In November 2020, a Ghanaian comedian in his late fifties sat behind a news desk in Accra and read out the weekend’s European football scores. By the end of the week, footballers, clubs and fans around the world were sharing the clip.
The man was Akwasi Boadi, known to Ghanaians as Akrobeto. The show was The Real News on UTV, and the reason the clips spread was his delivery: enthusiastic, confident, and full of mispronounced club names and inventive English that turned a routine sports bulletin into a comedy performance.
Decades in Kumawood
Akrobeto was born on 18 November 1962. Long before the viral clips, he was a familiar face in Kumawood, the Twi-language film industry based in Kumasi. He appeared in more than 100 films, often in comic roles, and was well known to Ghanaian audiences who watched those films on television and DVD.
Kumawood comedy relies heavily on physical humour, wordplay and exaggerated characters, and Akrobeto was one of its reliable performers. His height, his expressive face and his timing made him a natural for comic roles, and he often played alongside other Kumawood stars in films sold across Ghana and the diaspora.
The Real News
The Real News gave him a different kind of stage. The format is simple: Akrobeto reads news and sports headlines in English, sometimes switching to Twi, with a straight face that only makes the delivery funnier. His readings of football results, with names such as Manchester City, Borussia Dortmund and Paris Saint-Germain turned into something new, travelled far beyond Ghana.
Clubs and players shared the clips on social media, and international media outlets wrote about him. For many viewers outside Ghana, it was their first introduction to Ghanaian comedy.
A new generation of fans
The viral moment turned Akrobeto into a social media star in his late fifties. Brands used him in advertisements. Young Ghanaian musicians and influencers made content with him. His catchphrases turned up in memes and comments across the internet.
The clip of him reading news with Black Sherif, which circulated widely in September 2026, showed the same thing: a younger generation of Ghanaian stars wanted to be seen with him, and his audience included people who had never watched a Kumawood film.
The joke and the respect
Some commentators have debated whether audiences are laughing with Akrobeto or at him. His answer, in interviews, has been to embrace the character. He knows what he is doing, and the performance is built on timing that comes from decades of comic acting.
Kumawood made him known across Ghana. A football bulletin read in his own English made him known around the world, more than thirty years into his career.
