Isbae U has gone back to the lowest season of his career and described how close it felt to a public funeral. On The Morayo Show, the comedian and host of Curiosity Made Me Ask told Morayo Afolabi-Brown that the 2022 sex-for-roles scandal and leaked videos left him asking whether his life was finished, and that the first person he put that question to was Mr Macaroni. The clip is part of a longer studio conversation in which he also explained how the interview series was born and why elders such as Pete Edochie still make him nervous.
Adebayo Ridwan Abidemi, known as Bae U or Isbae U, was a rising skit maker when the story broke at the end of January 2022. Screenshots circulated accusing him of asking women for sex in exchange for appearances in his content, and explicit material leaked into the same storm. He posted an apology on Instagram, said he would not blame anyone but himself. On Morayo’s set four years later, he did not relitigate every message. He talked about what the pile-on did to him.
“2022 when my scandal of ‘sex for roles’ and leaked videos happened was a tough time for me. It was the first time I was going through something like that and the first question I asked somebody — I think it was Mr. Macaroni — was ‘is this the end?’ You never know how powerful people are in your life until they turn their backs on you. People that used to comment good things about me started commenting bad without caring about what I was going through.”
His way out, he said, was not a long defence of his private life. It was craft.
“What I did was to focus on doing and getting better with my craft, and as a person. I focused on giving them entertainment. I moved back from posting anything about my life and I kept giving them entertainment — what I believed concerns them — and being better at it.”
That decision sits behind the show that later gave him a second identity. When Morayo asked where Curiosity Made Me Ask came from, he said it grew out of a refusal to stay average.
“It came from me still finding myself. There was a day I told someone I was done being mediocre or average and that I wanted to do something different. I didn’t just want to be considered one of the Skit Makers.”
He pointed to an old American format, the Zach Galifianakis series Between Two Ferns, and said the idea of sitting people down and talking felt like work he could own even if he now does it more often than the show that inspired him.
The format has already carried him into rooms that would have sounded impossible in January 2022. Pete Edochie and Olusegun Obasanjo appeared on Curiosity Made Me Ask this month and engaged him efficiently in banter. Isbae U told Morayo that the fear of speaking out of turn during his roast-style interviews remain with him always.
“Always. Every time. Especially when it comes to people that are way older than me like Sir Pete Edochie, Ogogo, and Chief Olusegun Obasanjo. I was really really worried about interviewing people like that, but I’m glad they welcomed me and assured me that I could do it.”