Afropolitan Influence: Gender,Comedy,and Social Media in Global Africa

Abstract

Gender and humor have always been intimately related. In many societies, comedy is traditionally understood as a masculine pursuit, and women’s existence in comedic spaces has been subject to intense scrutiny by male commentators. Africa’s burgeoning stand-up comedy scene is an important site of contestation in this regard, but in recent years social media has afforded opportunities for African women to bypass traditional industry gatekeepers. In online spaces like Instagram, TikTok, and X (Twitter), African women creators have built massive audiences that cross national and continental boundaries. In this project, I draw on interviews with three prominent female comedy creators—Stella Dlangalala, Thenjiwe Mosely, and Beverly Adaeze—and use their work to shed light on how female comedians negotiate their position(s) in digital spaces rooted in Nigeria, South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond. While social media affords autonomy to performers, success as a comedian-influencer demands more from women than jokes. Feminism, Afropolitanism, and commodification intertwine in the stories of these performers. The gendered body, viewed through the lens of parasocial intimacy that short-form video facilitates, emerges as a site of great significance. In addition, I argue for greater critical attention to what I call “algorithmic mystery”—the influence of opaque social media algorithms in promoting, maintaining, and severing digital connections.

Afropolitanism, Gender, and Comedy

African comedy—and particularly African women’s comedy—has never been more visible online. The spread of social media usage across the continent over the past 10 to 15 years has afforded massive opportunities for women to publish and profit from comedic content. The ability of African women’s comedy to disrupt well-worn patriarchal and Afro-pessimistic stereotypes has not gone unnoticed by scholars (Machirori, 2023), and has been celebrated in forums like TED, where Motswana activist Siyanda Mohutsiwa’s talk on “How Young Africans Found a Voice on Twitter” has been watched almost 1.2 million times since 2016. According to Mohutsiwa (2016), who coined the comedic #IfAfricaWasABar hashtag, “with a social Pan-Africanist thinking and using the internet as a tool, we can begin to rescue each other, and ultimately, to rescue ourselves.” According to Rebecca Pointer (2023, p. 156), such “humour reveals digital agency driving an emerging ‘African’ digital cosmopolitanism” that “challenge[s]—consciously or unconsciously—reductive narratives” about the continent that holds it back on the world stage.

Existing scholarly work on the role of social media platforms in facilitating African comedy creators’ success can be fairly described as celebratory, even as the attitude of many commentators toward social media has become more circumspect in recent years. Events like the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022 and the debate over whether to ban TikTok in the United States have served as reminders that social media platforms are corporate products regulated by ever-changing algorithms rather than “virtual public squares” free from capitalistic or partisan interference. Moreover by focusing on viral hashtags rather than the lives of individual creators, existing studies risk reproducing the logic of the social media feed, treating African (women’s) comedic expressions as data points to be consumed rather than clues to lives lived and careers built across multiple platforms, out of a multiplicity of motivations. Building off previous research on stand-up comedians in South Africa (Crigler, 2022), my point of departure for this study is the contention that life histories are a crucial and underutilized method for making sense of African women’s comedy online, revealing the ways in which feminism, Afropolitanism, and commodification intertwine in the lives of content creators like no other method can.

By examining the life histories of African women comedians online, this study also responds to Taina Bucher’s (2018) call to consider algorithms from a phenomenological perspective. Bucher (2018, p. 62) notes how users’ experiences give rise to “tacit forms of knowledge that linger in the background and which may have as much of an impact on the ways in which life with algorithms take shape as the coded instructions themselves,” invoking the example of someone who jokingly accuses the Netflix video streaming platform of reading their mind. Indeed, the more palpable and capricious the algorithms (for example, on TikTok, where users are shown only one video option at a time), the more playfully and explicitly users engage with, call out, and reflect on them. Toward the end of this article, I reflect further on this re-enchantment or re-mystification of the digital realm as “algorithmic mystery”—an undertheorized aspect of social media’s enduring appeal. From the perspective of a comedy content creator, however, the stakes are higher than for the average user—harnessing algorithms, no matter how capricious or mysterious, is a core dimension of their career and livelihood.

Methodology

In the following paper, I examine the lives and careers of three women whose performance of comedy in virtual spaces and refusal to be boxed in by limits set by geography, language, culture, and patriarchy directly implicates these recent trends. In addition to merely creating comedic content, I deliberately chose three African women (one based in South Africa, one based in the United Kingdom, and one based in the United States) who have been able to monetize their online comedy creation, mostly through influencer marketing campaigns. Unlike many previous studies of comedic content on social media, I aimed to produce a study that would confront the reality of comedy as remunerative work in the lives of each of the women I focused on.

I examined data sets of their best-performing video content across multiple platforms through visual and textual analysis, and conducted semi-structured interviews with all three women via Zoom in mid-2023. In my data analysis and interviews, I was motivated by the following core questions:

• What motivates African women to start producing comedic content on social media?

• How do African women comedians build and manage multiple audiences, both across different social media platforms and offline?

