By Jessica Taurins
As my partner and I arrived to see Demi Adejuyigbe’s The Wheel, his Melbourne International Comedy Festival 2026 offering, we worried we were late, as our previous show had run over.
Silly us.
Adejuyigbe’s queue of eager weirdos (ourselves included!) stretched unmoving out of The Greek’s lobby, around the corner, and past multiple restaurants. The show started over fifteen minutes late as we filed inside the building and up the stairs to the performance space.
There, we were greeted by the first yummy little taste of what was to come.
Adejuyigbe is a well-seasoned comedian of all flavours. Most known for his sitcom writing, music, and performances in assorted Dropout shows (an online comedy channel), Adejuyigbe uses each of his many skills to dazzle his audience during The Wheel. Throughout the show, it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s just part of the act. Adejuyigbe claims he wants his show to be about misdirection – which it very much is – but what was pre-planned and what was just a happy coincidence?
The Wheel is split into a few different parts accompanied by assorted videos and photos – part concert, part self-tape audition, part guy reading out tweets while an audience member threatens him with a tomato. Throughout each segment Adejuyigbe maintains this wonderfully comedic yet thoroughly strange and uncomfortable energy, checking his set list to confirm he’s doing the right bit and yelling at us for laughing at his (intentional?) mistakes.
When his sponsorship robot topples over, the crowd uproarious with laughter, Adejuyigbe spends multiple minutes lamenting that any jokes the robot could have told were never going to beat the thrilling thud of this custom-built machine absolutely stacking it. Was the entire gag that the robot was supposed to fall, and he was supposed to tell us off for laughing? Who knows! It made me cackle so hard I choked, and that’s all that really matters.
Adejuyigbe’s presence on stage is so remarkably enthralling that you never want to look away. He tunes directly into his crowd’s need for Weird Shit and gives it to us in spades, serenading us with songs about surfing Dracula, monsters going to a Halloween party, and all of the strange, confusing objects in his apartment. (I’m sure I’m not the only neurodivergent person with auditory processing problems in the audience who appreciated the subtitled lyrics during the songs.)
Adejuyigbe lives a very, very weird life, and he’s bloody brilliant at telling you about it.
He also does magic!
