Nigeria’s Humor Reflex Is Problematic

Something deeply unsettling is unfolding across Nigerian social media, and most of us are too busy scrolling to notice. Terrorist groups operating within the country’s volatile regions are slowly becoming content creators. Their propaganda videos—once confined to grainy WhatsApp forwards and hushed conversations—now circulate openly on TikTok and Twitter, racking up views, comments, and shares like any viral post.

The algorithm doesn’t distinguish between a dance challenge and a hostage video. Both are content and demand engagement. And Nigerians, with our characteristic mix of dark humor and adaptive resilience, are engaging, some of us are even laughing. When terrorist propaganda begins to occupy the same psychological space as comedy skits, we begin to cross a threshold that’s difficult to return from. The boundaries that once separated existential threats from everyday entertainment are dissolving, and with them, our collective capacity for appropriate alarm.

Terror works, historically, because of its shock value. It’s designed to rupture normalcy, to inject fear into the mundane rhythms of daily life. But shock requires novelty. Once the human mind encounters the same violent stimulus repeatedly, desensitization sets in. The outcome is a loss of the moral urgency required to confront it.  Terror stops provoking terror, kidnappings become background noise, when armed groups operate with the visibility of influencers, society has already begun collapsing inward. The terrorists don’t need to win militarily; they only need the country to stop caring.

To understand how things reached this point, it’s necessary to confront an uncomfortable national trait: Nigerians joke about everything. It’s both a superpower and an Achilles’ heel. For decades, humor has functioned as a way to process trauma in a place that offers little room for collective grief or healing. If it can’t be fixed, it can at least be laughed at. Except that this coping mechanism has been stretched past its limits. Even rape has become punchline material. Scroll through Nigerian Twitter on any given day, and men casually deploy sexual violence as a joke setup, indifferent—or worse, unfazed—by how it trivializes one of the most devastating experiences a person can endure. Women who object are told to “stop being sensitive” or “learn to take a joke,” as if the problem is their lack of humor rather than the brutality embedded in the joke itself.

Somehow, the corruption that has hollowed out institutions and stolen futures becomes skit material. Politicians embezzle billions meant for schools and hospitals, and within hours, memes about “national cake” flood the timeline. Fuel subsidy fraud becomes a joke told while standing in petrol queues. ASUU strikes become punchlines while an entire generation loses years of education. Nothing is ever too serious or off-limits. 

This cultural reflex has its uses. It keeps spirits afloat in impossible circumstances and creates community through shared experiences. But it has also eroded the capacity to treat certain crises with the gravity they demand. And now, with terrorism, that erosion has become existentially dangerous. Nigeria urgently needs a mass re-sensitization. A collective decision to treat serious issues as off-limits, not because we’re humorless, but because we recognize that some battles are fought by attention and action.

Beyond the immediate security implications, there’s a deeper political consequence to this reflexive humor. Nigerian leadership—at every level—has never taken its citizens seriously. Already, concerns are dismissed, protests are ignored, and the suffering of the masses is rationalized away. Citizens are perceived as fundamentally unserious people. Now imagine the message sent when insecurity is turned into comedy material. Armed groups terrorize communities, and memes become the response. Kidnappings rise, and survival-tactic skits dominate the noise. How can accountability be insisted upon when the signal being sent is that nothing truly matters?

The ruling class is watching. And they’re learning that Nigerians will absorb anything and eventually turn it into a joke. That makes their jobs easier, suggesting that we’re not actually in crisis, just perpetually entertained by our own dysfunction. While Nigerian humor has always been a form of resistance, resistance requires maintaining a clear distinction between oppressor and oppressed.

When those distinctions blur, and terrorists become just another type of content creator, we lose something we may not be able to recover. Shock has been traded for familiarity, creating a vulnerability more dangerous than anything an armed group could inflict. Nigeria is at a crossroads. Down one path is a society that can still be moved by injustice and violence. Down the other is a society that has laughed itself into numbness and can no longer distinguish between entertainment and emergency. The choice, for now, is still ours. But the window for making it is closing fast.