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Before her first Edinburgh Festival Fringe run last summer, Ayoade Bamgboye posed a question to her stand-up peers. “How do you make your debut?” She recalls the advice: One must present yourself, and establishing a point of view. It should also be a story. And, you need to establish your identity as a comic.” This was quite a bit to take in. “It instilled in me a sense of anxiety,” says the thirty-one-year-old. “There’s this persistent fear which suggests one can only launch a career a single time. If it falls flat, then one is just a terrible newcomer, for life.”

“Each and every day proved to be such a departure. Every day something in the room and from the audience provided me with something new to play with.”

Reader, Bamgboye avoided that destiny, and then went further. A fringe newcomer possessing a very slender comedy CV to her name, this Londoner-via-Lagos performer came to the festival carrying a brand-new hour, Swings and Roundabouts, and departed holding the prestigious best newcomer prize, an honor previously won by comedian Harry Hill, Sarah Millican as well as Tim Minchin. (She became the inaugural Black woman to win this accolade.) It’s a ticket to major success yet Bamgboye remains stunned. The last few months have been very difficult, getting out of my head and overcoming my doubts. That question like: why me, why this, why now?” At times, only a cliche can describe it. Winning altered my life’s course,” says Bamgboye flatly. I dislike to say phrases of that nature, but it did.”

A Inquisitive Thinker and Caretaker of Language

One can believe she dislikes uttering it: as an hour in her company reveals, Bamgboye proves to be a searching thinker, a caretaker of language, humorously alert to their connotations. She is not someone who uses a hackneyed expression – or at least, she does so while questioning why the area of Hackney is getting the blame for it. On multiple occasions throughout our discussion, she withdraws a notebook to note idioms which seem curious to her African incomer’s perspective. A particular cultural study section within Swings and Roundabouts focuses on British expressions that connote unhappiness.

One compelling aspect of the show is the slippery fun it finds in Bamgboye’s bi-cultural identity – a well-spoken Englishwoman when it pleases her, flipping into Nigerian-accented outsiderdom between words, thoughts, effortlessly. She is the same when speaking, a vocal shapeshifter – the result of growing up moving between from Lagos and a Lake District boarding school.

Controlled Chaos: Her Core of the Performance

Swings and Roundabouts showcases a woman brought up like a gift from God (her name, she crows onstage, translates to “crown of joy”) who is existing uneasily as an adult, caught between worlds, mourning the passing of her beloved dad. “With this show I wanted to introduce myself and to share the challenge I experience it to be alive,” she explains – but, should you imagine “trauma comedy,” such a label severely undersells the exhilarating turbulent experience of watching Bamgboye’s first show. Consider this alternative: “I’m trying to establish a creative practice which resembles a controlled chaos. My intention was to navigate the difference between ‘you’re in safe hands’ and ‘you cannot predict what will occur afterwards’.”

Distinct Influences coupled with an Unconventional Method

Alternatively, hear her response to my request for her comic inspirations, which elicits the never-before-combined trio of Jack Black, Maya Rudolph and Chris Morris. Bamgboye is nothing if not her own woman, a somewhat stand-up novice who had “never really performed an identical bit twice” before her Edinburgh run – and one who approached the fringe with the mindset that “if I’m going to be saying and doing identical material night after night for weeks, it must constitute something that’s exciting personally to say and enact”.

The discovery during that summer for Bamgboye proved that, even though the words are repeated, the in-the-moment encounter with an audience can be refreshed completely each evening to the next. “Every single show was an entirely new experience. Each performance, some factor within the venue or from those watching gave me novel inspiration to play with.”

An Altered Performance Outlook and Upcoming Aspirations

“From that point onward, there’s a change in the kind of performance I want to do, one which places the spectators in front of me as the priority.” When talking, Bamgboye is overflowing with an awareness of the opportunities her new comedy life has opened up to her. Not long ago, she worked as a drifting talent in the arts and media, which involved working as assistant to the director Yorgos Lanthimos on his movie Poor Things.

Presently, cooking up a new set on the topic of small talk, while rapidly absorbing a comedy education thanks to her assorted guides (such as Jamali Maddix and previous best newcomer winner Lara Ricote), “my whole existence,” remarks Bamgboye, “is now set-ups for jokes, and this renders me more thrilling to live”.

“Perhaps that is an overstatement,” she edits herself, characteristically. “But it has been a real blessing to learn a way to articulate my thoughts through comedy. And, this represents just the beginning. There are so many things I yet want to try within stand-up. It feels as if like a guest [in this industry] who has not yet made herself at home. I have not even been upstairs. Now I’m here, I am committed for the long haul.”