By Dayo Showemimo
The man Bunmi Davies is neither an actor nor a comedian, yet he’s a household name in the entertainment industry.
His contributions to the world of comedy since he started producing comedy shows nine years ago have been tremendous. He is the boss of Afrotainment Productions, producers of Stand Up Nigeria.
This lanky showbiz man and Theatre Arts practitioner, who has worked with big and up-and-coming comedians in the industry, in a recent chat with NET recounts how he started the comedy show and the challenges he’s had to deal with. ‘Before Stand Up Nigeria, we were into theater productions, and now we have a new project called ‘Plays’ By Bunmi Davies.
Let me take you back a bit, the first edition of Stand Up Nigeria had under 12 people in attendance at City mall, but fast forward to 5 years after, we sell out every show, so when we look back we just thank God’ he said.
He went on to explain how it took him nine months to make any profit from the show saying ‘At the point when we started the show in 2008, we just wanted to have a 100% comedy platform because it was always annoying when you want to do a show and the platforms available are not what you need, because as at that time we had strong music platforms and comedy was always secondary, so we had to build the industry from the scratch.
Like every sane person going into a business, we had fears, but I was confident that we would pull through, but what I didn’t know was that it would take a while, because it took a while, and we just had to keep pushing. It took us nine months to make our first profit, and thank God we didn’t know that before we started, because if we had that information before we started, we might not have started Stand Up Nigeria.
For the first nine months, we were making our progress in losses, I’ll sit down with Soji Adeniji our production manager and we’ll say this month is not bad, we lost just 300,000, last month was 450,000, maybe next month we’ll lose 200,000, that was how we were calculating our progress before we started making profit after nine months, but it’s a different story, the business is now profitable enough to keep us in the business, profitable enough for us to expand, profitable for us not to look elsewhere’.