• How are the practices of African women comedians online entangled with material and market concerns, especially influencer marketing?

• To what extent do African women comedians online experience social media platforms as enabling change within a comedy industry that has historically been highly male-centric and exploitative?

In other words, is social media comedy by African women a true paradigm shift in women’s comedic art and representation? Or does the multi-trillion dollar social media industry represent just another neoliberal effort to penetrate formerly private spheres of life and remold them in the image of the market?

To answer this question, I first review relevant literature on social media, commodification, and African women’s comedy to help reveal the terrain of the debate. I then consider evidence from my interviews with Thenjiwe Moseley, Stella Dlangalala, and Beverly Adaeze, which suggests an answer somewhere in the middle. We cannot minimize the extent to which “subaltern counterpublics” constituted online are compromised by corporate ownership of and interference with social media platforms. We also cannot help but observe that the “gatekeeper free” world of frictionless social media discovery never materialized. If anything, the algorithms that structure people’s experience of social media are more inscrutable and potent than ever—a concept I refer to as “algorithmic mystery” in a reflection at the end of this article. Nevertheless, even with all these caveats we can still appreciate the ways in which African women creators have taken advantage of the opportunities afforded by the social media landscape, circulating dynamic new expressions of what it means to be both an African and a woman in the mid-2020s.

Why Women Influencers Matter

Comedy and capitalism have long been intertwined. Traditional live stand-up comedy exists to make a profit. Outside of purpose-built comedy clubs, which are rare in Africa, bars and restaurants offer their spaces for stand-up comedy in the hope of attracting customers. Likewise, since the dawn of broadcast media in the early 20th century, corporations have sponsored comedic programs to draw positive publicity to their businesses. The controversial American television comedy Amos ‘n Andy was sponsored by the Blatz Brewing Company to the tune of $40,000 per week in the early 1950s, while Jack Benny’s famous sketch show incorporated ads from many sponsors, most frequently Lucky Strike cigarettes (Cox, 2008; Means, 1998, p. 65). With the rise of publishing platforms unencumbered by broadcasting networks and other gatekeepers, and newly armed with granular data on online consumer behavior, advertisers now enjoy the ability to target specific audiences like never before through the use of influencers. Influencer marketing generated $16.5 billion in revenue globally in 2022 alone, according to a report by Allied Market Research (2023), and the sector continues to experience strong growth.

Across the world, the landscape of comedy is also highly gendered. With a few key exceptions (Finley, 2020; Pakade, 2020) despite the existence of a vibrant literature on African American women’s humor (Horhn, 2020), scholarly studies of comedy in Africa tend to center men and the intersection between humor and masculinity. The ability to make others laugh implies real social power, and can be used both to reinforce social hierarchies and challenge them. In precolonial African societies, women’s comedic talent was most often expressed through storytelling, at young women’s rites of passage (Turner, 2017), and in predominantly female environments like West Africa’s marketplaces (Wiley, 2014). When women laugh at men’s jokes, patriarchal assumptions about male power are often implicated. As South African comedian and influencer Siv Ngesi explained in a 2019 interview (Interview by author, Makhanda, South Africa, 29 June), “men hate it when a man can make his wife laugh, or his girlfriend, because there’s something quite special about making someone laugh.” Comedy by and for women, therefore, offers opportunities to reassert their agency and refocus attention on their own concerns—which may or may not intersect with those of male performers (Gilbert, 1997; Mizejewski, 2017; Parker, 2002).

As Izuu Nwankwọ (2022) notes in his introduction to Stand-up Comedy in Africa, one of stand-up comedy’s greatest advantages as a performance form is its low upfront costs relative to other performance genres (p. 16). Nevertheless, Michael P. Jeffries (2017) cautions that traditional stand-up comedy is a “brutal business” (p. 2), offering low pay, little to no worker protections, plentiful opportunities for exploitation, and uncertain career pathways. Add the impact of institutional and societal misogyny into the mix and it is not difficult to understand why women in particular might be receptive to alternatives to the traditional stand-up comedy industry.

Through social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter), women comedians can bypass male intermediaries and connect with fans directly. Short-form videos which can be monetized by platforms, supported by fans through premium subscriptions (i.e., Patreon) or sponsored by corporate clients, can attract larger audiences to in-person shows. This in turn boosts comedians’ reputations and increases their bargaining power in interactions with venues and agents. As a result, the social media age enables performers to constitute and cater to niche audiences that would be prohibitively difficult to reach within the late 20th-century paradigm of mass-market (and, in Africa, often state-owned) broadcasting networks. In theory, then, the business model of the 21st-century comedy influencer presents a nearly ideal solution to one of traditional stand-up’s thorniest problems, the historic exploitation, and marginalization of women.

