6.1Performing the heteronormative status of women: Females as appendages of men

In general, Nigerian comediennes joke about women’s intimate relationship with men in their routines. Their narratives either focus on getting married or being in a marital relationship. The reason for this is that marriage is a highly revered institution in Nigeria. Many Nigerian cultures see marriage as an achievement and an indicator of a high sense of social responsibility. Married individuals are assumed to be individually responsible and to have redeemed their social incompleteness. Unmarried individuals who have attained the marriageable age are deemed less responsible and lacking in the demeanour that attracts spouses. While being unmarried for a man may not be too problematic as the man would be stereotyped as an individual enjoying bachelorhood, being unmarried for women is met with negative stereotyping, which includes framing such women as lacking the comportment for marriage and framing them as promiscuous. Given this background, the topic of marriage and other intimate relationships with men serves as a strategy for establishing shared knowledge through which humour could be realized in the interaction. Given also that not all women have positive and palatable experiences in marriage, one would expect comediennes to perform subversive humour that would undermine the restrictive framing of women based on marriage, or perform jokes that target men’s misdemeanour and maltreatment of their wives in marriage. Rather, what some of the jokes of the comediennes emphasize is the importance of marriage in the society. Their routines suggest that marriage is an important marker of feminine identity.

The comediennes in their jokes about marriage construct a feminine identity that is heteronormative, which is depicted in a woman’s role in her marriage to a (biological) male. Their intention is to construct a female identity that is based on traditional gender role as wife while at the same time, instantiate some discourse strategies through which women repetitively perform and acquire such socially constructed role. Central to the humorous representation of women’s image are the linguistic strategies through which contextualized meanings are generated in the routines. An example of this is seen in Lepacious Bose’s routine on women and their prayers for husbands.

In Excerpt (1), the comedienne performs different social images for women vis-à-vis their roles in marriage and their marital statuses. A primary way with which she achieves the performance of different social images for women is by instantiating the discourse strategy identified by Rutter (2001)Rutter, Jason 2001 “Rhetoric in Stand-up Comedy: Exploring Performer-Audience Interaction.” Stylistyka 10: 307–325. as character footing. According to Ruiz-Gurillo and Linares-Bernabeu (2020Ruiz-Gurillo, Leonor, and Esther Lineares-Bernabeu 2020 “Subversive Humour in Spanish Stand-up Comedy.” Humour: International Journal of Humour Research 33 (1): 29–54. , 33), it is a “technique in which the comedian quotes another person, typically by using direct speech and paralinguistic signals to parody their speech style.” With this strategy, the comedienne demarcates the images of women she is performing and discursively differentiates the different types of marriage-based identities for women. Character footing is significant for gender construction in the excerpt because Lepacious Bose instantiates it based on the shared cultural knowledge of women’s identity that is grounded in their marital status. Thus, the character footing is not just a form of performance strategy but a contextualization cue which suggests the comedienne’s intention of foregrounding the importance of marriage in the Nigerian sociocultural context. It also suggests the kind of inferences the comedienne wants the audience to make while interpreting the monologue.

Lepacious Bose adopts character footing in lines 3 and 18–21. In line 3, there is explicit modulation of her voice to indicate it. She uses a softer, slower and breathy state voice which is not found in other points where she indicates the female character voice. What she tries to do is to map women into two categories; the first is nonchalant while the second is passionate and zealous, and the difference between these two extremes lies in the subject that attracts the attitude. The first subject is Nigeria while the second is husband. In performing how a woman prays for Nigeria, she portrays a relaxed attitude while in performing how a woman prays for (her) husband, she portrays an aggressive and conscientious tone (lines 18–21). To validate her representation of how Nigerian women take marriage seriously, the comedienne gives two very short anecdotes of two women and their reactions to getting married. Here, there is an exemplification of how feminine agency in marriage is constructed, which is based on the age of the lady getting married. In the first instance, she assigns agency to the 25-year-old by giving a voice to the character in line 10 (for instance, she screamed after uttering the statement, I’m getting married to indicate the character’s excitement). In the second instance where a 38-year-old lady is getting married, she assigns agency to the mother of the bride. In this second instance, character footing is marked by the discourse type and style, specifically by assigning the discourse act of gratitude to the mother and using the focus marker o in NP to intensify the mother’s discourse act (line 13). The comedienne’s exemplifications are based on cultural presuppositions. In the first example, it is assumed that the lady is getting married at an appropriate age while in the second one, it is presupposed that the lady at 38 is getting married late because she has been unable to attract suitors. Given these background assumptions and the individuals to whom the comedienne assigns voice in the narrative, the second example generates an implicature that affirms the background assumption. Since the mother of the 38-year old lady has been accused of being responsible for her daughter’s plight (she was called a witch), the comedienne’s use of discourse type of gratitude and focus marker for emphasis generates an implicature that the mother is not responsible for her daughter’s late marriage. To be called a witch in the Nigerian sociocultural context means associating the referent with evil omen that attracts bad luck. In the routine therefore, the comedienne implies that the mother tries to show that she is not the one responsible for her daughter’s late marriage. It should be noted that the focus marker is a contextualization cue for suggesting the implicature.

