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Before the maiden Edinburgh fringe run last summer, Ayoade Bamgboye posed a question to the stand-up peers. In what way do you make your debut?” She remembers the guidance: One must introduce yourself, while establishing a perspective. There should additionally be a narrative arc. And, it’s necessary to establish your identity as a comic.” This was quite a bit to hear. “It instilled in me a sense of anxiety,” says this 31-year-old. “There’s this recurring fear which suggests you can just launch a career a single time. If that debut fails, then one is just a terrible newcomer, for life.”

“Every single day proved to be such an incredible departure. Each night something from the atmosphere or from the audience gave me something new to work with.”

Audience, Bamgboye sidestepped that destiny, and then some. A fringe newcomer with an extremely thin comedy CV to her name, this London-based, Lagos-raised performer came to the Fringe with a fresh-minted show, Swings and Roundabouts, and left clutching the prestigious Best Newcomer prize, as formerly claimed by Harry Hill, Sarah Millican as well as Tim Minchin. (She became the first Black woman to win this accolade.) It’s a ticket to major success and Bamgboye remains stunned. “These past months have proven very difficult, getting out of my own thoughts and overcoming my doubts. That question of: why me, why this show, why at this moment?” Sometimes, just a platitude will cover it. “It changed my life,” admits Bamgboye flatly. I dislike to say stuff of that nature, but it truly did.”

The Searching Thinker with a Guardian of Words

You can be convinced she dislikes to say it: since a conversation in her company reveals, Bamgboye proves to be a searching thinker, a caretaker of words, playfully attuned to its implications. She is not a woman to drop a hackneyed expression – or at least, she does so while wondering why the London Borough of Hackney receives the negative association for it. On multiple occasions during our discussion, she withdraws a notepad to jot down idioms which seem curious from her African incomer’s ear. A particular anthropological part of Swings and Roundabouts is dedicated to British expressions that connote misery.

A captivating feature of her performance is the fluid fun it finds in Bamgboye’s bi-cultural identity – a well-spoken British woman as she chooses, flipping into Nigerian-accented outsiderdom between words, thoughts, effortlessly. She’s the same when speaking, a vocal chameleon – the product of growing up moving back and forth Lagos to a Lake District boarding school.

Orchestrated Anarchy: The Heart of her Performance

Swings and Roundabouts presents an individual raised like a gift from God (her first name, she boasts onstage, means “crown of joy”) who is living with discomfort in adulthood, trapped between worlds, grieving the passing of her beloved dad. “Through this performance I wanted to present who I am and convey the challenge I experience it living life,” she explains – but, if you’re thinking “therapy-based humor,” that radically misrepresents the joyful whirlwind experience of watching Bamgboye’s first show. Consider this instead: “My goal is to find an artistic method which resembles a controlled chaos. My intention was to split the difference separating ‘you’re in safe hands’ and ‘you don’t know what will occur next’.”

Distinct Influences and a Unconventional Approach

Alternatively, hear her answer regarding a question for her comedy influences, which produced the never-before-combined trio of Jack Black, Maya Rudolph alongside satirist Chris Morris. Bamgboye is certainly her own woman, a relative comedy ingenue who confessed she “never really told an identical bit twice” prior to her Edinburgh run – and one who tackled the festival with the mindset that “if I’m going to be repeating and doing identical material over and again for weeks, it has to be material which thrills me for me to deliver and do”.

The revelation during that summer for her was that, even though the words are repeated, the live interaction with an audience is capable of being refreshed totally each evening to the following. “Each show felt like an entirely new variation. Every day, some factor within the venue or from those watching gave me something new to play with.”

A New Performance Outlook and Future Ambitions

“Since then, there’s a change in the type of performance I aim to create, and it puts the spectators in front of me as the priority.” When talking, Bamgboye is overflowing with an awareness of the possibilities her burgeoning comedy life has opened up for her. Not long ago, she was a wandering creative in the arts and media, including serving as an assistant to filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos on his movie Poor Things.

Presently, developing fresh material about banal conversation, while rapidly absorbing stand-up wisdom thanks to her various guides (who include Jamali Maddix and previous Best Newcomer champ Lara Ricote), “my whole existence,” says Bamgboye, “has become premises for jokes, and it makes me more excited to live”.

“Perhaps that is too much,” she edits her own statement, characteristically. “But it truly has been a genuine gift to discover how to articulate my thoughts in this way. Moreover, this represents just the beginning. There are numerous things I still wish to attempt within stand-up. I feel like a guest [in this industry] who hasn’t made herself at home. I haven’t so much as been upstairs. Now that I’ve arrived, I am committed for the long haul.”