The Satirical Social-Media Skits As Template For New Education: Understanding The Amateurish Auteurism In Nation Building

Abstract

The ICT age has midwifed into existence, all manners of multifaceted creativities both in written forms and in cinematheques. For theatre practitioners, for instance, these creativities have manifested in different genres, one of which the present paper has labelled “satiric social-media skit†which is defined as a short theatrical sketch or act characterized by comical embellishments often designed for spontaneous viral spread via the social media. This research proceeds out of the need to examine selected social-media skits as didactic satires intended to educate their audience on certain endemic social dysfunctions. Thus, the study considers the social media skits, as typified by some selected pieces, as veritable windows to use the cyber space as educative forum which dwells on the popular binarity involved in the coinage – edutainment – in which such skits have the tendency to educate and entertain their audience within the parenthesis of the global classroom and cinema world at the same time. Relying on the theoretical praxis of Paul Simpson in his model of ‘Satire as Humorous Discourse’, a theory which recognizes the presence of the indexical trio of the satirist, the satiree and the satirized, the study attempts an analysis of Mock News, and Adeola Fayehun’s comical news packages that permeate the social network. The theory offers sufficient support to this research since the selected skits are considered amateurish in the sense that they have been scripted and produced by auteurs who are often driven by the need to satirize in order to educate than the need to produce professionally ethical pieces that merely fulfill architectonic mandate of news peddling. Hence, there is the assumption that the underlining structures of the cinematographic pieces called satirical social-media skits are traceable to the auteur’s sub-conscious frenzy to teach a global class within a framework where he (auteur or the skit producer) is the jocular teacher, the cyber space the classroom, the cinematics the teaching aids and the audience the students. In the final analysis, the study opines that the satirists are nation builders in their own way since they attempt to curb or reduce decadence in the society in one way or the other.