🔗 Share this article

Before her first Edinburgh fringe run last summer, Ayoade Bamgboye put forth a question to her comedy peers. “How do you debut?” She recalls their advice: “You introduce oneself, while there’s a point of view. It should also be a narrative arc. And, it’s necessary to define who you are as a comedian.” This was a lot to hear. “It filled me with dread,” says this 31-year-old. “There’s this persistent thought that you can only debut a single time. If it falls flat, consequently one is just a shit debutante, forever.”

“Each and every performance proved to be such a departure. Each night some element from the atmosphere or from the audience provided me with fresh material to work with.”

Audience, Bamgboye avoided that destiny, and then went further. A fringe newcomer with an extremely thin comedy CV behind her, the Londoner-via-Lagos performer arrived at the Fringe with a brand-new hour, Swings and Roundabouts, and departed clutching the prestigious best newcomer award, an honor previously claimed by comedian Harry Hill, Sarah Millican as well as Tim Minchin. (She was the inaugural woman of color to win this accolade.) This is a ticket to the big time and Bamgboye remains stunned. “These past months have proven incredibly challenging, getting out of my own thoughts and out of my own way. That question like: why me, why this, why at this moment?” Sometimes, just a platitude can describe it. “It altered my life’s course,” says Bamgboye flatly. I dislike to say phrases of that nature, but it did.”

A Inquisitive Mind with a Guardian of Words

One can believe she dislikes uttering it: since an hour in her company makes clear, Bamgboye is a searching intellect, a caretaker of words, playfully attuned to their connotations. This is not someone who uses a hackneyed expression – or at least, not without wondering for what reason the area of Hackney is getting the negative association with it. Several times throughout our chat, she pulls out a notebook to note sayings which seem curious to her African incomer’s ear. One cultural study section of Swings and Roundabouts is dedicated to British phrases that connote misery.

One compelling aspect of her performance remains the slippery fun it finds in Bamgboye’s bi-cultural self – an articulate Englishwoman as she chooses, flipping into Nigerian-accented outsider perspective between words, thoughts, effortlessly. She’s the same in conversation, a vocal shapeshifter – the product of growing up moving back and forth from Lagos and a Lake District boarding school.

Controlled Chaos: Her Heart of the Show

Swings and Roundabouts showcases an individual raised as a blessing from God (her first name, she crows onstage, translates to “crown of joy”) but living with discomfort as an adult, trapped between continents, mourning the passing of her beloved dad. “With this show my aim was to introduce who I am and convey how difficult I find it to be alive,” she explains – but, should you imagine “trauma comedy,” that radically undersells the joyful whirlwind experience of watching Bamgboye’s first show. Try this instead: “I’m trying to establish a creative practice which resembles a controlled chaos. I wanted to navigate the difference between ‘you feel secure’ and ‘you cannot predict what will occur afterwards’.”

Unique Influences coupled with an Unconventional Approach

Alternatively, hear her response regarding my request for her comedy influences, which elicits the never-before-combined trinity featuring Jack Black, Maya Rudolph and Chris Morris. Bamgboye is certainly a unique individual, a somewhat comedy ingenue who confessed she “had practically never performed an identical bit twice” prior to her Fringe stint – and one who approached the fringe thinking that “since I will be saying and doing identical material over and again for a month, it must constitute something which thrills me for me to say and do”.

The revelation last summer for Bamgboye proved that, just because the script are repeated, the in-the-moment encounter with the crowd can be renewed completely from one night to the next. “Each show felt like such a variation. Every day, some factor within the venue or from the audience offered me novel inspiration to play with.”

A New Stage Philosophy paired with Upcoming Ambitions

“From that point onward, I’ve experienced a shift in the kind of show I aim to create, and it puts the people before me first.” In conversation, Bamgboye is bursting with an awareness of the possibilities her new comedy life has unlocked to her. Not long ago, she worked as a wandering talent in the arts and media, which involved serving as assistant to the director Yorgos Lanthimos on his movie Poor Things.

Now, cooking up a new set on the topic of banal conversation, while rapidly absorbing a comedy education from her assorted guides (such as Jamali Maddix and former Best Newcomer champ Lara Ricote), “my whole life,” remarks Bamgboye, “is now premises for jokes, and it makes me more excited to live”.

“Maybe that is too much,” she edits her own statement, typically. “Yet it has been a genuine gift to learn a way to express myself through comedy. And, this represents only the start. There are numerous ideas I yet wish to attempt in comedy. It feels as if I am a visitor [in this industry] who hasn’t taken her shoes off. I haven’t so much as been upstairs. Now that I’ve arrived, I’m in it for the duration.”