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Before her first Edinburgh fringe run last summer, Ayoade Bamgboye put a question to her comedy friends: “How do you debut?” She recalls their advice: “You introduce yourself, and there’s a point of view. There should also be a narrative arc. And you need to establish who you are as a comedian.” This was a lot to hear. “It filled me with dread,” says the 31-year-old. “There’s this recurring thought that you can only debut once. If it falls flat, then you’re just a shit debutante, forever.”
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, as formerly won by Harry Hill, Sarah Millican and Tim Minchin. (She was the first Black woman to win the award.) It’s a ticket to the big time and Bamgboye is still reeling. “These 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?” Sometimes, only a cliche will cover it. “It changed my life,” says Bamgboye flatly. “I hate to say stuff like that, but it did.”
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 – 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’s 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’s cross-cultural identity – a well-spoken Englishwoman when it pleases her, flipping into Nigerian-accented outsiderdom between words, sentences, at will.
She’s the same in conversation, a vocal shapeshifter – 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 “crown of joy”) but living uneasily in adulthood, caught between continents, grieving the loss of her beloved dad. “With this show I wanted to introduce myself and to share how difficult I find it to be alive,” she says – but, if you’re thinking “trauma comedy”, that radically undersells the joyful whirlwind experience of watching Bamgboye’s debut. Try this instead: “I’m trying to find a creative practice that’s like a controlled chaos. I wanted to split the difference between ‘you’re in safe hands’ and ‘you don’t know what’s going to happen next’.”
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. Bamgboye is nothing if not her own woman, a relative comedy ingenue who had “never really told the same joke twice” before her Edinburgh run – and who approached the fringe thinking that “if I’m going to be saying and doing the same thing over and again for a month, it has to be something that’s exciting for me to say and do”. 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. “Every single day was such a variation. Every day something in the room or from the audience gave me something new to play with.”
“Since then, there’s a change in the kind of performance I want to do, and it puts the people in front of me first.” 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. Now, cooking up a new set about small talk, and crash-coursing a comedy education from her various mentors (who include Jamali Maddix and previous best newcomer champ Lara Ricote), “my whole existence,” says Bamgboye, “is now set-ups for jokes, and it makes me more excited to live”.
“Maybe that’s too much,” she edits herself, characteristically. “But 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’t taken her shoes off yet. I haven’t even been upstairs. Now I’m here, I’m in it for the long haul.”
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Ayoade Bamgboye: Swings and Roundabouts is at Soho theatre, London, 13-24 January and 20 April-2 May