Yet, the visibility that apparently “ordinary” women have achieved through their social media feeds has also inspired misgivings, especially from feminist scholars who see influencer marketing as an opportunity for corporations to infiltrate areas of social life previously understood to be private and outside the commercial sphere. Among the most important contributions to this literature is Alora E. Paulsen Mulvey’s (2019) study of Estée Lalonde and her transition from Canadian fashion blogger to global “lifestyle influencer.” As Lalonde’s following grew, Paulsen Mulvey traces how Lalonde adapted her increasingly lucrative persona to the challenges that necessarily arose from commodifying the personal, from navigating her break-up with the boyfriend who helped launch her blogging career to adopting the rhetoric of female confidence and resilience culture to satisfy her audience’s calls for feminist engagement (while avoiding the controversy that might come with endorsing or opposing political causes). Paulsen Mulvey’s discussion of Lalonde’s “branded femininity” builds on Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill’s (2022) critique of social media-driven “confidence cult(ure),” a discourse whose expressions are “troublingly individualistic, turning away from structural inequities and wider social injustices to accounts that foreground psychological change rather than social transformation” (p. 6).

Lifestyle influencers, according to Paulsen Mulvey, Orgad, and Gill, mobilize their brands to exemplify the confidence and resilience necessary for thriving as 21st-century women, even as they continue the age-old practice of profiting from women’s insecurities (Lalonde’s line of bathing products, Mirror Water, calls itself “a bodycare brand focused on a revolution within ourselves”). Because comedy is also a realm where women are frequently represented as deficient, comedy by women influencers is susceptible to the same kinds of critiques as those than Paulsen Mulvey, Orgad, and Gill make: influencer content lending a thin comedic sheen to the continued corporate exploitation of women consumers.

Why Social Media Comedy Matters

Given the extent to which humor and marketing have long intertwined, relatively little attention has been paid to comedy’s role in influencer culture. Paulsen Mulvey’s engagement with humor is limited to a brief discussion of Lalonde’s public performance of friendship with Amelia Liana through Instagram tagging and memes, which “contribut[es] to their narrative of realness,” while Orgad and Gill only mention humor a handful of times in their monograph. At the same time, the rise of social media in the early 21st century coincided with a massive resurgence of interest in the importance of comedy. In the words of Megan Garber (2015), who cites figures like Amy Schumer, John Oliver, and the sketch duo Key and Peele, “comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.” In a 2020 monograph, Caty Borum Chattoo and Lauren Feldman take things even further. “Contemporary mediated comedy,” having broken free of censorious, homogenizing broadcast networks, should be thought of as “an engine for new ways of seeing, or an arena of resistance” (Chattoo & Feldman, 2020, p. 7). According to Chattoo and Feldman (2020), comedy is important to social movements because it can “galvanize attention, spark conversation, change how some people think and feel about social issues and groups, and foment activism” (p. 38).

The breezy optimism of Garber’s article already feels dated—it was written roughly a year and a half prior to the election of Donald Trump. Chattoo and Feldman’s text goes into greater depth than Garber but more critical attention needs to be paid to the role of corporate power in shaping who makes it to the table in the first place even as different platforms for content creation proliferate in the streaming era. Even legendary satirists cannot act with complete autonomy, as Jon Stewart learned when his Apple TV+ show The Problem with Jon Stewart ended abruptly—due in part to Stewart’s insistence on covering topics that Apple reportedly deemed threatening to its corporate interests (Sharf, 2024).

One non-corporate institution that comes closer to exemplifying an effective counterpublic in the social media era is Black Twitter—“the millions of Black users on Twitter [now officially known as X] networking, connecting, and engaging with others who have similar concerns, experiences, tastes, and cultural practices” (Florini, 2014, p. 225). André Brock’s (2012) canonical article, credited with first bringing the concept of Black Twitter under scholarly consideration, discussed it as a site of “signifyin’”—that is, as “a discursive public performance of Black identity” carried out in full view of the mainstream culture, yet building Black users’ cohesion and camaraderie (Brock uses a Zora Neale Hurston quote to gloss this assertion: “he can read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind”) (pp. 537, 529). In subsequent scholarship, authors such as Bradley Hobbs (2015), Monk-Payton (2017), Hill (2018), and Taylor (2022) have analyzed Black Twitter not only as an inclusive space for the performance of Blackness online, but as a “counterpublic” challenging White supremacist narratives common in mainstream social media discourse. Hill (2018), for example, regards smartphone videos of police misbehavior, circulated widely on Black Twitter in the late 2010s, as evidence that Black Twitter’s purpose is not merely therapeutic. According to Hill, it allows users to turn technologies of surveillance back on the state, imposing their concerns on the discourse through the power of viral circulation. Crucially, Black Twitter is not purely an American or even a Global North phenomenon: Despite the challenges of the digital divide, versions of Black Twitter exist on the African continent as well in dialogue with Black Twitter in the United States while also influenced by local languages and agendas (Phiri, 2020; Smit & Bosch, 2020).

