The Boss of Afrotainment may not come who you expects him to be in stature and style. He has nebver been in a movie nor acted any movie but he has tremendous contributions to the the Nigerian entertainment industry specifically the comedy sector for nine years now is more than enough to make his name a household name in Nigeria..He is the boss of Afrotainment Productions, producers of Stand Up Nigeria. This lanky showbiz man and Theatre Arts practitioner has worked with big and up-coming comedians in the industry. He spoke to ADEDAYO SHOWEMIMO of thisdaylife about how he started Stand Up Nigeria and the challenges he has had to deal with, here are the excerpts:
Journey into the World of Comedy….
A lot of times when I am asked ‘why comedy’, I always say to them ‘why not comedy’, because I feel people don’t believe that comedy is wide enough for one to settle down and go deep. Believe me; it’s wider than you might think. For me, I’ve always tried to be different in my approach to things. It’s part of the reason why our show “Stand Up Nigeria’ is the only 100% comedy show in Nigeria, and that’s our unique selling point. When we started, honestly, we didn’t deliberately set out to do comedy. We started out doing theater and back then all our works always had some form of comedy in it. We always infused humour into our works to pass the message across because we believe that when your nerves are relaxed, the message sinks faster. So, over time, since our jobs always had humour, it was only natural to have the humour merchants get attracted to us and here we are today.
We Saw a Gap in Comedy…
The attraction for me was the gap we saw in the industry; we saw a space that needed to be filled. So, we brought a combination of talent and business mind to it and these so far have brought us to where we are today. It’s one thing to be talented, and it’s another thing to understand the workings of the business. When you have the two working for you, the sky is the starting point for you.
Attention is an Unnecessary Distraction…
Attention is relative. For me, I don’t need that kind of attention because I see it as an unnecessary distraction. Everybody doesn’t need to see us; you should see our works and our work should always speak for us. People are not interested in seeing my face. So, I keep the work going from behind the camera. Everybody can’t be in front of the camera.
It Took Us 9 Months to Make Our First Profit…
At the point when we started Stand Up Nigeria in 2008, we just wanted to have a 100% comedy platform because it was always annoying when you want to do a show and the platforms available are not what you need. As at that time, we had strong music platforms and comedy was always secondary.
So, we had to build the industry from the scratch. Like every sane person going into a business, we had fears, but I was confident that we would pull through. But what I didn’t know was that it would take a while, because it took a while, and we just had to keep pushing. It took us 9 months to make our first profit and thank God we didn’t know that before we started. If we had that information before we started, we might not have started Stand Up Nigeria. For the first 9 months, we were making our progress in losses. I’ll sit down with Soji Adeniji (our Production Manager) and we’ll say ‘this month is not bad, we lost just 300,000, last month was 450,000, may be next month we’ll lose 200,000.’ That was how we were calculating our progress before we started making profits after 9 months. But it’s a different story today. The business is now profitable enough to keep us in business; profitable enough for us to expand and profitable for us not to look elsewhere.
We Won’t Stop The Show…
Stand up Nigeria is now a platform. So, we can’t pack up the show and say we are not interested anymore, because if we do so, we’ll be depriving other talents from growing. I think it’s only smart to hand it over after a while and grow it into other states in the country because it’s big in Lagos already. We can expand into other states.
I Have No Regrets…
Am not sure I can lay my hands on any regrets. God has been very fair to us. Things always work in our favour. It might not work out immediately, but we always find a way around it to get results. Though, we are not fulfilled, because we are not where we want to be yet, but we are on the way and we are happy doing what we are doing.
Our First Show Had 12 People in Attendance….
Before Stand Up Nigeria, we were into theater productions, and now we have a new project called ‘Plays’ By Bunmi Davies. Let me take you back a bit. The first edition of Stand Up Nigeria had under 12 people in attendance at City mall. But fast forward to 5 years after, we sell out every show. So, when we look back, we just thank God.
The Growth of Comedy in Nigeria…
It’s absolutely awesome. The industry is growing rapidly and everybody now wants to have a piece of it. Several years back, a child can’t look up to his parents and say ‘daddy, I want to be a comedian’ because there was no basis and standard for it. But now, parents even help their kids to build careers in comedy and that’s the way forward. The talents abound and the platforms are building too.
Favourite Comedian…
There are loads of them, depending on the yard stick you want to use. But if you talk about helping others to grow, it has to be Ali Baba. He’s clearly number one. Even if you look at other factors, his name would always come up somehow somewhere. Clearly, he’s the king.
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