Demi Adejuyigbe wants government-mandated dance classes for all men—or so he told Kareem Rahma on Subway Takes. It’s hard not to like the idea of a world where everyone boogies as hard as the comedian does, whether in his iconic series of annual music videos set to Earth, Wind & Fire’s “September” or the absurd musical numbers from his celebrated one-man shows. (The title of his Edinburgh Fringe debut advertised that he would also do a backflip on stage). Between his countless pursuits as a 21st-century renaissance man, including DJ sets, TV writing, podcasting, and film photography, Adejuyigbe somehow finds time to reply to every text and to research visual effects in movies. Like LeBron James in his favorite meme, he is truly “smiling through it all.”
Phone model: iPhone 17e
Phone alarm: Radial
It's a very default one. I just need something that’s not going to sound like anything else. I don't do a custom tone, because I feel like I could very simply just be like, “Oh, it's this song,” but I need something that will be annoying very quickly.
Computer model: MacBook Pro 14-inch
Daily average screen time: 9 hours
I get notifications for it, and I’m always like, “That's none of my business.” I'm on my phone a lot. I use my phone in my show. I record things.
Music app: Apple Music
It was revealed that the CEO [of Spotify] was [investing in] AI companies and military contractors, and that was the last straw. I continually hear about how bad Spotify is, and I have so many musician friends who are just like, “The residuals suck.” It's not a good one to use if you support musicians. So I was just like, “Fuck it, I'm going to switch.” And when they were doing ICE ads, I was like, “Yeah, let's get off this.”
I missed the UI so much, but I've gotten used to Apple Music so much now that it just feels sort of like the lesser of two evils. Not like Apple's a good company, but you know.
Number of unacknowledged …
Emails: 72
I'm actually bad at answering emails, but my unread count is never crazy, because it's always purposeful: “I want this to be unread until I've responded, until I've marked it.” And I get very anxious sometimes when I get an email, even when it's something from a specific person or something I'm waiting on. I'm like, “I'm not in the place to answer that right now,” and then it just falls down the list.
Texts: 0
I'm very good at responding to texts, especially because why pretend I'm not on my phone all the time? When I see the text, I'll respond to it. If I ever have a high count of unread texts, I just got out of a movie and the group chat has been talking about something.
Last content binge: Reel Talk Show
It’s an Instagram game show that popped up for me a couple of days ago. Someone asks people on the street to guess certain movies by audio playing from the movies, and I watched like 20 of those in a row.
Rule of thumb for replying on social media:
I'll comment if it’s by a friend and I know the comment will be helpful for the algorithm or whatever. In general, I see it like I'm at the zoo—I don't need to interact with that. It's just a thing that I enjoy, and then I walk away.
Also, if I comment and people reply to me, I will get notifications and I'll be annoyed, so I mostly just reply if it's something that I think is helpful or constructive or they will be happy to see. If it's a stranger, I almost never comment because who's that for? Unless, again, it's really funny and I just want to write “hahahaha.”
Frequency of DM slides: Quarterly (when single)
Almost never. When I was single I would try DM sliding once every quarter. But truly I have to have something to talk about, I have to have some reason to believe that they'd be receptive: We follow each other and have not really interacted, or I have something clever to say about something they said to me. Because there have been times where I would try to slide into someone's DMs with nothing, and I would make a joke, and then I'd be like, “All right, well, I'm out of stuff now. I didn't try very hard, but I'm done.” I'm not trying to establish myself as someone with a reputation for doing this, but I think it's fine.
Last Google search: Engelbert Humperdinck
I saw a Reddit thread about what celebrity you were shocked to find wasn't using their real name. Someone said Engelbert Humperdinck, and I was like, what's his real name? And it's Arnold Dorsey.
Last photo taken:
I went to my friend Sophie's show tonight, and whenever I go to a show, I’ll take a photo so I can post about it. This is a show I've seen before, in Melbourne, and I saw it again in Edinburgh because it was a more finished version, and she asked me to have a little walk-on cameo at the end. I took a photo of her from the side of the stage, like a proud mom.
Last screenshots: Ticket to a Patti Harrison show (phone) and a playlist sorted by popularity of song (laptop)
My last screenshot on my phone was my ticket to Patti Harrison's show, like two days ago. My last screenshot on my laptop was an organized list of music; there's a website called Organized Playlist, and if you have a link to your Spotify playlist or whatever, you can be like, “OK, I want it to be alphabetical. I want it to be organized by genre. I want it to be organized by year.” I was preparing to make a mashup megamix for a party that I was DJing, and I set it to be organized by popularity to see which songs people would recognize. In the screenshot, the most popular song is “Set Fire to the Rain” by Adele, and the least popular is “Attention” by Charlie Puth.
Top three emojis: 😎❤️🙄
I use the sunglasses and the eye roll a lot. Heart emoji because I love to show love. I feel like I only use the eye-rolling emoji ironically, when I'm saying something that's very stupid and pretending it's like, “Everyone should know that.”