Ultimately, social media comedy is important because, as Marc Lamont Hill (2018) insists, the transition toward digital space has been “unavoidable”—and has only grown more so over the past half-decade (p. 289). The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the decline of venues for in-person airing of social critique like theaters, independent retailers, and coffee houses under neoliberalism. Dissent has been pushed online even as a near countless stream of controversies (such as the scandals surrounding foreign interference in American elections on Facebook, the rhetoric of Elon Musk on X, and TikTok’s support for pro-Palestinian content) has firmly dispelled the idea that these platforms are neutral, apolitical “public squares.” The rhetorical landscape of social media increasingly resembles the landscape of society as a whole, bringing subaltern spaces of resistance and transgression under renewed scrutiny. In this context, online comedic figures play an important function, navigating this fraught terrain, like comedians in front of physical audiences, through strategic subversion and transgression.

Why African Women Comedy Influencers Matter

As COVID-19 swept the world in 2020 and billions of people were temporarily confined in their homes for fear of the virus, a 19-year-old Kenyan named Elsa Majimbo became the face of pandemic catharsis for many. Majimbo’s sarcastic and nonchalant takes on pandemic life, shot on an iPhone 6 while eating potato chips, rocketed her to fame after her content was discovered and recirculated by influencers outside Kenya. At the time of the pandemic, Majimbo was studying journalism at Strathmore University in Nairobi; by the end of the year, she had won a People’s Choice Award for Best African Entertainer and a YouTube Streamy Award (Sullivan, 2020). She moved to Los Angeles, was named in Forbes magazine’s 30 Under 30 list for 2023, and boasts 2.1 million followers on Instagram, 1.8 million followers on TikTok, and 377,000 followers on X as of May 2024.

Majimbo’s story, at first glance, seems almost like a fairy tale: the quintessential case study of a life transformed overnight by going viral. The magnitude and apparent durability of Majimbo’s fame is extraordinary by any standard, but it correlates with some very canny choices made by Majimbo starting just a few months into her time as a viral personality. One of the first countries in which Majimbo’s content gained prominence was South Africa, and as early as June 2020, Majimbo actively courted this audience: placing the South African flag in her X handle and referring to the South African rand rather than the Kenyan shilling in the title of her video “When I find R100 in trousers I haven’t worn in 2 months,” which garnered almost 18,000 likes (@ElsaAngel19, 2020). In August of that year, Majimbo featured in an advertisement for the South African fast-food chain Chicken Licken (MarkLives, 2020), but she had goals beyond the continent as well. According to a contributor post for Forbes (not subject to the same editorial standards as the magazine’s core reporting), Majimbo’s links to her manager Mohamed Kheir began via Instagram direct message, and for the whole first year of their professional relationship they did not meet in person. Nevertheless, as the Forbes piece puts it, they acted decisively to prevent Majimbo from being pigeonholed:

In the early days of Majimbo’s career, the media used four keywords—or let’s call them four corners—to box her in: Influencer. Pandemic. Kenyan. Chips.

“These are the four keywords we wanted the press to stay away from,” Kheir explains. . .

Case in point: When Bumble [an online dating app] wanted to collaborate with Majimbo, they wanted her to post a selfie brand promo (much like Fenty). But Majimbo and Kheir decided to create what would become a mini-series, shot in a full-on studio, with a glam squad. The aim was to strategically create an aspirational, elevated version of Majimbo, even if it meant taking on the production expenses.

Because part of defining yourself is dressing for the role and the life you want. (Eldor, 2021)

Today, in stark contrast to her early videos, Majimbo films herself mainly in designer clothing, often while applying expensive makeup and skincare products. The brash self-confidence that read as relatably ironic in her early videos has remained consistent, and, to Majimbo’s credit, she has been able to maintain a large audience through the course of this major transition—at the time of writing, her latest Instagram Reel had over 58,000 likes and 847 comments (@majimb.o, 2024).

Majimbo’s extraordinary success in parlaying social media comedy into wealth and celebrity is atypical in scale but not in strategy. Women comedy influencers throughout Africa and the diaspora are using many of the same strategies as Majimbo as they harness social media algorithms to build their careers, though their specific hopes and aspirations are diverse. While social media does not offer women comedians a complete refuge from patriarchal norms and expectations, it has allowed performers like the ones profiled below to profit from their craft and, crucially, to build audiences in diverse and unexpected places, not unlike Majimbo.

The “industrialization” of social media influence (Hund, 2023) is very much an ongoing process. There are no guarantees that the successful methods of today will still be around tomorrow. It is likewise true that the “calibrated amateurism” demanded of women by social media raises significant feminist concerns (Abidin, 2017). Even so, the efforts of African women comedy influencers have already tangibly contributed to addressing the marginalization of Africans and African women online, and will likely continue to do so regardless of the future disruptions and obstacles posed by the global media landscape. The personal stories of three important African women comedy influencers detailed below—Thenjiwe Mosely, Stella Dlangalala, and Beverly Adaeze—will foreground and highlight their perseverance and creativity in adapting to seismic technological shifts.

