Comedy no longer regarded as job for dropouts

Abiodun Olopade, a comedian, popularly known as "MC Abbey", said the profession had grown in leaps and bounds, and no longer regarded as a job for dropouts. Olopade told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos on Wednesday that the professionals had carvee a niche for themselves.

He stressed that any creative act was good enough to be nurtured in order to make it relevant in the entertainment circuit. The comedian told NAN that comedy as career, had ascended to unimaginable heights, and that the acceptance level was very high; compared to what it was in the years gone by.

"People now see us as professionals; we are not dropouts or people who are idling away. It is now seen as a business, our passion and profession and so people see us in that light. It sure is getting better, when we started comedy, nobody gave us a chance, but we were unrelenting, we built it and it started yielding dividends and people started respecting us.

According to him, it is not easy to make people laugh, you have to have the gift of doing that to be able to excel. "You have to be able to face the audience and try not to crack jokes that will not be abusive but send a message across. You have to also try not to repeat the jokes that your colleagues have previously rendered, in order to stand out of the crowd. You have to be abreast of the happenings around the world and your terrain and to also lecture people on what is right and wrong”, he said.

He told NAN that the job was not for lazy persons and urged those that are engaged in it to strive to build on what they met on ground. "We will always be grateful to Ali Baba, who saw the vision and continued and helped trained a lot of us.’’