Before her first Edinburgh fringe run last summer, Ayoade Bamgboye put a question to her comedy friends: \u201cHow do you debut?\u201d She recalls their advice: \u201cYou introduce yourself, and there\u2019s a point of view. There should also be a narrative arc. And you need to establish who you are as a comedian.\u201d This was a lot to hear. \u201cIt filled me with dread,\u201d says the 31-year-old. \u201cThere\u2019s this recurring thought that you can only debut once. If it falls flat, then you\u2019re just a shit debutante, forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reader, Bamgboye avoided this fate, and then some. A fringe first-timer with a very slender comedy CV behind her, the Londoner-via-Lagos arrived at the festival with a fresh-minted show, Swings and Roundabouts, and left clutching the prestigious best newcomer award<\/a>, as formerly won by Harry Hill, Sarah Millican and Tim Minchin<\/a>. (She was the first Black woman to win the award.) It\u2019s a ticket to the big time and Bamgboye is still reeling. \u201cThese past months have been very difficult, getting out of my head and out of my own way. That question of: why me, why this, why now?\u201d Sometimes, only a cliche will cover it. \u201cIt changed my life,\u201d says Bamgboye flatly. \u201cI hate to say stuff like that, but it did.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018Every single day was such a variation\u2019 \u2026 Bamgboye at the Edinburgh fringe in 2025.<\/p>\n You can believe she hates to say it: as an hour in her company makes clear, Bamgboye is a searching thinker, a caretaker of words, playfully alert to their connotations. This is not a woman to drop a hackneyed phrase \u2013 or at least, not without wondering why the London Borough of Hackney is getting the blame for it. Several times during our chat, she withdraws a notebook to jot down idioms that sound curious to her African incomer\u2019s ear. One anthropological section of Swings and Roundabouts is dedicated to British phrases that connote misery. A captivating feature of the show is the slippery fun it has with Bamgboye\u2019s cross-cultural identity \u2013 a well-spoken Englishwoman when it pleases her, flipping into Nigerian-accented outsiderdom between words, sentences, at will.<\/p>\n Bamgboye with her Edinburgh Comedy award for best newcomer. Photograph: Alan Rennie<\/p>\n She\u2019s the same in conversation, a vocal shapeshifter \u2013 the product of a childhood shuttling back and forth from Lagos to a Lake District boarding school. Swings and Roundabouts showcases a woman raised like a gift from God (her name, she crows onstage, means \u201ccrown of joy\u201d) but living uneasily in adulthood, caught between continents, grieving the loss of her beloved dad. \u201cWith this show I wanted to introduce myself and to share how difficult I find it to be alive,\u201d she says \u2013 but, if you\u2019re thinking \u201ctrauma comedy\u201d, that radically undersells the joyful whirlwind experience of watching Bamgboye\u2019s debut. Try this instead: \u201cI\u2019m trying to find a creative practice that\u2019s like a controlled chaos. I wanted to split the difference between \u2018you\u2019re in safe hands\u2019 and \u2018you don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen next\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n Or try her response to my request for her comedy influences, which elicits the never-before-combined trio of Jack Black, Maya Rudolph and Chris Morris<\/a>. Bamgboye is nothing if not her own woman, a relative comedy ingenue who had \u201cnever really told the same joke twice\u201d before her Edinburgh run \u2013 and who approached the fringe thinking that \u201cif I\u2019m going to be saying and doing the same thing over and again for a month, it has to be something that\u2019s exciting for me to say and do\u201d. The revelation last summer for Bamgboye was that, just because the words are repeated, the in-the-moment encounter with an audience can be renewed completely from one night to the next. \u201cEvery single day was such a variation. Every day something in the room or from the audience gave me something new to play with.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSince then, there\u2019s a change in the kind of performance I want to do, and it puts the people in front of me first.\u201d In conversation, Bamgboye is bursting with a sense of the possibilities her new comedy life has opened up to her. Until recently, she was a drifting creative in the arts and media, including working as assistant to the director Yorgos Lanthimos on his movie Poor Things<\/a>. Now, cooking up a new set about small talk, and crash-coursing a comedy education from her various mentors (who include Jamali Maddix<\/a> and previous best newcomer champ Lara Ricote<\/a>), \u201cmy whole existence,\u201d says Bamgboye, \u201cis now set-ups for jokes, and it makes me more excited to live\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe that\u2019s too much,\u201d she edits herself, characteristically. \u201cBut it has been a real gift to learn how to express myself in this way. And this is just the beginning. There are so many things I still want to try in comedy. I feel like a guest [in this industry] who hasn\u2019t taken her shoes off yet. I haven\u2019t even been upstairs. Now I\u2019m here, I\u2019m in it for the long haul.\u201d<\/p>\n