Demi Adejuyigbe’s must-see comedy backflip: ‘It’s kind of Evel Knievel!’

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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?!’”

It worked, but arguably didn’t need to, because Adejuyigbe’s “bits” are funny enough to barely require cohesion. In the show, now on in London, he variously performs a musical-theatre number about the so-called “Ikea monkey”, has his stage invaded by a robot, and offers the audience tuition in jazz. There’s a parody of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire, which goes in wholly unforeseen directions, and phone interruptions from Barack Obama. The point, and the pleasure, is in a creativity so free-flowing as to be disposable, in the dizzying misdirection, and in the craft our host applies to his daft ideas, as PowerPoint, video and Heath Robinson robotics are deployed to max out every unexpected gag.

“I’ve always been someone who puts a lot of effort into a small joke,” says Adejuyigbe, with understatement. “Taking pains to mimic verisimilitude is something that I’ve always prided myself on doing. And misdirection: I’m never just making a thing, I’m hyper-focused on presenting it in a way that shows the audience I know what they’re thinking – and then ‘zag!’” – cue a switchbacking gesture – “but in a way where you’re still super-engaged and focused.”

Easier said than done – but Adejuyigbe had years honing these skills online before he synthesised them on stage. He first came to attention in the US as “the September guy”, who for six years running on 21 September released a new video of himself dancing to the Earth, Wind and Fire song September. Escalating in ambition year-on-year, the videos featured a mariachi band, a children’s choir, a choreographed dance party – and raised money for charity too.

They were a phenomenon, but for Adejuyigbe, a ball-and-chain too. “There’s a lot of validation and joy that comes with performing online,” he says now. But “you’re also beholden to the audience in a way I don’t always love. A lot of times I would do a thing, get really into it, then realise, ‘Oh, the audience will be happy if it’s one way and upset if it’s another way.’ And you feel you have to create in service to that.” He always had ambitions beyond online, but finds writers’ rooms in the TV industry challenging in a different way. “In TV, I always felt beholden to all these gatekeepers and masters in a way that made me miss the freedoms I had when I was online.”

It becomes apparent, then, why Adejuyigbe keeps backflipping between creative contexts: he’s not wholly satisfied anywhere, the live stage being no exception. “I don’t perform that often,” he says, “or feel like I’m someone who has to get up on stage.” He came to Edinburgh with no expectations, least of all award nominations, of which he was blissfully ignorant. Finding out about them “felt weird”, he reports, “like going to summer camp and learning there’s an award for best camper”. All those other struggling newcomers who weren’t recognised might be miffed, I tell him, to hear how blase he is about his prestigious prize nod. “I’m sure they don’t love to hear it!” he laughs. “But they might love to hear that, because I’m blase, I will not be competing next year.”

He would happily return to the UK though. He was born to Nigerian parents and spent his first five years in London. “I still have my UK citizenship,” he says, and “if Taskmaster called me for even an episode, I’d do it in a heartbeat.” But until then, he’s trying to get a suite of writing and directing projects (“A mythical romcom … a puzzly thriller”) made – and hoping the success of his live show might help. “It’s all the same thing,” he says of his shapeshifting canon of comedy. “If you like how my brain works in this arena, maybe you’d also like how it works in that arena? If you find me funny and creative and smart here, what else would you like to see from me?”