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Before her first Edinburgh Festival Fringe run the previous summer, Ayoade Bamgboye put forth an inquiry to her stand-up friends. “How do you make your debut?” She recalls their guidance: “You introduce oneself, while establishing a perspective. It should also be a narrative arc. And, it’s necessary to establish who you are as a comic.” This was quite a bit to take in. That instilled in me a sense of anxiety,” says the thirty-one-year-old. “There’s this persistent fear which suggests you can only launch a career a single time. If that debut falls flat, then you’re just a shit debutante, for life.”

“Every single day was such a departure. Every day something in the room and from the audience gave me something new to work with.”

Reader, Bamgboye avoided this fate, and then some. A fringe newcomer with a very slender comedy CV behind her, the Londoner-via-Lagos artist came to the Fringe with a brand-new show, Swings and Roundabouts, and departed holding the prestigious best newcomer prize, an honor formerly claimed by comedian Harry Hill, Sarah Millican as well as Tim Minchin. (She became the inaugural Black woman to receive the award.) It’s a ticket to the big time and Bamgboye remains stunned. “These past months have been incredibly challenging, escaping my own thoughts and out of my own way. That nagging query of: why me, why this, why at this moment?” Sometimes, only a cliche can describe it. “It altered my life’s course,” admits Bamgboye flatly. I dislike to say stuff like that, but it truly did.”

A Inquisitive Thinker with a Guardian of Words

You can be convinced she hates uttering it: since an hour with her reveals, Bamgboye proves to be an inquisitive thinker, a guardian of language, humorously alert to their implications. This is not a woman to drop a hackneyed phrase – or, if she does, not without questioning why the area of Hackney is getting the negative association with it. On multiple occasions throughout our discussion, she withdraws a notebook to jot down sayings that sound peculiar from her Nigerian outsider’s perspective. A particular anthropological part within Swings and Roundabouts focuses on UK phrases which signify misery.

One compelling feature of her performance is the fluid fun it has with Bamgboye’s bi-cultural self – an articulate Englishwoman as she chooses, flipping into a Nigerian-inflected outsiderdom between sentence, thoughts, effortlessly. She is the same when speaking, a vocal chameleon – the result of a childhood moving between from Lagos and a Cumbrian private school.

Controlled Chaos: Her Core of the Performance

Swings and Roundabouts showcases a woman raised as a blessing from heaven (her first name, she crows during the show, translates to “joy’s coronet”) but living with discomfort in adulthood, trapped between worlds, mourning the loss of her beloved dad. “With this show I wanted to present who I am and convey the challenge I find it living life,” she explains – but, should you imagine “trauma comedy,” such a label radically undersells the exhilarating whirlwind experience of watching Bamgboye’s first show. Try this alternative: “I’m trying to find a creative practice that’s like a controlled chaos. I wanted to split the space between ‘you feel secure’ and ‘you cannot predict what’s going to happen afterwards’.”

Distinct Inspirations coupled with an Unconventional Approach

Alternatively, hear her answer regarding my request about her comedy influences, which produced the unprecedented combination of trio featuring actor Jack Black, Maya Rudolph alongside satirist Chris Morris. Bamgboye is nothing if not her own woman, a relative stand-up novice who had “never really told the same joke more than once” prior to her Fringe stint – and one who approached the festival thinking that “since I will be saying and doing identical material over and again for weeks, it must constitute something that’s exciting personally to say and do”.

The discovery last summer for her proved that, even though the words are repeated, the in-the-moment encounter with the crowd is capable of being renewed completely from one night to the next. “Every single show felt like such a experience. Each performance, something within the venue or from those watching offered me something new to explore.”

A New Stage Philosophy paired with Upcoming Aspirations

“Since then, I’ve experienced a change in the kind of performance I want to do, one which places the spectators before me as the priority.” When talking, Bamgboye is overflowing with an awareness of the opportunities her new stand-up career has opened up for her. Not long ago, she was a wandering creative in the arts and film, including working as assistant to the director Yorgos Lanthimos on his movie Poor Things.

Now, cooking up fresh material on the topic of banal conversation, while rapidly absorbing a comedy education thanks to her various guides (who include Jamali Maddix as well as previous best newcomer champ Lara Ricote), “my entire life,” says Bamgboye, “is now premises for comedy, and this renders me more thrilling to experience”.

“Perhaps that’s too much,” she edits her own statement, characteristically. “Yet it has been a genuine blessing to learn how to articulate my thoughts through comedy. Moreover, this is only the start. I have numerous ideas I yet want to try in comedy. It feels as if like a guest [in this industry] who hasn’t made herself at home. I have not so much as been upstairs. Now that I’ve arrived, I’m in it for the duration.”