Humour, Resistance and Socioeconomic Disillusionment in Nigerian Youth Discourse: A Pragmatic-Critical Discourse Analysis of Anti-Proverbs

Abstract Anti-proverbs, defined as deliberate modifications of conventional proverbs that subvert their traditional meanings, have emerged as a distinctive mode of socioeconomic commentary in contemporary Nigerian public discourse. Circulating widely on social media platforms and in informal conversational contexts, these reformulated proverbs offer Nigerian youth a linguistically creative and rhetorically potent means of engaging with the material realities of fuel price escalation, inflation, unemployment, governance failures, and systemic nepotism. This article examines a corpus of fifty Nigerian anti-proverbs drawn from social media and informal public discourse, analysing how these texts generate humour and critical implicatures while functioning as forms of grassroots discursive resistance. The study adopts an integrated Pragmatic-Critical Discourse Analysis framework that draws on Grice's (1975) Cooperative Principle and theory of conversational implicature, Sperber and Wilson's (1986) Relevance Theory, Fairclough's (1992) three-dimensional model of CDA, and van Dijk's (1998) socio-cognitive approach to ideology and power. Through qualitative textual analysis organised across eight thematic categories, the study demonstrates that Nigerian anti-proverbs systematically flout Gricean maxims to generate politically charged implicatures, reconstruct traditional wisdom to reflect contemporary socioeconomic failure, and constitute a shared discursive identity among Nigerian youth grounded in collective experience of institutional exclusion. The findings contribute to pragmatics scholarship on humour and implicature, to CDA research on African resistance discourse, and to Nigerian sociolinguistics through its documentation of evolving proverbial language as a vehicle for political critique. Keywords:   anti-proverbs, conversational implicature, critical discourse analysis, Nigerian youth discourse, humour, resistance discourse, socioeconomic critique