Thenjiwe Moseley: Building Zulu Comedy as an Expat

On 29 September 1977, Thenjiwe Moseley was born in the sprawling township of KwaMashu outside Durban, South Africa. Both of her parents were only 18. Thenjiwe’s birth ended her mother’s dream of attending nursing school, and she remembers being raised largely by her grandmother, who worked as a cleaner in luxurious Whites-only hotels on the Durban beachfront. Thenjiwe recounts growing up in an atmosphere of intense conflict and tension: Her family was active in the underground anti-apartheid movement and her grandparents’ house was situated opposite a large men’s hostel with residents drawn from remote rural areas, supporters of the conservative Inkatha Freedom Party (I.F.P.). In the 1980s and early 1990s, gruesome violence between the I.F.P. and African National Congress (A.N.C.) supporters in KwaZulu and Natal amounted to a low-level civil war, even as popular protests were also subject to violent suppression by apartheid security forces. Remaining in school amid such deep instability was no mean feat. It was in this context that Thenjiwe’s seminal encounter with the power of humor took place:

My grandmother had been taken to prison for a whole weekend; they picked her up on Friday. . . When she returned on Monday . . . it was just a sad day at home, you know, when no one is talking to each other, no one is saying anything, nobody wants to ask her what happened . . . I was old enough to understand what happened when women get taken there. And one evening we were watching television, we used to watch the news, and then after the news, a sitcom played, it’s called ’Sgudi Snaysi, and it was so funny that suddenly everyone just burst out laughing at the same time. And I knew in my heart that one day, I want to be able to do this, I want to be able to make sad people laugh And from then on [in] the family the mood went back to normal, everything went back to normal. (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023)

Thenjiwe’s mission to make sad people laugh ended up taking her far away from South Africa. After studying drama at a technical college in Durban and struggling to make it as an actor in Johannesburg, she signed up for an au pair program that placed South Africans in the United States. Although she had tried her hand at open mics a few times in Johannesburg, it was while living with families in Ohio and Pennsylvania that she first drunk deeply of Black American stand-up—Def Comedy Jam videos, The Queens of Comedy, and The Original Kings of Comedy. “The money was not a lot when you look back now, but at the time it was a lot,” she remembers (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023). “[In] those two years I was able to change my family’s life, I was able to take my siblings to school” (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023). Her next destination was the United Kingdom where she secured a working holiday visa, eventually marrying and starting a family.

Whereas Thenjiwe first saw comedy as a way to defuse tense situations, after 2008 the rise of social media enabled her to use comedy to reconnect with her community in South Africa. She was “discovered” at an open mic night that year by a British talent scout and encouraged to keep going with stand-up, but all the while, she says, her deeper aspiration was to offer material to the world in Zulu, her first language. She began posting cell phone videos of herself doing Zulu comedy sketches on Facebook and YouTube, and, without much difficulty, secured a viral audience for her comic personae at home. “YouTube started asking for my account details,” she remembers. “So this thing can pay me?” (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023).

In mid-2023, Thenjiwe mounted The Mandela Effect at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, her first one-woman show. She has 163,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, and her videos there have almost 38 million total views as of May 2024. In addition, she has 347,000 followers on TikTok, 402,000 on Instagram, and two of her popular YouTube series, Judge Thenjiwe and Meet the Khambules, have been picked up by the South African satellite channel Moja Love. Most of her content is in Zulu, and much of her comedy involves maid characters partially inspired by her grandmother.

Stella Dlangalala: Building an Acting Career Through TikTok

Unlike Thenjiwe, who was born in the thick of the apartheid era, Stella Dlangalala was part of the first generation of Black South Africans to grow up under majority rule. Her childhood was much quieter from a political perspective, growing up in the small towns of Estcourt and Port Shepstone in KwaZulu-Natal, but the atmosphere within the house was competitive, with three brothers around. Watching soapies and DragonBallZ on television was the time when Dlangalala felt most at peace and connected to her siblings. Her father was a prosecutor, and would regale family and friends with stories about his own life well-honed by years of experience in the courtroom. Altogether it was enough to inspire Dlangalala to get involved in drama at school, and eventually to study movement along with marketing at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg. Marketing was a subject insisted upon by her parents, who were concerned about her ability to support herself off of drama alone.

South Africa’s drama and television markets are among the largest on the continent, but the lives of actors, who are not unionized, are precarious. After graduating from U.K.Z.N., Dlangalala was hired under a 1-year contract by the Ubom! drama company in Makhanda, where she earned a regular salary while picking up additional skills in physical theater. After the contract ended, however, Dlangalala moved back to Port Shepstone where she got an unsatisfying job as a marketing assistant. In 2016, Dlangalala moved to Johannesburg to pursue acting on a larger scale, but times remained hard. “The first year I had no money, I was earning nothing, I was doing a lot of free stuff, just to get my face out there and my face known,” she recalls, supported by a share of her best friend’s modest university honors funding (Dlangalala, Interview by author, 27 February 2023). She thought her life might be changing 2 years in, when she booked a role on a Netflix drama called Jiva!, but was frustrated when, despite the success of the show, it did not result in more auditions.