Another significant part of the excerpt that supports my analytical position is the Nigerian culture-specific conceptual properties of the key words. These key terms serve as the indicator of cultural presuppositions that are relevant to the interpretation of the routine. These key words are prayer, marry and husband. With these words, the comedienne specifies not only the denotative linguistic sense of the words, but also the collective cultural model. On the one hand, the culture-specific conceptual properties are shaped by deep-seated repeated practices while on the other, they are sustained through stereotyping. Given the shared knowledge, the comedienne will expect that the audience activates not only the semantic properties of the words (e.g. their collocations, lexical fields) but also their culture specific conceptual properties which bring about their figurative meanings. For instance, the word prayer in the Nigerian Pentecostal circle is seen as a means to an end and as a spiritual exercise with which adherents can have what they desire. Nigerian Pentecostal Christians could use prayer to command, kill or render anyone they desire armless or impotent. Prayer is not just a religion-based activity since it is not limited to the religion parlance; it is a discourse type that has different contextual meanings. Prayer can express gratitude, be used as combat weapon, be operationalized as medications for ailments etc. Praying, therefore, is a pragmatic exercise that can be used to do things in the real world like evoking an action and motivating positive social or economic changes. Therefore, by portraying that women pray in a relaxed manner when praying for Nigeria, she suggests that women are not naturally concerned with the country’s socioeconomic predicaments. As a counterpart, by portraying that women pray with aggression when praying for husbands, she suggests that Nigerian women are obsessed with their marriages and their social status as married women. An implicature that could be derived from these different poles through which she portrays women in her monologue is that Nigerian women are not very committed to nation building but they are very committed to family/home building. In other words, Nigerian women are satisfied with and more committed to their mundane social identity as wives. Therefore, in her bid to use shared cultural knowledge as the set-up for her monologue, she portrays women in the traditional patriarchal perspective which limits the role of women to the domestic context and entrenches their status as appendages to their husbands.

Furthermore, my position on the comic’s representation of women is strengthened by the lexical field dimension of the key words in the monologue. For instance, at the semantic level, anointing collocates with prayer, given the word-specific semantic properties of the two words. However, in the comedienne’s monologue, anointing is absent in the prayer for Nigeria but it is present in the prayer for husband. In this intentional collocational matching of anointing with a particular form of prayer, there is a thematic elaboration which foregrounds the kind of identity she is portraying. Thus, the comedienne’s lexical collocation functions as humour indicator which she uses for reinforcing the gender status quo.

