Nigerian popular comedian, Basketmouth has formed a five-year plan to leave the game and chase other interests, like filmmaking and music.
He made it known on an Arise TV interview on Saturday, 25th November, 2023taht he has a schedule of annual comedy shows for the next five years after which he plans to quit.
According to him, since he first dumped his music career for comedy in the 1990s, he knows that one day he will return to it again.
Basketmouth strategies to get involved in every sector of the entertainment industry and build his own empire.
T“I’ll be 50 in five years, I’d have moved on to something else that’d be taking a lot of my time, and I don’t want to cheat comedy. I want to give it 100%. I know that in five years, I can blend all my interests and go fully into movies, TV and music concerts. It’s going to be hard to do all these things and still give 100% to comedy,” he said.
He added challenges of the comedy industry in Nigeria, mentioning that comedians don’t have the organization to succeed. He said music and films have streaming platforms revealing them to a global audience, but the same has not happened for comedy.
He disclosed that the culture of standup comedy is dying because comedians don’t have the structures to practice and refine their work, a problem he believes impacts the quality of their craft.
He said, “The system is not built to support comedy. Many of the newbies don’t have the platforms we had. With social media, a lot of people started mistaking skit makers with standup comedians — they’re two different sets of people. Some skit makers now tried to do standup comedy and most of them bombed. When there are a lot of comedians bombing because there’s no space for them to grow, they’re not well refined and people start thinking, ‘Do we really need comedians?'”
Basketmouth plans to fix the problem by providing exposure for comedians. He implicit he’s working with “one or two streaming platforms” to give room for new comics to be seen and heard across the world before he finally exists.
The show he’s planning to do to achieve this would be named One Night Stand.
Story by Obaapa Janee
Source pulse.ng