Like Thenjiwe, Dlangalala’s stand-up comedy career began casually and became more serious over time. She performed her first stand-up material at a bar called Kitchener’s in the hip student neighborhood of Braamfontein, and began uploading lip-syncing videos to a video-sharing app called Dubsmash. When she started receiving positive feedback on these videos, she started to focus on content creation as a way to pique the interest of acting industry gatekeepers specifically. Dlangalala says she started producing content for “those casting directors, those producers, those channels to see my content, for my content to reach them, and for them to be interested to know who is this person and how can we involve them in our next project?” (Dlangalala, Interview by author, 27 February 2023). That bet proved successful, but not in the way she expected: It was her audience on social media that ended up becoming her strongest advocates:

It was more the general audience finding my content and going, “But how do we not know this person and why are they not on television?” Which, the more people comment on your stuff with that kind of stuff going, “We hope to see you on television, da-da-da-da-da,” then that creates traction with this niche group that you’re hoping [will] see your work and they start to see your work. (Dlangalala, Interview by author, 27 February 2023)

Dlangalala’s true breakout role came when she played a prison inmate on the second season of a popular show called The Wife—a job she says would not have been secured without the support of her audience.

Today, Dlangalala has 1.5 million followers on TikTok and almost 70,000 followers on Instagram, as well as visibility through her various roles on television. Like Elsa Majimbo, she had avoided being pigeonholed by her social media content. On TikTok, her bread and butter consists of dancing trends and lipsync videos (by far her most popular character—“Red Shirt”—is an over-the-top township party animal loosely based on her own uncle), but on television this has translated into dramatic rather than comedic roles. “I’m very intentional about my social media,” she explains “I’m doing it because I want to show my range as an actress. I’m deliberate about doing character work, showing that I can change from this person to this that person easily” (Dlangalala, Interview by author, 27 February 2023). On The Wife, she was cast to play a schizophrenic character, drawing directly on these abilities. Her approach comes with risks: Commenters sometimes complain when there is a gap between Red Shirt’s appearances in Dlangalala’s content. So far, however, Dlangalala has been able to balance the tastes of her audience with her professional priorities as a dramatic actress, pushing back against the notion that social media success cannot translate into success on more well-established platforms.

Beverly Adaeze: Pan-African by Accident

Beverly Iweala (professional name Beverly Adaeze) is of the same generational cohort as Stella Dlangalala, but in other ways her story more closely resembles that of Thenjiwe Moseley. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, her family left for the United States when she was 7 years old, eventually settling in Houston, Texas. She grew up in two cultures: Houston is home to the largest Nigerian American community in the United States (Coritz et al., 2023), and so, unlike Thenjiwe, Adaeze did not feel disconnected from the African side of her identity. In Houston, she grew up around people with roots in the same village as her family, and at her childhood daycare she was cared for by a Nigerian woman who she came to regard as her “second mother” (Adaeze, Interview by author, Virtual, 20 March 2023). Still, she says, the “American” side of her identity made her an “unconventional African.” Her parents encouraged her to become a doctor, but she studied sociology and Spanish at university instead. While at university she was also able to travel—first to Spain, and then to Italy and the Czech Republic—and she fell in love with travel itself. “Typically that’s not what we do,” she explains, “normally Nigerians just plant [them]selves in one place and . . . stay there” (Adaeze, Interview by author, Virtual, 20 March 2023).

Adaeze describes herself as “naturally timid” as a result of being an only child for the first 14 years of her life, and the first time she remembers performing in public was in skits for her university’s African student association. With so little experience performing live in front of people, social media allowed her to confer with friends before posting videos while also helping her build confidence. Like Thenjiwe and Dlangalala, her content often shows her embodying exaggerated versions of family members she interacted with growing up, revealing the ways in which her childhood, while not geographically “African,” resonated with that of other Nigerians in the diaspora, Nigerians within Nigeria, and indeed other Africans, as her subsequent experience in South Africa attested.

As her social media accounts began to grow and attract brand collaborations, Adaeze continued to seek out unfamiliar experiences. Once international travel became possible after the most acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Adaeze fulfilled a lifelong dream of living abroad by moving to Colombia for a year, continuing to film content while away. Today, Beverly Adaeze has 548,000 followers on TikTok, 224,000 followers on Instagram, and runs a successful business emceeing events in the Houston area. While she estimates her audience to be about 80% women and predominantly Nigerian American, she has also been struck by the level of support she has received from unanticipated quarters. “I’m not sure how my videos ended up on South African TikTok or Twitter,” she recalls, “but it actually blew my mind when I visited, there was not a day that I went without someone recognizing me in South Africa” (Adaeze, Interview by author, Virtual, 20 March 2023). Not only has Adaeze, managed to build a large online audience for her comedy despite lacking experience in drama or stand-up, she has attracted devoted audiences in countries she has never been to by lampooning her specific experiences within a Nigerian American family. Her journey with comedy has greatly increased her awareness of the global African diaspora and the ties that connect it:

It just shows that we all, all the African countries, we really relate. Even Haitians and Jamaicans, they can also relate as well. . .We just have certain things in common like overly superstitious and religious moms and the bum uncles and, you know, we’re just really not too different. (Adaeze, Interview by author, Virtual, 20 March 2023)