6.2Playing with taboos: Illustrating social inhibitions

Another way through which Nigerian comediennes uphold the traditional framing of women is by adhering to social inhibitions on speech. Given gender preferential language (Wardhaugh and Guller 2015Wardhaugh, Ronald, and Jenet M. Fuller 2015 An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. 7th edition. Malden: Wiley Blackwell), femininity is associated with avoidance of taboo words while masculinity is associated with such usages. Research on the nexus between gender and joke has also suggested differences between men and women’s use of humour (Bochetoux 2014Bouchetoux, Fancois 2014 “Gender Trouble in Sketches from Japan.” In Gender and Humour: Interdisciplinary and International Perspectives, ed. by Delia Chiaro, and Raffaella Baccolini, 100–122. New York: Routledge.). For example, Kotthoff (2006)Kotthoff, Helga 2006 “Gender and Humour: The State of the Art.” Journal of Pragmatics 38, 4–25. argues that feminine humour avoids overt aggression whereas male humour displays competence in verbal and physical fighting in many cultures. In addition, the joking context of stand-up comedy permits the use of obscenity for performative aesthetics and social critiques (Seizer 2011Seizer, Susan 2011 “On the Uses of Obscenity in Live Stand-up Comedy.” Anthropological Quarterly 84 (1): 209–234. ; Antoine 2016Antoine, Katja 2016 “ ‘Pushing the Edge’ of Race and Gender Hegemonies through Stand-up Comedy: Performing Slavery as Anti-racist Critique.” Ethnofoor Humour 28 (1): 35–54). Thus, stand-up comedy is not given to civility in speech. Also, Ruiz-Gurillo and Linares-Bernabeu (2020)Ruiz-Gurillo, Leonor, and Esther Lineares-Bernabeu 2020 “Subversive Humour in Spanish Stand-up Comedy.” Humour: International Journal of Humour Research 33 (1): 29–54. note that taboo and deviant topics are pivotal to the performance of gendered identity in stand-up contexts. Thus, taboo topics constitute a decisive pragmatic feature of subversive stand-up comedy. Subjects such as sex and other deviant topics facilitate how comedians negotiate both interactional and background identities in the stand-up venues (cf. Sunday and Filani 2018Sunday, Adesina B., and Ibukun Filani 2018 “Playing with Culture: Nigerian Stand-up Comedians Joking with Cultural Beliefs and Representations.” Humour: International Journal of Humour Research 32 (1): 97–124 ). However, what the sampling of Nigerian comediennes reveals is that, unlike their male counterparts that explicitly perform obscene locutions, the comediennes use evasive strategies while performing routines on erotic activities. Although the comediennes joke a lot about sexual activity, they do it with civility and count on the audience to deploy the shared knowledge in deducing what their intention is.

My interest in Excerpt (2) is how the comedienne adopts evasive strategies while portraying an image of a wife who knows and satisfies the sensual needs of her husband. Humorous narratives always present a viewpoint, as they explicitly or implicitly portray an image which could reinforce or subvert existing cultural imagery. Such viewpoints are enhanced by the linguistic choices and manipulation of inferential strategies. In the present case, the comedienne is seen using the prevalent cultural image of women, their beauty and their marriage, to portray herself as possessing the ideal image of a woman and a wife. Lexemes are labels through which a language expresses concepts and they are also discursive means through which language users systematically build images through their utterances. The comedienne is seen deploying concepts and building the ideal woman with them. She manipulates the cultural conceptual links between beauty, marriage and divorce. This manipulation entails creating ad hoc conceptual corresponding relationships between beauty and divorce on the one hand, and lack of beauty and staying married on the other hand. It should be noted that part of the linguistic and cultural meaning of being beautiful is that a lady attracts suitors, therefore, she should be married. On the other hand, the absence of beauty culturally indicates that a lady lacks the physical demeanour to attract husbands. Thus, the ad hoc conceptual relationships she instantiated are embedded with culturally based incongruities. It should be noted that ad hoc concept constructions are part of the pragmatic strategies for generating humorous effects (Yus 2016Yus, Francisco 2016 Humour and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ).

The intention of Helen Paul is to use the ad hoc corresponding relationship to build an argument that beauty does not guarantee getting and staying married. Her argument for staying married is that a lady must “infer” and meet that sensual needs of her husband. While such identity is important for the comedienne to construct her routine, she is also conscious of the communicative competence that determines language use in the macro context and prohibits obscene language in the public sphere. Therefore, in observing this social prohibition, she negotiates her intention of foregrounding love making as a primary duty for a married woman through pragmatic strategies inherent in her linguistic choices. First, by starting the bit on marriage, she opens up the possibility of considering several coresense meanings of being married, one of which is love making. Second, by referring to her husband as baby guy, she makes more salient the act of love making. Her suggestion that the husband’s illness needs only a massage further strengthens the assumption that she is talking about love making (and not beauty) as a means for keeping one’s husband. Another manipulated lexis in her routine is treat, which possesses the salient meaning of knowing how to meet a man’s sexual needs in her usage. Also, her use of the first person plural pronoun in Line 4 is to construct an in-group feminine identity with women in the comedy venue. The pronoun serves as an identity marker for mapping herself and other women into the group of women that Know how to treat men. Here, she uses her lines to represent a common women’s desire in the macro context, keeping one’s husband and staying married, so as to create solidarity with the women in the context of the performance.

