Kingsley Ogbonna, who played alongside top comedian Okey Bakassi, is back on the block. He’s back for good to put laughter in the mouth of his fans, who over the years had yarned for him. He talks to Blockbuster on his comeback. Excerpts:
“My name is Kingsley Ogbonna. Dauda is my stage name and it came when I had a programme on urban sex in school. I was pumping my manhood and the audience said, ‘ah, this is Dauda’ referring me to the comic character, Dauda, the sexy guy. That’s how I got the nick name.
“The audience inspires me a lot. When you get on stage and the audience does not accept you, it means you have nothing to offer. If you crack a joke and you don’t make any impact, obviously, your career will start going down. I anchored Basket mouth’s wedding recently and he really commended me for it.
When you make fun of your parents on stage, how does that go down with you? That is why the comedy business is very bad. You are being paid to make other people laugh but your mind is being blown away back stage and this can give you stroke. Even if you have to abuse your mother, we all know that your mother is not a bad person, but in order to make people laugh, you start abusing your mother and father.
Sometimes you run out of jokes but people don’t know. Once you come to the stage, people will start laughing simply because you are popular and you just pick up your joke from that place. But I learnt my lesson about five years ago at Ojez Club in Lagos. I was anchoring an event when actor Hans Anuku walked in, in his usual mafia style. I know he doesn’t do drugs but I capitalized on his mannerism to start cracking jokes. Immediately I started, somebody just shouted ‘my friend, get out of that stage’, then I knew I was in trouble.
The up-coming comedians are trying to take food from our mouth. Whenever you attend a show, before mounting the stage to perform, you find out that the up-coming comedians have cracked your jokes, and this will throw you off balance. This happened to me recently in Port Harcourt where Okey Bakassi and I went to perform. Before I went on stage, someone approached me that some young comedians had already cracked my jokes and I had to pull out some other jokes from the archives. I didn’t find it funny at all.
One of my achievements is travelling to the UK, to fashion out plans on how we can move the movie industry forward. I was making movies in the UK and also combining them with those of Nigeria, and the movies have earned some awards.
Yes, I have experienced failure. I must be very frank with you; it is not good for one to think that he has arrived. At a time, I thought I had arrived but before I knew it, some comedians just overtook me. I consider that a failure on my part. Now, I have taken my time to study everything carefully before coming back this time.”
