In 2020, Nigerian actress and filmmaker Toyin Abraham released The Fate of Alakada—a follow-up to her hit movie Alakada: The Saga—which features Broda Shaggi as a supporting act. One of the problems with Toyin Abraham’s The Fate of Alakada is its cast. The illiterate, loutish Instagram character Broda Shagi plays an illiterate loutish Nollywood character. The outcome is one long skit stretched to feature-length. Errm let’s just say the critics weren’t too pleased.
Nigerian internet comedians have grown in popularity over the past few years. They have found creative and innovative ways of deconstructing entertainment into digestible bits for the audience, and this had made their content more accessible than any other form of screen entertainment. It’s in the light of this that the Nigerian audience has been introduced to familiar figures like Broda Shagi, Mark Angel, and Lasisi Elenu, who have built an audience of millions, and have become the leading faces of Nigerian comedy. For this reason, it has come as no surprise that filmmakers have courted these people for their feature-length projects, seeking to take advantage of their talents and their audience to boost the commercial prospects of their endeavours.
The problem with this is that this transition is so shabbily done that these Instagram comedians typically add nothing new to these films than we are already used to seeing on their Instagram pages.
It’s been one full year since Broda Shaggi’s appearance in Namaste Wahala, another film where he’s featured as a copy of his Instagram persona, and the cringe has not waned yet. There are people who found it entertaining, and we cannot fault them. But there’s hardly any artistic merit in importing an Instagram comedian—along with their Instagram persona—into your feature movie, especially when their presence in the film does nothing for the general plot of the movie.
While the commercial viability of featuring popular social media comedians in movie roles to get more eyeballs on your project can be understood, it can be better done. Mr. Macaroni (real name Debo Adedayo) was recently cast in the Tunde Kelani’s biopic of veteran musician Ayinla Omowura, where he played the title character’s P.A Bayowa.
In this movie, Macaroni is made to play a character totally independent of his Instagram persona, and he delivers on this assignment.
It’s trite to note that skit makers are not necessarily actors, and making skits on Instagram doesn’t demand the same professional expertise as making a full-length movie. While it is normal (in fact, expected) for our favourite Instagram comedians to seek roles on bigger screens, they must understand that they need to be more than we know them to be while they’re within the frames of our mobile screens.
Social media content creators have the creative quality that can be of immense help to the filmmaking process in Nollywood, and sometimes they will do more good being deployed in this regard than being put in front of the cameras themselves.
