🔗 Share this article

Prior to the first Edinburgh fringe show the previous summer, Ayoade Bamgboye posed a question to her comedy peers. In what way do you make your debut?” She remembers their advice: One must introduce oneself, and there’s a perspective. There should also be a narrative arc. Furthermore, you need to define your identity as a comic.” That proved to be a lot to take in. “It instilled in me a sense of anxiety,” states the 31-year-old. I have this recurring fear that you can only debut once. If it falls flat, consequently one is simply a terrible newcomer, forever.”

“Every single performance was such a departure. Each night something from the atmosphere and from the crowd provided me with fresh material to play with.”

Audience, Bamgboye avoided that destiny, and then went further. An Edinburgh first-timer possessing a very slender comedy CV to her name, this Londoner-via-Lagos performer arrived at the Fringe with a fresh-minted hour, Swings and Roundabouts, and departed holding the prestigious best newcomer award, an honor previously won by Harry Hill, Sarah Millican as well as Tim Minchin. (She became the first Black woman to receive the award.) It’s an invitation to the big time yet Bamgboye remains reeling. “These past months have proven very difficult, escaping my own thoughts and out of my own way. That nagging query like: why was I chosen, why this show, why at this moment?” Sometimes, just a platitude can describe it. “It altered my life’s course,” says Bamgboye flatly. I dislike using stuff of that nature, but it truly did.”

The Inquisitive Thinker with a Guardian of Words

You can believe she dislikes uttering it: since an hour in her company reveals, Bamgboye proves to be a searching intellect, a guardian of language, playfully alert to their connotations. She is not a woman who uses an overused expression – or, if she does, not without questioning why the London Borough of Hackney is getting the negative association for it. On multiple occasions throughout our chat, she withdraws a notebook to jot down idioms that sound curious from her African incomer’s ear. One cultural study part of Swings and Roundabouts is dedicated to UK expressions that connote misery.

A captivating feature of the show remains the fluid fun it finds in Bamgboye’s bi-cultural identity – an articulate Englishwoman when it pleases her, switching to Nigerian-accented outsider perspective mid words, sentences, at will. She’s similar in conversation, an oral shapeshifter – the result of growing up moving between from Lagos and a Lake District boarding school.

Orchestrated Anarchy: Her Heart of the Performance

Swings and Roundabouts presents an individual brought up as a blessing from heaven (her name, she boasts during the show, translates to “crown of joy”) who is living with discomfort as an adult, trapped between worlds, grieving the loss of her beloved dad. “With this show my aim was to present myself and convey the challenge I experience it living life,” she says – however, should you imagine “therapy-based humor,” such a label severely undersells the joyful turbulent sensation of seeing Bamgboye’s debut. Consider this instead: “I’m trying to establish an artistic method which resembles a controlled chaos. My intention was to split the space between ‘you feel secure’ and ‘you cannot predict what will occur afterwards’.”

Distinct Influences coupled with an Unconventional Method

Alternatively, hear her response regarding a question for her comedy influences, which elicits the never-before-combined trio featuring actor Jack Black, Maya Rudolph and Chris Morris. Bamgboye is nothing if not her own woman, a somewhat stand-up novice who had “had practically never performed an identical bit more than once” prior to her Edinburgh run – and one who tackled the fringe thinking which held “if I will be saying and doing identical material over and again for a month, it must constitute material which thrills me for me to say and do”.

The discovery during that summer for Bamgboye was that, even though the words remains the same, the in-the-moment encounter with the crowd can be renewed totally from one night to the next. “Each show was such a experience. Each performance, some factor in the room or originating from the audience gave me novel inspiration to play with.”

A New Performance Philosophy and Future Aspirations

“From that point onward, I’ve experienced a shift in the kind of performance I aim to create, and it puts the people before me as the priority.” When talking, Bamgboye is overflowing with a sense of the opportunities her burgeoning comedy life has unlocked for her. Until recently, she was a drifting talent within the arts and film, including working as an assistant to filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos for his film Poor Things.

Now, developing a new set on the topic of banal conversation, while rapidly absorbing stand-up wisdom from her assorted guides (who include Jamali Maddix as well as previous best newcomer champ Lara Ricote), “my entire life,” says Bamgboye, “is now set-ups for comedy, and this renders me more thrilling to experience”.

“Maybe that is too much,” she edits her own statement, characteristically. “But it has been a real blessing to discover a way to express myself in this way. And, this represents just the beginning. I have numerous things I yet wish to attempt in comedy. I feel like a guest [in this industry] who hasn’t taken her shoes off. I have not so much as been upstairs. Now that I’ve arrived, I am committed for the duration.”