🔗 Share this article

Before the first Edinburgh fringe show the previous summer, Ayoade Bamgboye posed a question to her stand-up peers. “How do you make your debut?” She recalls their advice: One must present oneself, while there’s a point of view. It should also be a narrative arc. And, it’s necessary to establish your identity as a comedian.” This was quite a bit to hear. That filled me with anxiety,” says this 31-year-old. “There’s this persistent fear that you can only debut once. Should that debut falls flat, consequently you’re simply a terrible debutante, for life.”

“Every single performance proved to be such an incredible departure. Every day something in the room and from the audience gave me something new to work with.”

Audience, Bamgboye avoided this fate, and then went further. An Edinburgh first-timer with a very slender comedy CV behind her, this Londoner-via-Lagos performer arrived at the festival with a brand-new show, Swings and Roundabouts, and left clutching the coveted best newcomer award, an honor formerly won by comedian Harry Hill, Sarah Millican and Tim Minchin. (She became the first Black woman to receive the award.) It’s an invitation to major success yet Bamgboye is still stunned. “These past months have been very difficult, escaping my own thoughts and out of my own way. That question like: why was I chosen, why this, why at this moment?” Sometimes, just a platitude can describe it. “It altered my life’s course,” says Bamgboye flatly. “I hate to say phrases of that nature, but it truly did.”

A Inquisitive Thinker and Caretaker of Language

You can be convinced she dislikes to say it: since a conversation in her company makes clear, Bamgboye is an inquisitive thinker, a guardian of words, humorously alert to their connotations. She is not someone to drop an overused phrase – or at least, she does so while wondering for what reason the London Borough of Hackney is getting the negative association with it. Several times throughout our chat, she withdraws a notepad to jot down idioms that sound peculiar from her Nigerian outsider’s perspective. One anthropological part of Swings and Roundabouts focuses on British expressions which signify unhappiness.

A captivating feature of the show is the slippery fun it has with Bamgboye’s bi-cultural self – an articulate Englishwoman as she chooses, flipping into a Nigerian-inflected outsider perspective between sentence, thoughts, effortlessly. She is similar when speaking, a vocal chameleon – the result of growing up shuttling between from Lagos to a Cumbrian private school.

Controlled Chaos: The Core of the Show

Swings and Roundabouts presents a woman raised like a gift from God (her name, she crows during the show, translates to “joy’s coronet”) but living with discomfort in adulthood, caught between worlds, grieving the loss of her beloved dad. “Through this performance I wanted to present myself and convey how difficult I find it living life,” she explains – but, if you’re thinking “therapy-based humor,” such a label severely undersells the exhilarating whirlwind sensation of seeing Bamgboye’s debut. Try this instead: “I’m trying to find a creative practice that’s like a controlled chaos. My intention was to navigate the difference separating ‘you’re in safe hands’ and ‘you cannot predict what will occur next’.”

Unique Inspirations and a Unconventional Approach

Alternatively, hear her response regarding my request for her comic inspirations, which elicits the unprecedented combination of trinity featuring actor Jack Black, Maya Rudolph alongside Chris Morris. Bamgboye is certainly a unique individual, a somewhat comedy ingenue who had “had practically never told the same joke twice” before her Edinburgh run – and who tackled the fringe thinking that “if I will be repeating and doing identical material over and again for a month, it must constitute something that’s exciting personally to deliver and enact”.

The discovery during that summer for Bamgboye was that, just because the script remains the same, the in-the-moment interaction with the crowd is capable of being renewed totally from one night to the following. “Each day felt like such a experience. Every day, something in the room or originating from those watching offered me novel inspiration to explore.”

A New Stage Outlook paired with Upcoming Ambitions

“From that point onward, there’s a change in the kind of show I want to do, one which places the people before me first.” When talking, Bamgboye is overflowing with a sense of the possibilities her burgeoning stand-up career has unlocked for her. Not long ago, she worked as a drifting creative in the arts and film, including serving as an assistant to filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos for his film Poor Things.

Now, developing a new set about small talk, while rapidly absorbing a comedy education from her assorted guides (who include Jamali Maddix and former best newcomer champ Lara Ricote), “my entire life,” remarks Bamgboye, “has become set-ups for comedy, and it makes me more excited to experience”.

“Maybe that is too much,” she corrects herself, typically. “But it truly has been a real gift to learn how to express myself through comedy. Moreover, this represents just the beginning. I have numerous ideas I yet want to try in comedy. It feels as if I am a visitor [in this industry] who has not yet taken her shoes off. I have not even been upstairs. Now that I’ve arrived, I am committed for the long haul.”