Socio-semiotic Study of Family Dynamics in Selected Taaooma’s Youtube Comedy Skits

Family dynamics are the unique patterns of communication between family members, which unveils how they negotiate roles and power relations, and secure emotional connections. This paper explores visual and linguistic resources in selected Taaooma’s YouTube comedy skits, to explore how humor is constructed and how Nigerian cultural practices and family dynamics are encoded in humor and satirical contents. Kress’s (2010) Multimodality serves as the theoretical framework. Data for the study comprises five selected Taaooma’s comedy skits, produced in Nigeria. The findings reveal that Taaooma employs costume and makeup, gesture, language and dialogue, setting and character, to reflect and reinforce Nigerian cultural practices and societal issues. These semiotic resources demonstrate that comedy skits are products of multiple layering of communicative modes. The study concludes that Taaooma’s comedy skits functions as social commentary that critiques everyday social tensions: parental control versus youthful resistance, religious ideals versus moral lapses, and shifting gender expectations within the Nigerian household. The research therefore positions her skits as significant multimodal texts that contribute to the understanding of sociocultural and communicative practices in Nigeria.