Since her humorous sequence is on love making as a necessary duty for women to keep their husbands, the evasive strategy of verbal indirectness is seen in her intentional avoidance of the word ‘sex’ and other terms related to it. In line 9, she uses an innuendo to hint at lovemaking. Although the interactional context of stand-up comedy permits the use of sexually explicit content, she refrains from using it. Her indirectness is in a bid to keep with the sociocultural image of a responsible woman who uses polite speech in public and in the presence of children. Obeng (1997)Obeng, Samuel G. 1997 “Language and Politics: Indirectness in Political Discourse.” Discourse and Society 8 (1): 49–83. defines verbal indirectness as a communicative strategy in which participants abstain from directness in order to make their utterances consistent with face and politeness. Another form of indirectness found in the sample is the metaphorical use of expressions. This is seen in Excerpt (3) which is also a humorous sequence on love making.

The focus here is the comedienne’s use of the NP slang Oblorblor, which could have different contextual implicatures. Here, the comedienne employs the term metaphorically in a bid to avoid mentioning the act of love making in public. Since a specific coresense cannot be assigned to the term, the audience would rather search for its meaning based on the co-text and other contextualization cues given by the comedienne in the emerging common ground. In this sense, they would be guided by the propositions in line 6: the comedienne asserting that she could not narrate what happened to her. In the Nigerian sociolinguistic context, this kind of proposition is used in hinting at what should not be spoken about (e.g. taboo) and events that are considered as miraculous (e.g. surviving a ghastly motor accident). Since a primary meaning of line 6 has to do with expressing socially prohibited acts, I will argue that given the stand-up comedy context, the participants are prone to find love making the most salient meaning of the term. This is further reinforced by the statements in lines 7 and 8, I dey on top and I dey go up and down, which has the salient meaning of sex position and the act of pelvic thrusting. Here, the comedienne uses two strategies of verbal indirectness: the slang, Oblorblor with the metaphorical meaning of the act of lovemaking, and circumlocution, I dey on top, I dey go up and down, to talk about lovemaking. Just as in Excerpt (2), the verbal indirectness of Real Warri Pikin is motivated by her desire to maintain positive face as a woman as specified in the shared culture of the participants.

6.3Humour subverting the domestic image of women

As much as there are routines which align with the heteronormative and traditional framing of women, there are also routines that the comediennes use in subverting the traditional role of women. This set of humorous sequences challenges the patriarchal ideology of framing women as appendages to their husbands, which also limit their social roles to the home front. Helen Paul’s monologue on being a working wife illustrates this.

Helen Paul uses her humour in Excerpt (7) to confront advocates of traditional feminine identity that limits women to domestic tasks and prevent them from making their own money. Therefore, the humorous sequence is a subversive humour that challenges the prevailing ideology on gender roles. To achieve the subversive goals of her joke, she adopts two pragmatic strategies: she deploys shared knowledge for the construction of gendered identity and she instantiates terms of address and reference, which according to Holmes and Marra (2002)Holmes, Janet, and Meredith Marra 2002 “Over the Edge? Subversive Humour Between Colleagues and Friends.” Humour 15 (1): 65–87., have to do with the different discourse functions of referring expressions and pronouns in humorous interactions. There are two dimensions of shared knowledge which she deploys, first is the operational knowledge of stand-up comedy performance in Nigeria and the second is the cultural assumption on marriage in Nigeria.

The terms of address and references in the excerpt, people, she, hustler, her, money, madness, mothers, mother-in-law, and PA, pragmatically make salient the relevant background assumption for the interpretation of Helen Paul’s intention. In addition, because she adopts the first person singular pronouns, she makes the humorous sequence appear as a self-anecdote. Thus, the primary narrative strategy here is enhancing the believability of the routine as the audience would assume that the comic is sharing her life experience. Her terms of reference are adopted to foreground the culture-specific conceptual properties of her utterances. Thus, the salient meaning of being married is to be responsible. What is salient from the conceptual properties of being married and responsible, and which is relevant for the comic intention is to avoid nightclubbing, or not being a nighthawk. What suggests this implied proposition is the knowledge of stand-up practice in the country. Comedy performances in Nigeria begin at nightfall and it could extend beyond midnight. However, traditional cultural practices prevent a woman from being a performer who works late into the night. For the married woman in Nigeria, working late into the night means abandoning her primary role and being a performer working late into the night connotes that such a woman is engaged in an activity that is demeaning to femininity. Therefore, the implicature derivable from the sequence is that the comedienne has been accused of being an irresponsible wife.