Adaeze’s success outside the Nigerian diaspora, like Majimbo’s outside Kenya, has inspired her to think more broadly about her professional goals. One of her most important confidantes within the comedy content creation space is Julie Mango (real name Juliet Bodley), a Jamaican American creator based in the United States (Gordon, n.d.), and she has been thinking about embarking on more ambitious storytelling projects inspired by the Senegalese American comedy writer and actor Issa Rae (Adaeze, Interview by author, Virtual, 20 March 2023). “I don’t think I’m just funny as a Nigerian,” Adaeze explains, “I actually want to do things that are closer to S.N.L. [Saturday Night Live] and Chappelle’s Show . . . where I’m not using any Nigerian accents, where I’m able to be dramatic and showcase my skill in other ways” (Adaeze, Interview by author, Virtual, 20 March 2023). Like Elsa Majimbo, Thenjiwe Moseley, and Stella Dlangalala, then, for Adaeze social media comedy is less an end in itself than a means of securing other career opportunities.

Grappling With the Heterogeneity of Audiences

One theme that comes out very strongly in all three case studies is the complicated nature of these comedians’ audiences. To be a comedic creator on social media requires building and maintaining followers on multiple platforms, from Facebook to Instagram to X and Tiktok, to say nothing of Thenjiwe and Dlangalala’s success on television and at live comedy shows. These platforms each optimize different kinds of content—and, crucially for researchers, attract different audiences with different expectations. Each of these platforms is also algorithmically driven, which adds a significant degree of uncertainty to the question of whether their content will ultimately find its intended audience. An Instagram post, according to Adaeze, means “guaranteed engagement every single time; it’s consistency; I know this is going to reach at least this amount of people.” TikTok, on the contrary, is notorious for its fickle algorithm, holding the potential to supercharge or stifle a creator’s engagement at virtually any time. Even so, it has its uses—Adaeze finds TikTok to be a less appearance-obsessed platform than Instagram, one where she can be “more raw and authentic” (Adaeze, Interview by author, Virtual, 20 March 2023). On the contrary, Thenjiwe actively avoids associating with X and Black Twitter because, in her view, the platform is too full of “keyboard warriors . . . always out there to fight” (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023). Indeed, different groups of followers demand different things: Beverly Adaeze and Stella Dlangalala actively work to broaden their appeal beyond African Mom and Red Shirt content, respectively, while a video criticizing a stand-up set performed in Nigeria by Thenjiwe in 2017—but only uploaded to YouTube in 2024—recently went viral on TikTok (@mseazar2196, 2024).

The fact that these creators derive a large amount of their earnings from corporate collaborations (including government departments and state-owned corporate enterprises) is another dimension of the audience that researchers cannot afford to ignore. Through private gigs and social media advertising campaigns, corporate entities are highly influential players whose goals are highly likely to—at least sometimes—be at variance with the objectives and aspirations of creators and their non-corporate audiences. As a result, comedy influencers need to tread carefully. In Dlangalala’s words, “people can tell when you’re doing something now just to get paid,” which means that one has to be very deliberate about finding collaborations which maintain their brand integrity (Dlangalala, Interview by author, 27 February 2023). Thenjiwe notes how difficult it can be to make such choices, recalling how she “used to get also a lot of government corporate gigs [in South Africa], but then the minute I realized that it’s just their way of misusing state funds, I stopped doing them” (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023).

As researchers, all this should complicate the way we think about creative figures and their audiences. In a media landscape where the public overwhelmingly related to artists through live performance, it was easier to refer to “their audience” as a singular entity with a particular set of characteristics. Now, however, as people demand much more frequent and intimate access to creators through various social media platforms, we need to think of audiences as something much more heterogeneous and eclectic, ranging from die-hard fans to people who are only interacting with a particular creator’s content due to a quirk in an algorithm. We need to be especially alert to these dynamics and note the ways in which being a social media influencer requires managing a landscape in which their content is not just accepted, rejected, or ignored, but also debated within and among their social media followings.

Social Media Comedy and the Female Body

For Thenjiwe, gender plays a profound role in comedy, and she attributes at least some of her success to her efforts to resist stereotypes about Zulu women. “A lot of funny women are scared to show they are funny, because we’re supposed to be beauty-conscious, we’re supposed to behave like a lady,” she observes, echoing a common refrain—even though in home settings, she adds, women are often funnier than men (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023). For women creators, she avers, social media benefits women comedians by helping them avoid the open-mics that leave women most vulnerable to sexual and economic exploitation. At the same time, she freely conceded social media’s negative consequences—its impact on women’s mental health and body image, as well as social and political discourse. “I would love to see a Black Twitter where people are encouraging each other, where people are talking positive things about themselves and about being Black,” but, as it is, she says, “I don’t want to be part of a culture that destroys” (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023). Because of social media, Thenjiwe has been able to hone a bicultural comedic presence—cutting her teeth in Britain’s extensive and multifaceted stand-up scene while simultaneously building an audience of devoted Zulu-speaking followers half a world away.

