The leader of the rave-making Xploit Comedy,  Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo, has  revealed how the idea of positing skits on social media came about.

Xploit Comedy is very vibrant in the Nigerian digital space with about 285,000 followers on Instagram; over 400,000 followers on facebook and about well over 90,000 subscribers on the YouTube page

A top member of the group, which started from church,  Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo, aka Brizy, said he and other members of the group have their fans to thank for giving them the inspiration to be posting skits on the social media.

According to Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo, :”The idea was sold to us by our fans, who mooted the idea for us to embrace social media platforms to connect more with fans.

“Basically, when our performances became quite popular in the church and people saw how hilarious we were, some of our fans began to approach us and advised us to start a drama group and post our skits on Facebook and Instagram”, added Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo.

Though it was not a smooth ride when they began posting of skits.on facebook, with time,  Xploit Comedy was able to overcome the early challenge.

In the words of  Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo, “It was not a smooth ride; to be honest, it was not really easy because we had a lot of negative comments that could have weighed us down but we used them to motivate ourselves.

“We were very determined to succeed and the negative comments fueled us to put in more work and we are glad about the results today. There weren’t any challenges apart from the negative comments we got,” added Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo.

Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo said the fans’ behaviour influenced the kind of skits they posted on the social media despite the fact that the group had its birth from the church.

“If you check some of our old skits, they were more decent but, in the world, we live in today, sexual contents are what the world really wants to hear.

“However, it does not mean that our skits define who we are as individuals. It is what the fans want to watch and for the success of our brand, we have to give the fans what they want; we have to satisfy them.

“We noticed that whenever we do skits like that, they go viral. The fans prefer when contents contain elements of sex because most people on the social media are youths and they find many of these posts funny.

” Since most of these posts border on relationships, most of the youths can easily relate to them and they find them attractive. That is why we tilted towards posting some skits with sexual innuendos.”

On which of the skits boosted their popularity on the social media,  Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo said,  “The skit that boosted our followership was the scanning bucket skit. The whole idea of the skit was that anybody who wanted to get married would be put inside a bucket and the bucket would tell how many partners the person had had; this would help the intended spouse know how much to pay for bride price. The skit went viral.”

Recalling how the group started with the new media to propagate their comedy, Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo said that “We started with Facebook and that is the platform that has our highest number of fans. Even though we had always had the Instagram account, we did not start focusing on it until about a year ago so it was dormant.

“We did not really show interest in it because we were busy building our brands through Facebook and YouTube. It was recently that we began to invest our time and energy on our Instagram page and it is yielding a positive result because our skits are travelling really fast.

“Right now, we have about 285,000 followers on Instagram; on our Facebook page, we have over 400,000 followers while our YouTube page boasts of about 90,000 subscribers.” said Lazarus Emmanuel Chibugo, aka Brizy.