AYO EDEBIRI

As a writer and actor on ‘Big Mouth,’ the comedian is bringing a fresh perspective to the fore

ayo edebiri still remembers the first joke she ever told. She was in eighth grade and had just joined the improv team at her school in Boston. She was a nerdy teen, fond of writing fan fiction about

Twilight’s Jacob Black. Improv was not an obvious fit. Then she made a crack about why Christians’ favorite cheese was Swiss: “Because it’s holy,” she says, rolling her eyes. “People thought that was funny.”

The 25-year-old’s comic sensibility has matured considerably since then. She’s currently a writer for Netflix’s hilariously profane animated series about puberty, Big Mouth, where she’s started voicing Missy, a similarly awkward black teen with a predilection for writing steamy fan fic and humping her Glo Worm. In her standup and on her Comedy Central series

Ayo and Rachel Are Single, co-created with Rachel Sennott, she’s joked about everything from getting too high on edibles to people constantly asking her to have a threesome (what she calls having “the energy of a third”).

Growing up in a religious Pentecostal household, Edebiri had limited exposure to comedy. But while a student at NYU, she became inspired by Keisha Zollar and Monique Moses, members of Upright Citizens Brigade’s first all-black sketch group. Now, Edebiri is bringing Missy to life just as Big Mouth’s writers have begun exploring the character’s identity. (The original actor, Jenny Slate, who is white, stepped down amid widespread discussions about representation.) She also has a spot in the writers room for the upcoming Netflix series Mulligan and a plum role in the second season of Apple TV+’s Dickinson, as hair-care entrepreneur/clairvoyant maid Hattie. But she maintains a Missyesque attitude toward her meteoric rise. “People keep saying [I’m blowing up], but it certainly doesn’t feel like it,” she says wryly. “I can normalize pretty much anything in my mind.”