Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome

Archie Henderson brings his comedy creation Jazz Emu to the Brighton Dome Comedy Festival on Friday, October 16 at 18:00.

Jazz Emu: The Pleasure Is All Yours will be in the Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome.

“Jazz Emu is a character that I came up with maybe five or six years ago,” he says. “I was performing these songs that I had been writing in my bedroom. They were high energy and I was making YouTube videos of them, and when I started doing that, I just started becoming this character. He is a sort of vainglorious pop star from any decade. He’s an amalgamation of David Bowie and Harry Styles and an alien squidman. He's always getting the wrong end of the stick. He's missing things socially and is completely deluded about how good he is. He is good at music but bad at everything else. It developed from this goofy overconfident person. And I was just thinking how could I put this character on the stage, and this voice started emerging. It's a kind of pan global, pan European accent. I loved the idea of making him unplaceable.”

Archie first brought him to the stage in 2022: “I took it to the Edinburgh Fringe and that was my first go at making a comedy show out of it. It's the sort of comedy character that will never learn from his mistakes. He has an arrested development. He doesn't change much. If anything, the voice has become more embedded and more exaggerated.

“In this show he is having, I suppose, an existential crisis about his career. He is on a quest to really satisfy himself as a performer.

“The people that come to see the show are a very broad range. I often get families in the front row, the parents and the teenage kids but it does seem to be all ages. I think it's for people that just love word play.

“We are doing 25 dates on the tour. We're about halfway through at the moment. It's me driving the van and I've got a technician with me. It's a very small team at the moment. Last year we did the show with the band but this time we needed to be light on our feet.

“Touring is really good fun but at the same time it's quite mad. It's just me and him sharing a bedroom. We wake up face to face in the Travelodge and then drive for six hours. I don't think I have ever felt more like I'm in some kind of simulation! It's a strange and uncanny way of living.”

Archie is delighted to be back in Brighton: “We did Komedia last year and that was a great gig. It's fun turning up and thinking what is this venue going to be like. Komedia is a really great comedy club space.”