, in a fit of frustration, rails against his supervisor, an act of insolence which in real life is sure to have a student rusticated from a university or suffer a vengeful comeuppance from his lecturer. Yet that dramatic moment, in which the student loses all decorum, is unaccompanied by any kind of non-diegetic sound. Not even when the student comes to his senses is there any campy ad lib or sound effect to signal his turn of countenance. All that can be heard is Layi’s voice. As the video lacks the typical background squabble that fans of Nigerian online comedy have come to expect, it comes off as eerily quiet. Its quietness gives the skit, as like many of Layi’s skits, the air of tight-lipped intelligence.

As Layi’s skits tend to be without these frills, it also means his comedy treats its audience as equals, trusting their ability to get the joke unaided by any aural cue.

One other defining attribute of his style is its highly verbal nature. Many of his jokes derive from a facility for the well-turned and well-timed phrase. In one skit where he deals with a failed rapper, his delivery of the line “wrap/rap it up, nigga” is so perfectly timed. It is also thematically relevant, as it relates to the identity of the video’s subject. This reliance on verbal play marks Layi out from an industry mostly balanced on the stilts of physical comedy, where humor is usually the result of a funny face or a comically outsized get-up or a mild dash of physical violence. (In skits by Taaoma and OGB, a punch, or slap, quite literally is the punchline.)

As evidence shows, Layi’s style runs counter to the conventions of Nigerian online comedy. He also shows that success is possible even with an alt-style. Yet one understands why artists of all kinds toe the safe and popular route. They know that art which makes it to a million TV screens, and which enriches an artist, is art which contains many of the elements the general public have come to love, expect, and even demand. And of these elements, the most crucial one is perhaps simplicity, or to phrase it differently, art which has no ambiguity and surrenders its meaning and pleasure on the first look or listen. The popular Nigerian songs typify this quality: simple melodies and simplistic lyrics. Meanwhile, the songs condemned to the margins of Nigerian music history—say, many of the songs by the rapper Mode 9—have tortuous rhyme schemes and allusions which often demand a broad, even Wikipedia-esque frame of reference. In truth, most people do not want to use the thesaurus as they stream music on Spotify.

Even artists with an alt-style, who have managed to claw their way into the mainstream, have had to compromise: they have had to intersperse their unusual product with elements from more populist genres. In fact, Layi too has banked on this strategy, as some of his skits enact tropes from the more popular physical comedy form. A lawyer character which the comedian often plays wears comical pants and shoes, affects an exaggerated accent meant to parody that spoken by middle-aged Yoruba civil servants, and in one skit themed around a divorce, chews a piece of document as a way of slighting another character. By also lending himself to slapstick, he appeases two sets of fans: those who come for his cerebral style, and those who come for physical comedy. This melding of the unusual with the familiar is a survival tactic similarly deployed by the rapper M.I. Abaga at the start of his career. Knowing the English rhythms of his music were bound to alienate most of the Nigerian music base he courted, the rapper smartly entered creative liaisons with artists—Brymo and Flavor, some of them—whose style bears a markedly more Nigerian imprint.

It is nearly unanimously accepted in Nigerian art and entertainment spaces that the antidote to an artist struggling to find an audience is to “dumb down” his material. To keep it plain. To excise any kind of ornate symbolism. But as Layi shows, that may not necessarily be correct advice. It also comes off as condescending advice, as it implies that there are not many Nigerians who are sophisticated enough to appreciate artists with more subtle modes of presentation. It is not that Layi’s success shows that the Nigerian public as a whole is open to appreciating art which deviates from the usual. In fact, the comedian is not unanimously accepted; many have called his style a bore. Instead, what the comedian’s success shows is that the Nigerian public is not a monolith, that there is a market for every kind of artistic expression, both for the populist and the alternative style.

Nigerian artists with populist styles still commandeer most of the market. But—perhaps because the country’s outsized population makes it unlikely that an artist wouldn’t find a sizable number of kindred spirits—even the alternative artists can find widespread acceptance. As Layi shows, the trick is to be consistently brilliant. And perhaps to be amenable to compromise, to be willing to sprinkle the unusual with the familiar.