‘I quashed the comedy fire at first, but then said, why not try’

Seheed O’Shobowale first came to Cork 20 years ago at the age of ten, although the comedian recounts his immigration experience with a bit more flair. “I was imported into Cork from Nigeria by my parents,” he jokes.

Moving to the city’s northside was something of a baptism of fire for the young Seheed. He recalls of his early days in the North Mon primary school: “I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. A core memory is of when I was in fourth class, and I was the new kid, and some of the lads used to come up to me during lunchtime and give me money because they said they’d be giving money to Africa.”

Bemused by the situation, Seheed decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. “I took the money,” he says. “It was kind of nice!”

Life got a bit easier for Ballyvolane-based Seheed when he started secondary school. “I was feeling more and more comfortable by then,” he recounts. “And I got myself a bit more integrated into my local society.”

Seheed started playing hurling with Glen Rovers, a game that he did not expect to be taken so seriously by his peers. “I couldn’t get my head around the Glen Rovers and Na Piarsaigh rivalry,” he says. “It was quite interesting and funny to me. I didn’t get why they were so angry! I was like, ‘you guys are literally two minutes away from each other’.”

Throughout school, Seheed never considered a career in the arts. “I never thought I was creative,” he says. He decided to study analytical chemistry at Munster Technological University (then Cork Institute of Technology). “I just went into science straight away because I was more academic.”

Seheed’s background, he feels, put additional pressure on him to succeed. “As an immigrant, I had to really kind of prove myself. When I was in secondary school, we didn’t have Irish passports. We were still going through the process. So I feel like the pressure was really on my mom because she was hoping we’d get citizenship so we’d be able to go to college without paying too much tuition and all that stuff.”

Fortunately, Seheed’s family did get citizenship in time for him to start college. “And that’s when I started feeling more Irish.” He also started to feel more Corkonian when he met students from other counties – and one county in particular – on his course. “I made friends from Kerry and I realised around them how much I loved Cork. I’d be slagging them off about Kerry!”

While the comedian in Seheed makes light of his youth in Cork and immigration experience, his early days in Ireland were undeniably tough. An unexpected bereavement introduced hardships that the family hadn’t even imagined.

“I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, with my grandparents and a big family. And one of the first differences when I moved to Cork was that it was just my mom (Adetola). She was just recently widowed around that time. She had lost her husband, my dad. It was weird because like, I thought I was going to get the full family package when I moved to Cork, but unfortunately it didn’t happen.”

Seheed has lonely memories of his tenth birthday – his first after his father’s death, and his first in his new country. “It was just me, my mom and my sisters,” he remembers. “Whereas my previous birthday – my ninth birthday – was in Nigeria and I have a picture of me with all my classmates”.

Seheed has recently featured in a documentary series on Virgin Media One. My Ireland Too spotlights the work of Cork Migrant Centre in Nano Nagle Place. The series follows a group of young migrants as they navigate the ups and downs of growing up in modern Ireland.

An emotional scene in the documentary follows Seheed as he returns to the first house his family lived in when they came to Cork, the house where he spent that first Irish birthday. “It was a lovely moment,” he says, “going back there and seeing how far I’ve come, and the sacrifices my mom made and stuff.

“Not to be overly emotional, but it made me appreciate the immigrant journey a bit more.”

Seheed was moved by the experience, but was determined not to cry on camera. “I wasn’t gonna cry on TV – the lads would be watching it!”

The comedian now mines his immigration experiences – good and bad – for his material, the seeds for which were sown whilst he was seeking a piece of home in his parents’ old video store. “In my parents’ shop, I watched a lot of Nigerian comedies. And I feel like it kind of started from there, because, looking back now, I think I wanted to feel Nigerian still. I didn’t really get Irish humour yet, but I guess I was always funny around my friends.”

It was while at college, “holding court”, as he puts it, with his new friends, that he realised he was having fun. Pursuing a career in entertainment, however, was not something that had ever been encouraged when he was growing up.

“I was a bit anxious. Growing up in Cork as a teenager, it felt like you weren’t allowed to be creative. There was a bit of a stigma around it, like, ‘what are you doing that for? There’s no money in it’. There was a bit of that going on. So I kind of quashed that fire until later, I thought, ‘you know what? People say I’m funny, so why not try?’”

Seheed’s first attempt at stand-up – like that of many comedians – was humbling. “The first gig was not a friendly one,” he recalls of his open-mic night experience back in 2019.

Undeterred, he went on to find laughs – and his eventual comedic home – in the CoCo Comedy Club on Castle Street. “That was lit,” Seheed says of his first successful gig. “I felt on top of the world, man. I’ve never felt anything like that before in my life. It was crazy.”

Having caught the stand-up bug, Seheed has since toured around the Cork comedy circuit and more recently took to the stage a bit further afield. “I did stand-up in London the other day,” he says of a recent trip. “I didn’t mean to, but it just happened. I was on holidays and went to watch a show. I was at the back of the room watching and it turned out one of the participants wasn’t there. So I went up in his place without telling anybody... And now they know me there.”

Seheed doesn’t know for sure what his career might have in store, but is keen to keep grasping opportunities – like the London comedy club, and the My Ireland Too documentary – as they arise. Of where life may take him, the comedian describes it like a poet: “If I was a tree, I would be Nigerian. My bark, my stem is Cork, it’s Irish. And I’m still trying to figure out my branches and leaves. That’s the stage I’m at right now.”

• Seheed O’Shobowale’s podcast, The Seheed00 Show, is available on all main podcast platforms. Follow him on Instagram at @seheed00.
• My Ireland Too is available to watch on the Virgin Media Player.