The Good Place writer didn’t know there were prizes at the Edinburgh fringe until his acrobatic debut show earned him a nomination. Now he hopes to spring similar surprises
If you wanted a career that sums up the amorphous nature of modern comedy – from online content creation to the live stage and more besides – Demi Adejuyigbe’s would be hard to beat. He started out making online skits, moved into podcasting, then into writing for TV on the afterlife-set Ted Danson sitcom The Good Place. His flair for improbable comic song saw him dubbed by one critic “the Weird Al [Yankovic] of his generation”. Then when he performed a few one-off sketches at club nights in LA, his friends Brian and Nick, AKA the sketch duo BriTANick, coaxed him to glue them into a solo hour which last year secured the 32-year-old a best newcomer nomination on the Edinburgh fringe.
As if that weren’t variety enough, Adejuyigbe gave the show an unusual gimmick, requiring him to master a new and unrelated skill. The clue is in the title: Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip. “I had all these bits,” he recalls now, Zooming from California, “and there was no real through-line. What I came up with was telling everyone I’m gonna do a backflip at the end. Because it’s kind of an Evel Knievel stunt that’s funny and appealing and everyone would be like, ‘Why are you doing that?!’”
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