Akan Humor

It has not been easy to come up with an allencompassing definition of humor, but researchers seem to agree that humor must be funny or amusing. Simply put, anything devoid of this feature cannot qualify as being humorous. Very little research work has been done on African humor in general and Akan humor in particular, though joking constitutes a prominent sociocultural activity among the Akan people of Ghana. Owusu Brempong makes an indirect reference to the joke genre in his folkloristic study of verbal insults among the Bono, a subgroup of the Akan people. Brempong indirectly connects jokes with insults, indicating that some insults and youth game songs are known to exist in joke form. He goes on to mention that most of the comedy ...