What Does “Curiosity Made Me Ask” Understand About Nollywood?

Two years ago, Adebayo Ridwan “Bae U Barbie” Abidemi released the debut episode of Curiosity Made Me Ask featuring Lege Miami. It’s a 13-minute conversation that ranges across Lege’s friendship with Seyi Tinubu, his unshakable belief in the Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency, and advice for upcoming Nigerian influencers and content creators. The episode, conversation-wise, was a desert, but it reveals what has now become the show’s pattern: fun, supposedly harmless, and socio-politically conscious questions clothed in respectful and dark humor language. By the second episode, Nigerian filmmaker and actor Toyin Abraham appeared to promote her December-released movie Malaika. That episode has gotten over 973k views and over 900 comments, establishing the show’s pop-culture relevance. 

After Lege Miami and Abraham, the show has had Richard Mofe-Damijo, Stan Nze, Jide Kosoko, Adebayo “Oga Bello” Salami, Femi Adebayo, Joke Silva, Adunni Ade, Patience “Mama Gee” Ozokwor, and other Nollywood filmmakers as guests, promoting their films or chasing pop-culture relevance courtesy of the show’s popularity. After a moony and conscious watch of several Nollywood-centered episodes, it’s isn’t out of place to say: CMMA’s satire, through its jokes about typecasting, about an actor always playing the same role, and other industry-focused issues plaguing Nollywood, is doing a quasi-structural analysis that Nollywood’s access-dependent press structurally can’t. 

In Ibukun Filani’s Dis laf fit kill person – An overview of Nigerian humour, different Nigerian scholars and academics discussed the functionality of satire and humor in Nigerian society. They focused on humour resident in the broadcast media, internet humour, stand-up comedy, comedy skits, and literary humour. Filani argued that for everyday Nigerians and the professional humourists, humour expresses expectations from and disappointments in the socio-political leadership of the country. That common Nigerian jokes indicate the country’s travails with ethnicity and failed political leadership isn’t a far-fetched conclusion to draw. 

A part of everyday living, humans, as social beings, adopt humour for communicative, rhetorical, political, and social intentions. For the average user, its functionality lies in its derived entertainment. For the humourists, it holds subtle power. And in sociocultural conversations, humour expresses cultural beliefs, attitudes, and ideological dispositions. In Henri Bergson’s theory of laughter we can comprehend the social dimension of humour in Nigeria. Humour is conceptualised as not just a tool for causing laughter but as a tool for social awareness and positive sociocultural and political change. This is where Bae U Barbie’s CMMA comes in. Curiosity Made Me Ask has grown from its average 13-minute episodes to 40-minute episodes with subtle technical quality improvement. But, what hasn’t changed is the host, Bae U Barbie’s laser-sharp questions attired in dark humor. By asking suggestive questions, he baits his Nollywood guests to accept or deny widely-held but rarely-articulated opinions about their career trajectory, role choices, filmography, and other industry-focused issues. 

According to the YouTube page, the show is described as a podcast where comedy meets candid conversations. “Dive into hilarious moments, engaging discussions, and real-life stories with your favorite skit king. From trending topics to unexpected guest appearances, every episode brings something fresh, funny, and thought-provoking,” the description reads. Bae U Barbie’s Curiosity Made Me Ask is built on dark humor, savage sarcasm, and roasting. For a while now, due to its commercial and numerical success, Nollywood filmmakers have adopted and legitimized it as a PR/Marketing spot when they have a film, series, and show to promote. As expected, in these Nollywood-related appearances, he baits the Nollywood guest into defending their own casting and career choices, their typecasting,  and their career “failures.” Courtesy of the show’s roast-as-entertainment, actors metaphorically let their guards down in ways they wouldn’t in a typical interview. 

On its face, CMMA is one of Nollywood’s vetted promo stop\slop. By going to the show, Bae U Barbie, in his infinite kindness, gives them a platform to promote their films. But, the show consistently articulates industry-centered issues around acting, casting, legacy, production culture, and payment. When Patience Ozokwor went on the show, she ended up revealing that actors typically get a one-time payment for films regardless of how much revenue those films keep generating. Zubby Michael offhandedly stated that “sometimes you shoot to survive, other times, you shoot to make a statement,” when responding to the fast-paced production nature of the industry. As Bergson stated, Bae U Barbie’s show is raising “social awareness” on these structural and industry concerns when he asks humour-ridden questions. 

In contemporary Nigeria, comedy and dark humour often emerges in response to tragic events, as a coping mechanism for individuals grappling with difficult realities. While some view it as a way to process trauma, others criticize it as potentially abusive or insensitive. Despite varied perspectives, dark humour remains a notable form of satire that invites audiences to confront uncomfortable subjects through laughter, reflecting deeper psychological mechanisms that help individuals regain a sense of control in the face of adversity. In Nelson C.J’s Is Humor Still an Effective Coping Mechanism for Nigerians?, the culture writer maintained that, in Nigeria, there’s a collective understanding that no matter the seriousness of the situation or its impact on the extent of the nation’s well-being, comedy, dark humour, if you may, introduces a certain level of levity that psychologists and mental health experts describe as a coping mechanism. 

In this way, despite the analytical observation made by Bae U Barbie on the show, its seriousness gets expunged because it’s just a joke. Neither the show nor its host is posed as an informed critic of the industry but because comedy offers deniability that lets both host and guest gesture at something real without either having to own it as critique. The more interesting argument is that CMMA is criticism in disguise, but that it exposes a gap in Nollywood after the laughter subsides.