The critical dimension of Helen Paul’s humorous sequence is to question the negative framing of women that makes them to shirk from the pursuit of their goals. To combat such traditional framing, she describes herself as a hustler. Here again, the comedienne banks on the culture-specific conceptual property of the word to achieve her intention. In the Nigerian sociolinguistic parlance, hustler is the referring expression for individuals who are strongly focused on achieving their goals, especially if such goals involve making money. Thus, in the comedienne’s narrative sense, marriage and being a woman is not a barrier to her career. This interpretation is suggested from how she describes how much financial success her career has brought her. In addition, other discourse strategies like rhetorical questions and reiteration in the excerpt are instantiated to support her subversive stance. The comedienne has used her subversive humour to distort and reconstruct the institutionalized image of a married woman and at the same time, to mock those who are upholding such traditional image of women. This is seen in the last line of the excerpt where the comedienne humorously tags her mother-in-law as her personal assistant. By referring to her mother-in-law as her PA, the comedienne generates some cultural implications that further strengthens the subversive effect of her routine. In the Nigerian cultural sense, mother-in-law is not just a term that indicates kin relationships as it also connotes a matriarchal status that sustains the traditional order. Generally, the position of the wife is assumed to be subservient to that of the mother-in-law. Thus, by referring to her mother-in-law as her PA, she subverts the traditional hierarchical structure of family relations and she implicates that she has power and authority over patriarchal order in her family.

6.4Humour subjectifying the female body

Generally within Nigeria, the female body is used as a motif for humour. It is common to find jokes and skits with humour derived from stereotypes on different aspects of physical femininity like the body, beauty, weight and age. For comediennes too, their feminine body and fashion style readily serve as topics and materials for their routines. The few existing comediennes consistently joke with their feminine appearance to the extent that their humorous sequences on their bodies have become signature tunes that distinguish their humorous style. For instance, Lepacious Bose who was large at the time she joined the comedy industry, is renowned for joking with her body weight. In fact, her stage name is a joke on her body type. Adetunji (2013Adetunji, Akin 2013 “The Interactional Context of Humour in Nigerian Stand-up Comedy.” Pragmatics 23(1): 1–22., 16) analyses her stage name as follows:

The tag “Lepacious Bose” is a humorously ironical name which alludes to the body image of the comedian. The NP term, “lepacious” ordinarily means “very slim” or “skinny”, and thus when used to qualify or describe a lady weighing more than 200 pounds, it not only suggests self-disclosure (an aspect of self-deprecation), it also instantiates punning and promptly invites laughter.

Since these comediennes possess the female body, they actively subjectify it in their jokes. These female performers operate within a cultural context of male hegemony on one hand, and an occupational context that is operationally conceptualised as masculine. While these contexts limit the opportunity of female agency, these comediennes use their humour on femininity to fight for space on one hand and to (re)construct the feminine image on the other hand. Although some of their jokes on physical femininity symbolize women as appendages to men, they still use their jokes on the female body to reclaim their feminine identity. In popular culture, the female body is commonly objectified for men, however these comediennes use it to contest for what they want the female body to mean. Therefore, we have the comediennes performing subversive humour that is fed by cultural stereotypes so as to challenge such stereotypes. I shall cite two instances of this from the data.

Excerpt (5) is a humorous sequence taken from the comedienne’s monologue on marriage. Here, I am interested in how she uses this humorous sequence to reject cultural presuppositions on women’s identity in marriage and to question the general tendency in the culture to exonerate men whenever they are involved in illicit intimate relationships with women who are not their partners. What makes the humorous sequence relevant for this analysis is how the comedienne uses the physical aspects of her femininity (lines 9–11) to ideologically challenge justifying men’s infidelity, and within the same sequence, she uses a physical aspect of femininity to negatively portray men as uncontrollably libidinous (line 14). Central to this ideologically laden humorous sequence are the humour markers and indicators which all function as contextualisation cues. These include aspects of prosody like accent and speech rate, coinages, rhetorical and direct questions to the audience. There is also the use of hyperbole (line 11) to humorously emphasise her feminine body so as to negatively portray men as lustful.