Stella Dlangalala, despite living in South Africa her whole life, does not foreground these concerns to the same extent. Nevertheless, she is aware that much of her TikTok success has come from playing male characters like Red Shirt, and is careful not to represent herself online in only one way. Given that Beverly Adaeze describes her audience as 80% women, it is perhaps not surprising that does not report having much trouble with viewers who have a problem with female comedic creators. Nonetheless, since she came to comedy from the beauty industry (Adaeze was working as a hair stylist when she first delved into content creation), she is highly attuned to the mental health challenges that can come with being widely perceived online, and takes regular breaks from social media to regulate them.

As discussed above, laughter entails a curious interplay between the voluntary and the involuntary, the intellectual and the instinctual. It is a phenomenon that manifests in the physical body and is deeply entangled with the other layers of meaning mapped on to the gendered body. Like Siv Ngesi, Thenjiwe acknowledges the sexual subtext of joke telling: “most of them [African men] are not going to allow their wife to go and stand in front of men, making them laugh for a quick buck . . . their family’s going to judge them as if [their] wife is a prostitute” (Moseley, Interview by author, Virtual, 3 March 2023). African women’s comedy on social media disrupts the idea that this kind of “penetrative” humor is a male prerogative. On an even deeper level, the range of ways women like Elsa Majimbo, Thenjiwe, Stella Dlangalala, and Beverly Adaeze present themselves online disrupts the idea that women’s presentation online must always orient itself toward the mainstream patriarchal gaze. From the audacious intimacy of Elsa Majimbo’s first viral cell phone videos—lying on a pillow, without makeup, camera close to her face, interspersing her words with bites of potato chips—to Stella Dlangalala’s impersonations of malume (uncle) characters and Adaeze’s sketches about family elders—their collective message is that there are a multiplicity of different ways to be an African woman on social media, just as there are many different ways to watch women who are making people laugh on social media. As a cohort, female influencers whose accounts center comedic content are thus uniquely positioned to address issues of sexism online. They are on the frontlines of demonstrating what it can and should mean to interact as a woman with the incredible potential engines of creativity now at people’s fingertips.

Coda: Toward a Theory of Algorithmic Mystery

Today’s social media landscape offers women comedic creators incredible potential rewards, but is undergirded by an alarming precarity. Social media algorithms can accomplish in a few hours what months or years of marketing and promotion might otherwise do, but they are remarkably opaque. “Sometimes the numbers grow slowly on social media,” as Dlangalala (Interview by author, 27 February 2023) puts it, “and you’re like, ‘Damn, am I doing something wrong?’ because the views are so low . . . you just need that one video that will then get people to notice you.” Trusting that one’s viral moment will come—and when it comes, that it will be able to translate into lasting success, requires a significant and perhaps not entirely rational level of faith. The case studies presented in this article illustrate what success looks like for one small selection of successful African women comedy influencers, but exclude legions of other would-be creators whose breakout moments have not yet come, and whose paths to success, given the ever-changing social media landscape, may look quite different from the careers examined here.

The phenomenology of algorithms demands further scholarly attention, focusing on both content creators and platform users. Boosters of social media in its first decade promised a creative landscape without elite gatekeepers—an extraordinary opportunity for women in particular to evade systemic bias and control their own comedic journeys. Yet, the reality, as Dlangalala and Adaeze’s experiences of unexpected virality attest, has been more complicated. Yes, impersonal algorithms can reinforce familiar biases, as an ever-increasing body of quantitative research has shown (Fosch-Villaronga et al., 2021; Rohrbach et al., 2024). But algorithms are also fickle and idiosyncratic, in ways that can either discourage or supercharge content creators’ best efforts. On TikTok, the algorithm is understood to be so central to the overall user experience that users repeat common refrains in comments sections like “I am responsible for my own fyp [For You page]” and “mythical fyp pull” on strange or decidedly non-viral videos that appear when scrolling.

In an era where so much ink has been spilled by commentators over media echo chambers, sounding the alarm at the degree to which algorithms are driving us deeper and deeper into loops of content that reinforce our pre-existing prejudices (Chakya, 2024; Feezell et al., 2021; Levy, 2021), I suggest using the term “algorithmic mystery” (inspired in part by Reddy et al., 2019) to refer to the ways in which algorithms do, in fact, deliver up the unexpected—an important yet neglected dimension of social media’s power.

The algorithmic “black box” that Bucher (2018) eloquently describes from a user’s perspective presents a formidable yet unavoidable challenge to a content creator, especially operating in a comedic register. Bucher (2018) warns us not to think of algorithmic logics as “somehow more hidden and black-boxed than the human mind” (p. 60), and for all comedians the human mind is the original black box to be opened. Being a successful social media comedian, then, requires gambling on the chances of opening two black boxes millions of times simultaneously—one human and one nonhuman. Focusing more closely on this dynamic, as well as the ways we discuss or ignore algorithms will help us work toward a more nuanced and sophisticated critique of social media technology and the role it plays in people’s lives, both in Africa and beyond.