‘I’ve never told the same joke twice!’: The explosive rise of Ayoade Bambui, Edinburgh’s best new comedian | comedy

forBefore her first tour in Edinburgh last summer, Ayoade Bamgbwe posed a question to her comedian friends: “How do you get started?” “Introduce yourself, and there will be a point of view. There also needs to be a narrative path. You need to establish who you are as a comedian,” she recalls their advice. This was a lot to hear. “It filled me with dread,” says the 31-year-old. “There’s a recurring idea that you can only debut once. If you fail, you’re just a debutant, forever.”

Reader, Bamboi has avoided this fate, and then some. This London-via-Lagos debutant with a very fine comedy CV arrived at the festival with a new show titled Swings and Roundabouts, and walked away with the coveted Best Newcomer award, as previously won by Harry Hill, Sarah Millikan and Tim Minchin. (She was the first black woman to win the award.) It’s a ticket to the big time and Bamgbwe is still reeling. “These past months have been very difficult, getting out of my head and out of my own way. This question: Why me, why this, why now?” Sometimes, just clichés will cover it. “It changed my life,” Bambui says emphatically. “I hate to say things like that, but she did.”

You can believe she hates saying it: as an hour in her company makes clear, Bamgboye is a searching thinker, attentive to words, playfully attentive to their connotations. She’s not a woman who drops a cliche – or at least, not without wondering why the London borough of Hackney should be blamed for it. Several times during our conversation, she pulled out a notebook to jot down terms that sounded foreign to an African expatriate ear. An anthropological section of Swings and Roundabouts is devoted to British phrases connoting misery. An attractive feature of the show is the slippery fun it has with Bamgboye’s multicultural identity – a well-spoken Englishwoman when she pleases, who in a foreign world with a Nigerian accent flips between words and sentences at will.

She is herself in conversation, changing the shape of her voice – a product of her childhood moving back and forth from Lagos to boarding school in the Lake District. “Swings and Roundabouts” features a woman who grew up as a gift from God (her name, she shouts on stage, means “crown of joy”) but lives in the angst of adulthood, stuck between continents, grieving the loss of her beloved father. “With this show I wanted to introduce myself and share with you how hard it is to survive,” she says — but if you think “shock comedy,” that radically diminishes the exhilarating, enjoyable experience of watching Bamgboye’s debut. Try this instead: “I’m trying to find a creative practice that feels like controlled chaos. I wanted to split the difference between ‘You’re in good hands’ and ‘You don’t know what’s going to happen next.'”

Or try her response to my request about her comedic influences, which teases the never-before-seen trio of Jack Black, Maya Rudolph and Chris Morris. Bamboy is nothing if not her own woman, a relatively comedic figure who had “never told the same joke twice” before her run in Edinburgh – and who approached the sidelines thinking that “if I’m going to say and do the same thing over and over again for a month, this must be an exciting thing for me to say and do”. What Bamgboye discovered last summer was that simply by repeating words, a momentary encounter with an audience could be completely renewed from one night to the next. “Every day was such a difference. Every day there was something in the room or in the audience that gave me something new to play with.”

“Since then, there’s been a change in the type of performance I want to do, which is putting people in front of me first.” In conversation, Bamgboye bursts with a sense of the possibilities her new comedic life has opened up for her. Until recently, she was a creative in the arts and media, including working as an assistant to director Yorgos Lanthimos on his film Poor Things. Now, having built a new repertoire around small talk, and receiving extensive comedy education from her various mentors (among them Jamali Madix and former Best New Champion Lara Ricotti), “my whole existence is now set-up for jokes, and that makes me even more excited to live,” says Bamboy.

“Maybe this is too much,” she characteristically edits herself out. “But it’s been a real gift to learn how to express myself in this way. And this is just the beginning. There are a lot of things I still want to try in comedy. I feel like a guest star.” [in this industry] Who hasn’t taken off her shoes yet. I wasn’t even upstairs. Now I’m here, I’m in it for the long haul.”