“Kwabena-19” and “Sohyia Deskansere”: An analysis of humour on the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana.

This chapter examines the rhetoric of humour as a benign element of communication about the COVID-19 pandemic during the period of the partial lockdown in Ghana. It specifically examines how the humourous discourses are used as a vehicle to share valuable information on the nature of the novel virus, its symptoms and how to contain its spread. The study explores jocular soundbites from Peace FM, a radio station in Accra, comical videos from WhatsApp, YouTube and TikTok platforms, and semi-structured telephone interviews with ten purposively sampled participants from Kwabenya in the Ga East Municipality of Ghana. The findings show that through the on-air jocular conversations on the COVID-19 pandemic and its related issues, consumers of the media shared their bottled-up socio-cultural experiences on religion, politics, parenting, ethnic relations, and infidelity using humorous episodes on the media as the basis for such discussions. Thus, the comical effects of the soundbites and jocular conversations during the pandemic helped to reduce the audiences’ fear and possibly lowered their levels of anxiety. The study recommends consumers of such media messages be intentional in accessing the embedded information on the COVID-19 pandemic.