Demi Adejuyigbe side-steps perfection and lands on his feet

Demi Adejuyigbe / Photograph: Josh Goldner

“It's funny because I feel like it started as one thing and now has morphed into this other thing, and so every time I talk about it, I'm like, what can I say that's not a spoiler,” says Demi Adejuyigbe from his home in LA. He’s telling me about his debut comedy show, Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going To Do One (1) Backflip, which will bring the writer and comedian to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time. 

“I have a bunch of bits that I've always done on other people's shows,” he continues, “and I wanted to do a show where I put them all together, but I can't just say, ‘It's a show of Demi's bits’. So I decided to find something really funny to frame the show around.”

In the mid to late 2010s, against the backdrop of cringe viral challenges and Harambe jokes, I would have described myself as ‘chronically online’. Creators like Adejuyigbe, or Electrolemon as he was known on Vine, regularly made appearances in the carousel of 10-second clips on my page. Beyond the Vines, parodies and internet memes, however, Adejuyigbe was part of a generation of creators that found their niche on such platforms and whose comedy went on to exist in multiple arenas outside of the online sphere. In the context of the Fringe, Scottish comedian Paul Black or Toronto-based Laura Ramoso both come to mind as contemporary examples of creators that have successfully turned their short-form social media sketches into fully-fledged shows, selling out venues like the Gilded Balloon and Pleasance in the process. 

Like those before him, Adejuyigbe hopes to soon find his place within the anomalous landscape of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with a show that offers an amalgamation of his original comedic songs and skits, with one big stunt. The backflip might seem arbitrary, but the inclusion of such a motif has allowed the show to develop and progress in ways that he didn’t necessarily expect. 

“I did it once in January 2020. I'd never done a backflip before, and it went well in a way that I was like, ‘Oh, that's a bad lesson, that's hubris there’. It probably would have been better for my ego if I had fucked it up. Every time since then, the show has changed a little bit, and now it's morphed into this sort of commentary on why I would ever put a backflip in a comedy show and what it means for me to be a performer.”

Demi Adejuyigbe / Photograph: Sela Shiloni

For a prospective punter like myself, attaching a central premise or gimmick like a backflip may help to cut through the noise of the Fringe programme. But there’s more to it – the sense that you’re being invited in, with the intention of being led astray. At its heart, Adejuyigbe is asking the audience to consider why he, as a comedian, would ever want to do a show like this and what kind of performer that makes him. It’s analytical and clever, but it’s also a fun collection of the kind of bits that propelled Adejuyigbe into the internet’s collective consciousness.

On the whole, it’s not unusual for internet personalities and social media creators to appear at the Fringe, and we’ve gradually seen the increased presence of TikTok at the festival, particularly in its partnership as the Official Virtual Stage of the Fringe. As someone whose material has grown through platforms like Vine and has taken him into prolific writers’ rooms and across other mediums, Adejuyigbe is a strong believer in levelling the playing field when it comes to spaces like the Fringe, for the benefit of both future performers and audiences.

“I think as much as it sounds like people will bristle at the idea,” he says, “if you want it to be more democratic and want people from all sorts of different places to be able to do this, you have to accept that even people on platforms that you might see as ‘beneath real comedy’ have to be allowed to perform at these festivals.” 

For Adejuyigbe, the democratisation of festivals can unfortunately lead to people considering these spaces as lesser in quality because of their acceptance of creatives from different avenues. “You think it's not good anymore, because they are letting in people who don't have as much experience, who don't have the development platform that you had as a powerful white guy who could just do an hour on stage, because he looked like the other[s],” he continues. 

It’s a familiar trope that many of us know well, like when a culture-based society or community group wants to attract more members but then they get upset when those members come via unconventional pathways. Or feeling like you don’t belong in a space because your route to entry has been less of a straight line and more of a zigzag or curve – as is common in the arts.

“I think there's a thing about waiting for ‘perfect’ that a lot of People of Colour and women and queer people and anyone who's outside of this central box will understand – we don't get to wait for ‘perfect’ in order to get to the bigger platform. You just have to be putting stuff out, and then learning what works and what doesn't work. And I think, because of that, people see a lot of things that you do as low effort. But no, it's just, I don't have the team behind me to develop something until it's perfect, and then put it out. And that's not how creation should be. So I think it's just about letting people in without making the barrier to entry about existing fame or existing power.”

The Fringe landscape has changed over the years and will hopefully continue to evolve in years to come, but as Adejuyigbe says of the wider comedy scene, a shift in mindset is needed so that people are able to take that first shot. Waiting for perfection is not realistic in our current climate. Thinking back on my own experiences in music and journalism, such a wait would have taken me out of the game entirely. 

Beyond the Fringe, Adejuyigbe has a number of projects he’s working on, including a rom com he hopes to finish this year. But first, he has 25 shows and subsequently 25 backflips to perform to audiences in Edinburgh. 

“It's always fun to make something that sticks in people's heads,” Adejuyigbe tells me of his hopes for the show. “Figuring out how to make it so that people leave feeling excited about what they saw, that’s what I’m hoping for."

Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going To Do One (1) Backflip, Pleasance Courtyard, 31 Jul-25 Aug (not 12), 6.20pm.