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Before the first Edinburgh Festival Fringe show the previous summer, Ayoade Bamgboye posed an inquiry to the comedy peers. In what way do you make your debut?” She remembers their guidance: One must present oneself, and establishing a perspective. It should also be a story. And, you need to establish your identity as a comic.” That proved to be quite a bit to hear. “It instilled in me a sense of anxiety,” states the 31-year-old. “There’s this recurring thought that one can only debut a single time. If it fails, consequently you’re simply a shit debutante, for life.”

“Each and every day proved to be such an incredible variation. Each night something from the atmosphere or from the audience provided me with something new to work with.”

Audience, Bamgboye sidestepped this fate, and then went further. An Edinburgh newcomer with a very slender stand-up resume to her name, this London-based, Lagos-raised performer arrived at the Fringe with a brand-new show, Swings and Roundabouts, and departed holding the coveted best newcomer prize, as previously won by comedian Harry Hill, Sarah Millican as well as Tim Minchin. (She was the first woman of color to win the award.) It’s a ticket to major success and Bamgboye remains stunned. The last few months have been very difficult, escaping my head and out of my own way. That nagging query of: why me, why this, why now?” Sometimes, only a cliche will cover it. Winning changed my life,” admits Bamgboye flatly. “I hate to say phrases of that nature, but it did.”

The Inquisitive Mind and Caretaker of Words

One can believe she hates to say it: as a conversation with her makes clear, Bamgboye proves to be a searching thinker, a guardian of language, humorously attuned to its implications. She is not someone to drop an overused phrase – or at least, she does so while questioning for what reason the London Borough of Hackney receives the negative association for it. On multiple occasions throughout our chat, she pulls out a notebook to note idioms which seem peculiar from her Nigerian outsider’s ear. A particular anthropological part of Swings and Roundabouts focuses on British phrases which signify unhappiness.

A captivating feature of the show is the fluid fun it finds in Bamgboye’s cross-cultural self – an articulate British woman as she chooses, switching to a Nigerian-inflected outsider perspective mid words, sentences, at will. She is similar in conversation, an oral shapeshifter – the product of growing up shuttling back and forth from Lagos to a Cumbrian private school.

Orchestrated Anarchy: The Core of the Performance

Swings and Roundabouts presents a woman brought up like a gift from heaven (her name, she boasts onstage, means “crown of joy”) who is existing uneasily as an adult, trapped between continents, grieving the passing of her beloved dad. “With this show I wanted to introduce who I am and convey the challenge I experience it living life,” she says – but, should you imagine “trauma comedy,” such a label radically misrepresents the exhilarating turbulent sensation of watching Bamgboye’s debut. Consider this instead: “I’m trying to find an artistic method that’s like orchestrated anarchy. I wanted to navigate the space between ‘you’re in safe hands’ and ‘you cannot predict what’s going to happen afterwards’.”

Unique Influences coupled with an Unconventional Approach

Or try her answer regarding a question about her comic inspirations, which elicits the never-before-combined trio featuring actor Jack Black, Maya Rudolph and satirist Chris Morris. Bamgboye is certainly her own woman, a relative stand-up novice who confessed she “never really performed the same joke more than once” prior to her Edinburgh run – and one who approached the fringe with the mindset that “since I will be repeating and doing identical material night after night for a month, it has to be something which thrills me personally to deliver and enact”.

The revelation during that summer for her proved that, even though the words are repeated, the live interaction with an audience can be refreshed completely from one night to the following. “Every single day felt like such a variation. Each performance, some factor within the venue or from those watching gave me something new to play with.”

An Altered Performance Philosophy paired with Upcoming Ambitions

“From that point onward, there’s a change in the kind of performance I want to do, one which places the people before me first.” In conversation, Bamgboye is bursting with a sense of the possibilities her burgeoning comedy life has unlocked to her. Not long ago, she worked as a drifting talent within the arts and film, including working as assistant to filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos for his film Poor Things.

Now, cooking up a new set about small talk, and crash-coursing a comedy education thanks to her assorted guides (who include Jamali Maddix and former Best Newcomer champ Lara Ricote), “my entire existence,” says Bamgboye, “has become set-ups for comedy, and it makes living more thrilling to live”.

“Perhaps that’s too much,” she corrects herself, characteristically. “Yet it has been a real blessing to discover how to express myself through comedy. And, this is just the beginning. There are numerous things I yet want to try in comedy. I feel I am a visitor [in this industry] who hasn’t made herself at home. I haven’t so much as seen the rest of the house. Now that I’ve arrived, I am committed for the duration.”