Dismantling Colonial Laughter: Tracing Emergent African Diaspora Stand-Up Comedy in French and German
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study redirects attention from English-speaking African diaspora stand-up productions to French and German language expressions of purposively selected comedians with recent immigration history from Africa performing within mainland Europe. Through a socio-historical interrogation of specific colonial histories and joke themes, the paper comparatively explores the French language stage acts of Fary Lopez, Samia Orosemane (France) and Cécile Djunga (Belgium and France) and the German language works of Dave Davis (Germany), Charles Nguela (Switzerland), and Soso Mugiraneza (Austria). The aim is to show how the individuated colonial histories of the nations in which these comics reside and the chronicles of their relations with Africa(ns) and Black peoples feature in joke formulations and satiric jibes of the jokesters. Through these explorations, this essay studies how stand-up comedy’s transformative power challenges societal norms and attitudes using the backdrop of the concurrently heterogeneous and dissimilar colonial histories of the African continent and its diasporas. Moreover, through its focus on non-English expressions, it presents the unique intersections of language, “race,” ethnicity and colonial histories, as well as the geographic and linguistic spread of the African diaspora beyond European nations with direct colonial contact with the continent. Thus, the enquiry posits joke performances as platforms for cultural expression and critique as well as a site within which African peoples negotiate their presence in non-African environments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".