It is now happening only too frequently – another artist from the entertainment industry trying out yet another extreme stunt.

One from western Kenya is normalising crossdressing after his previous considerable wild stunts seem to have run their course. He is just the latest on the line.

Most of the stunts are on video. A couple fighting here, a comedian daring the police for arrest, a male musician releasing a picture while aloft a woman and so on. The question now always is – what will the next stunt be?

Because the stunts have been showing up in quick succession, their shock value wanes with every stunt. The competition then shifts to the extremity of the stunts to keep the public interested or even following.
Given the lifespan of the social media platforms where most of the performances appear, the stunts soon go stale only days after their appearances.

This is after long hours of preparation and performances for some of them. Comedy and broad-spectrum entertainment have been known to be generally clean content. You could trust that the young can view them without the fear of running into some X-rated material. But that seems to be different since you never know what a previously clean content creator may resort to.

While previously, one could trust that the cartoon channel would hardly show content harmful to younger consumers, that is no longer true. Indeed, cartoons have become increasingly violent and adult content could show up without warning.

Comedians and entertainers are, on the whole, effective messengers because of the nature of their medium. As Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death nearly four decades ago, the public approaches entertainment with suspended belief. Rather than analyse every performance and message and ascribe to it ulterior motives, the comedian and the artist is seen operating under different rules and only intending to amuse. They are given a licence to make the public laugh, and people get disappointed if the performance falls flat and is not funny.

But like all communicators, whether in the entertainment industry or not, the audience wants to be sure of the credibility and authenticity of the source. It is this that gives trust to both the message and the messenger. Could the antics of the comedians and entertainers be hurting the genre in general?

The credibility gap may soon rock the entertainment industry if that is not already happening. Is the entertainment authentic, or is it an avenue to the real objective? For most of those experimenting with stunts, the objective may be to find their path to political stardom and wealth. Kenya today has no shortage of those who have used their talents as an avenue to politics.

But riding to fame on the back of the entertainment platform is not limited to Kenya. One of Uganda’s opposition leaders rode the path of music to politics. The Ukrainian President, now leading the war between his country and Russia, started as a comedian before the political bug bit him. Before them, there was Ronald Reagan, who rose to become the President of the US and Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California in America.

It is not to say those in the entertainment industry should not join politics or transition to other roles. It is rather the speed with which some of them seek to transition and the methods they employ, erasing the boundaries of what they had been known for and what they now represent. It is the impact that this rush may do on the industry in the long run.

Do we stand a danger of entertainers being seen as lacking authenticity going by the stunts they stage and leading to the assumption that this is characteristic of the industry? Entertainers must safeguard the safe boundaries they have been known for.

— The writer is Dean, School of Communication, Daystar University