Laughter as an antidote to adversity is a recurring theme. In 1995, the filmmaker and producer Opa Williams launched Nigeria’s first and most important comedy showcase, “Nite of a Thousand Laughs.” As Ayakoroma tells it, one of Williams’s inspirations came during a visit to a hospital to shoot a Nollywood film. There, he ran into an actor who had been injured in a car crash, and the cast and crew began making jokes in order to comfort him. “It occurred to me that laughter could be a healing balm,” Williams later told a journalist. At the time, the country had been under military dictatorship for more than a decade. Two years earlier, an attempt at transitioning to democracy had been thwarted, when General Sani Abacha seized power and installed a new junta. “The military considered anything you said as the voice of the opposition,” Ali Baba told me. In 1998, Abacha died, and his successor, Abdulsalami Abubakar, organized a transition to a democratic government. Nigeria’s new democratically elected leader, the former military ruler Olusegun Obasanjo, was known for his sense of humor, and he regularly invited Ali Baba to perform at the Presidential palace. “He was kind of my chief marketing officer,” Ali Baba told me.

Okey Bakassi’s standup routines often traffic in social commentary. One of his most famous bits is called “In Search of Who Wrote ‘Things Fall Apart.’ ” He tells the story of a governor who visits a school and asks a student, “Who wrote ‘Things Fall Apart’?” The student thinks that he is being accused of some terrible crime. “Not me!” he replies. The governor is shocked by the student’s ignorance of Nigeria’s most famous novel. The teacher and the principal don’t know, either, and the governor is outraged. He complains to his aide, who leaps into action. “Don’t worry, sir,” he says. “We’ll set up a mission to sniff out who did it.” At home, the governor complains to his wife. “They won’t tell you because they’re your political enemies,” she replies. “They don’t want you to succeed!”

Bakassi tells the joke with delight, but underneath boils the frustration that Nigerians have with their dysfunctional government. The country is one of the largest producers of oil in the world, but it is unable to deliver basic services, like education and electricity, to its own people, owing to widespread corruption and incompetence. The election of Buhari, in 2015, brought a surge of hope. He was the first opposition candidate ever to unseat an incumbent, and he promised to crack down on corruption, put millions of unemployed young Nigerians back to work, and end Boko Haram’s insurgency. Nearly three years later, his Presidency is bogged down by health problems and weak leadership. “People massively wanted change, and suddenly that change has become like a mirage, and they are so confused right now about what to do that they’ve become inactive,” Bakassi said one day while we were talking in the studio. “I want to be that one program that will bring people together and activate them to bring about change.”

It sounded like a campaign speech, and, in fact, Bakassi is one of the rare political satirists who is also a politician. In September, 2008, he was appointed to be a special adviser on entertainment matters by the governor of Imo State, where he grew up. Later, he launched an unsuccessful run for the state assembly. Once, on a radio show, he said that the experience of being “on the inside” had changed his views on politics.

“We cannot say that we are all innocent, because they say society gets the kind of government it deserves,” he told me. Politicians aren’t inherently evil. The main problem is the widespread practice of selling votes to the highest bidder. Given how little the government does for poor Nigerians, many of them see this as their one chance to benefit from politics. Bakassi objects on pragmatic grounds. If voters accept payment before the politician gets into office, they have little leverage with which to hold him accountable later. In addition, the expense of paying off so many voters means that the politician who wins election must find a way to recoup the money, which leads to corruption. “We demand so much from politicians when they seek elected office that at the end of the day they need to get money back,” Bakassi said.

Last year, Bakassi posted a picture to Instagram over which he’d put the text “@okeybakassi for president.” He wouldn’t be the first satirist to run for President, but, as far as I could tell, his intention was more sincere than Stephen Colbert’s, in 2008. “I’m qualified to be the President,” he said. “The only thing I don’t have is the resources. I am an educated person and I can discuss national issues and I have the burning desire to serve this country.” He continued, “Politics is simply a group of processes that people apply to get what they want.”

“If you gather twenty different Nigerians, you might get twenty different opinions,” Nwabudike said to me one day. She was explaining why it was so hard for the staff to agree on anything. I had witnessed endless debates about what angle the show should take on a controversial issue, how far to take a joke, and who should be criticized for the problems facing the country. To Nwabudike, the group’s fractiousness was a sign of a more fundamental fact of Nigerian life. “In the U.S., a lot of things are sort of communal,” she explained. “In Nigeria, it’s pretty much the opposite. If that road is bad, nobody’s going to fix it, so we all have to buy high cars to get over the potholes. If there are no lights, the government is never going to fix it, so let’s all go buy generators for ourselves.” The need for self-sufficiency, she said, made it hard to find common ground. Still, the writers shared one thing. “We’re all in that room because we believe in that show,” she said.

Sodi Kurubo explained to me how he saw the mission of “The Other News.” Some young Nigerians, he said, follow American politics more closely than they do Nigerian politics. They love “The Daily Show,” along with John Oliver and Bill Maher, whose shows are easily accessible online. “Americans don’t realize how America-focussed the rest of the world is. We get your news, we get your media,” he said. “We always have to remind ourselves that it’s another country.” As dysfunctional as our politics may seem to us, there is still a sense that the stakes are real. Kurubo saw “The Other News” as a way to direct young Nigerians’ attention back to Nigerian issues, through a form they already know.

As the writers labored over the scripts, the correspondents went around Lagos filming “field pieces,” in which they investigated pressing matters by talking to people on the street. One day, I joined Ned Rice as he went to supervise a shoot. Rice is a large man, who wears a uniform of jeans and a tucked-in T-shirt. He grew up in Detroit, and, when he is not racking his brain for one-liners, he speaks with the sonorous Midwestern accent of an oldies-radio d.j. Comedy was his calling. The first time he watched “Late Night with David Letterman,” he knew that was what he wanted to do. Rice moved to New York and began bartending at the Improv, which led, eventually, to a career as a comedy writer, including five years for “Politically Incorrect,” where he met Kevin Bleyer. Rice loved the undeniable reality of making somebody laugh, but he had been having a tough time recently. He got divorced, and moved from Los Angeles to Ann Arbor; he “wasn’t getting work,” he explained. Then he got the call from Bleyer to go to Nigeria. “I couldn’t think of a bigger adventure than comedy in Africa,” he said. Rice nagged and cajoled the writers, whom he often referred to as “kids.” He was at once the most vocally touched by his experience in Nigeria and the most obviously uncomfortable with it. After a week of shuttling between his hotel and the offices of Channels, this was his first time going out into the streets of Lagos. “I’m terrified,” he said, as we bumped down the road in a van, with a driver, a cameraman, a producer, and two correspondents, Binta Bhadmus and Mo Williams.