Social network you just can’t quit: X
I want to burn it to the ground. I think it's awful. I think everyone on there is really bad, myself included. It's like one in every thousand posts is the thing that makes you go, “Oh, that's fun, that's funny, that's nice.” I think we all have an addiction that can only be solved by someone taking an axe to the Twitter servers.
It just feels really, really dark. I always say that the only fix for that website, short of an outage, is everyone being allowed to tweet exactly three times a day, and then you would be very specific about what you're saying and not just pick fights with people or boost things by quote-tweeting it just to say it's stupid.
People say, “Well, go to Bluesky.” I'm like, “You don't really understand. It's not that I want a replacement. I want to not do it at all.” I'm not like, “Oh, I miss posting.” I don't want to post. It's like I got addicted to cigarettes when I was young, and now I keep smoking cigarettes and, well, you could try vaping? That's not the thing. It should be banned.
News source: X and Reddit
Oh boy, X, which is one of the worst reasons that I think I stay on it. X or Reddit, both of them not great, but it's just easy because it feels like my life is already condensed into attending those places regularly, so I don't have to go outside and ask, “What other things should I be aware of?” Outside of that, I'm not really good at actively searching for news, hugely to my detriment. I recognize that getting your news through an algorithm that is tailored to you is a really good way to stay very insular in what you know.
Favorite subreddit: r/movies
I really like the movie subreddit. With every subreddit, again, it's like the zoo, I'm not intending to interact. I don't actually want to be a part of the community. People will post trailers, and I don't wanna watch the trailer, but I understand now the trailer is out. Or I'll just see announcements for things.
I really like the Oscars race subreddit [r/oscarrace] because it's just fun to see what people are arguing about. I especially like it when it’s so far ahead of time, because I’m just watching, going, “You guys are insane, and this is way too early,” but I personally do like the Oscars and care about it. So as it gets closer it's nice to see updates—“Oh, this didn't do well at Cannes. This is doing well at Venice, blah blah blah.” It's nice to feel like I'm staying in touch with that even outside of the Oscars season. But I do think it's fun to watch from a distance really early in the year. It's fun to watch everyone fight and think, “I care a lot about this, but not in the way that you do, and it makes me feel better about myself.”
Favorite tech product: Canon EOS-1N (replaced three times so far)
I carry my camera everywhere. It's a camera that has broken many times, and I will just replace it and get the exact same one. It's a Canon EOS-1N, a film camera from Japan. I just love it because it’s a film camera, but it's digital enough that it has autofocus and great settings and I'm so comfortable with that. When it breaks down—because they're all old and the batteries die and they have problems—I could get a new one or a more updated one, but I like this one so much I will just go and get it again.
Favorite meme: LeBron James “Smiling through it all” or Nathan Fielder’s “What that means”
It's funny, my friend was complaining about guys on dating apps asking about her favorite meme. I think that seems like a fine question; he's just trying to bond. She then asked me to describe my favorite memes and I literally didn't respond.
My favorite one is the LeBron James “Smiling through it all,” where he's in the pool—yeah, I think that one's so funny.
Nathan Fielder, when he's doing that interview and he has a kid in a van talking in his ear, and the kid says, “What that means,” and Nathan just goes, “What that means.” I've just started saying “What that means” without context, as a normal thing.
Old website you’re most nostalgic for: Xanga
I really liked when Xanga was around. The fun of having to know how to code to build a website was such a fun early thing—so nice to be tricked into learning a skill for the sake of, you know, trying to have style. I'm sometimes nostalgic for that level of customization when it comes to an online profile, as opposed to everything being sort of flat and homogeneous.
Craziest internet rabbit hole: Visual effects in film
There's this YouTube channel Corridor Digital that I really like—but also have a lot of problems with. In general, I just like their content; it focuses on behind-the-scenes production of films and visual effects. That's something that people shit on a lot now, and I still just find it such an artful and interesting thing. It's nice to see people who keep this discussion alive around the artistry of the effects. They had some videos around the second-to-last Avatar movie because there's a shot in one of the trailers where everyone was like, the VFX on this looks so good, it's unbelievable. They had sort of a breakdown with it at one point—the movie came out and they were like, “No, it's not VFX. It was a photo, a thing that was filmed and then edited into the video.” I went down the rabbit hole of looking into the VFX for that movie and compositors talking about how they did that shot. A lot of times I get into rabbit holes about film production.
Tech hygiene habits: None
I unfortunately have no tech hygiene habits. I set up the screen time block on my phone for Twitter—after 15 minutes it pop ups, you're out of time. But you can hit Ignore, and I hit Ignore every time. I just keep my phone with me at all times. I'll look at it before bed. I do all this.
I don't have too many rules for myself about when I'm not supposed to be on the internet, unless I'm trying to write, in which case I'll go to a coffee shop that has no Wi-Fi, and that's always good for me to focus while being surrounded by people and noise that I find is a comfort.
A version of this article appears in the January/February issue. Subscribe now.