Narratively, what suggests the comic’s intention to challenge men’s cultural positioning in intimate relationships is how she immediately switches from appreciating (the first line) to insulting men (the second line). Furthermore, she instantiates an utterance that foregrounds a cultural bias against women and then she denounces such bias by rejecting the stereotype that women are insatiable. She uses humour markers like word accent for emphasis (e.g. lines 3 and 5), intonation (e.g. lines 3 and 4) and different speech rates (speed) for her statements to indicate different textual and propositional emphases for the audience. For instance, in line 7 where she uses a slower speed for her utterance, she stylistically places emphasis on the simplicity of female needs. There is also the pragmatic use of shared cultural knowledge on intimate relationship, specifically the presupposed role that the female physical appearance plays in making a man stay attracted only to his spouse.

Just as it has been indicated in the preceding sections, the lexical choices of the comedienne are cardinal for achieving her ideological laden intention. In lines 6 and 7, the comedienne uses the collective pronoun to foster gender-based group solidarity with the females in the audience. Thus, with the identity mapping strategy, she foregrounds that it is a woman’s desire to have her partner to herself. Another dimension of her humorous sequence is the description of her physical features in lines 9–10, which she uses to exemplify archetypal feminine body for the audience. Her description is based on the cultural presupposition that the female image being constructed, typified by her physical appearance, is the ideal image for the woman, and that such an image should keep a man from lusting after other women. The implied proposition here is that regardless of a woman’s beauty, her partner may still cheat on her. Furthermore, given that the society usually faults women when intimate relationships break down, her routine challenges the assumption that many women do not have what it takes to keep their men from cheating. The sociocultural effect of using her physical features in this routine is to counter the assumption that men cheat because their women do not have the culturally desired physical and social demeanour.

It is important to comment on how the comedienne interactionally deploys two coinages, tabolas and lap odour. In my view, these two terms are created on the spur of the moment by the comic. However, she counts on the audience to deploy their inferential strategies vis-à-vis the already established background assumptions to deduce the meaning of the terms. In line 16, where she re-echoes the question from the audience on the meaning of lap odour, she retorts at the audience that they should be able to infer the meaning. Here again, we see the comedienne keeping to social inhibition on speech by avoiding mentioning what exactly she is referring to. Given that the humorous sequence is on men having extra intimate relationships, she expects that her audience would relate lap odour with vaginal odour. However, because she is portraying a positive image for women she coins a euphemism which initially seems inaccessible to the audience but is later understood without any explanation from the comedienne. In line 18, she pushes the task of uncovering the referent of lap odour to the audience and their laughter indicates that the intended meaning is uncovered.

My second example of the comediennes joking about their physical appearance is found in Helen Paul’s routine and this is presented in Excerpt (6) below.

Excerpt (6) ridicules women’s fashion consciousness and it is built on the stereotype that women are generally gossip mongers. Furthermore, the cultural assumption here is that women are highly self-conscious, worried about self-image, therefore, they deliberately dress to make fashion statements. It is on these cultural presuppositions that she grounds her utterances and physical acts in the performance sphere. Here, she performs the joke on her physical appearance (removing her wig and the clothing stuck in her underwear to make her buttocks look bigger). The primary intention to target women motivates the choices of lexis that are central to the construction of femininity in Nigeria: wardrobe, married, women, give birth and weave-on. Given the coresenses of these terms, which include a cultural sense of femininity, they interact in a semantic web and function to reiterate the feminine image that the comedienne is projecting: women are always meddling with each other’s affairs. Her intention is to use this background knowledge as the set-up for the salient meaning she is implying in the comedy context, that women always dress to impress and outdo each other. Therefore, there is a deliberate portrayal of the feminine identity as a façade by Helen Paul. The discourse strategy, code switching, which she employs in lines 11 and 13, is a contextualisation cue that emphasizes her framing of women as gossip mongers. While she has been narrating in English, she deliberately code switches to Yoruba in line 11 to instantiate a directive illocutionary act which is a command to mind one’s business. Similarly, in line 13, she also code switches to instantiate an indirect speech act that has a contextual implicature of questioning the sincerity of the targets of the monologue.