🔗 Share this article

Prior to the first Edinburgh fringe show the previous summer, Ayoade Bamgboye posed a question to her comedy friends. “How do you debut?” She remembers the guidance: One must present oneself, and establishing a point of view. It should also be a story. Furthermore, you need to define your identity as a comic.” This was quite a bit to hear. “It instilled in me a sense of anxiety,” states the 31-year-old. “There’s this recurring thought which suggests you can just launch a career once. If that debut fails, then one is simply a terrible debutante, for life.”

“Each and every day proved to be such a variation. Every day some element in the room and from the crowd gave me something new to work with.”

Audience, Bamgboye sidestepped this fate, and then went further. A fringe first-timer possessing an extremely thin stand-up resume to her name, the Londoner-via-Lagos performer arrived at the Fringe with a fresh-minted show, Swings and Roundabouts, and departed clutching the coveted best newcomer award, as formerly claimed by Harry Hill, Sarah Millican as well as Tim Minchin. (She became the inaugural Black woman to win the award.) It’s a ticket to major success yet Bamgboye is still reeling. The last few months have proven very difficult, getting out of my head and overcoming my doubts. That nagging query of: why was I chosen, why this show, why at this moment?” At times, only a cliche will cover it. “It altered my life’s course,” says Bamgboye plainly. “I hate using phrases like that, but it truly did.”

A Inquisitive Thinker with a Caretaker of Words

One can be convinced she hates uttering it: since a conversation in her company reveals, Bamgboye is an inquisitive thinker, a guardian of words, playfully alert to its implications. This is not someone to drop an overused phrase – or, if she does, she does so while wondering for what reason the London Borough of Hackney is getting the blame for it. On multiple occasions during our discussion, she pulls out a notebook to jot down idioms which seem peculiar from her African incomer’s perspective. One anthropological part within Swings and Roundabouts focuses on British phrases that connote misery.

A captivating aspect of her performance is the fluid fun it finds in Bamgboye’s cross-cultural self – an articulate Englishwoman as she chooses, flipping into Nigerian-accented outsiderdom between words, thoughts, effortlessly. She is the same in conversation, a vocal chameleon – the result of growing up moving between from Lagos to a Lake District private school.

Orchestrated Anarchy: Her Core of the Performance

Swings and Roundabouts presents a woman raised like a gift from God (her first name, she crows during the show, means “joy’s coronet”) who is existing with discomfort as an adult, caught between continents, grieving the passing of her beloved dad. “With this show I wanted to introduce myself and convey the challenge I find it to be alive,” she explains – however, if you’re thinking “therapy-based humor,” such a label radically misrepresents the joyful turbulent experience of watching Bamgboye’s debut. Consider this instead: “I’m trying to establish a creative practice which resembles orchestrated anarchy. I wanted to split the space separating ‘you’re in safe hands’ and ‘you don’t know what will occur afterwards’.”

Distinct Influences and a Novel Approach

Alternatively, hear her response regarding a question about her comic inspirations, which elicits the unprecedented combination of trinity of Jack Black, Maya Rudolph alongside Chris Morris. Bamgboye is nothing if not a unique individual, a somewhat stand-up novice who confessed she “never really told the same joke twice” prior to her Fringe stint – and one who tackled the festival thinking that “if I’m going to be repeating and doing identical material night after night for a month, it must constitute something which thrills me for me to say and enact”.

The revelation during that summer for her proved that, just because the script remains the same, the live interaction with an audience can be refreshed totally each evening to the next. “Each show was an entirely new experience. Each performance, something within the venue or originating from the audience offered me novel inspiration to explore.”

An Altered Stage Outlook and Upcoming Ambitions

“Since then, there’s a shift in the kind of show I aim to create, one which places the people before me first.” In conversation, Bamgboye is overflowing with a sense of the opportunities her burgeoning comedy life has opened up to her. Not long ago, she was a drifting creative within the arts and film, including working as an assistant to filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos for his film Poor Things.

Presently, developing a new set on the topic of banal conversation, and crash-coursing stand-up wisdom from her assorted guides (such as Jamali Maddix and previous Best Newcomer winner Lara Ricote), “my entire existence,” says Bamgboye, “is now premises for comedy, and it makes me more thrilling to live”.

“Maybe that is an overstatement,” she corrects her own statement, typically. “But it has been a real gift to learn how to articulate my thoughts through comedy. Moreover, this is only the start. There are so many ideas I still wish to attempt within stand-up. I feel like a guest [in this industry] who has not yet made herself at home. I haven’t even seen the rest of the house. Now that I’ve arrived, I’m in it for the long haul.”