Viral sensation Jazz Emu offers Brighton comedy night

He has gained more than 70 million views, 430k followers on YouTube, 10 million views and 258k followers on TikTok and more than 74k monthly listeners and 20 million streams on Spotify. Now comes the first ever national tour, complete with full band. Dates include Brighton Komedia on Wednesday, February 19 and Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre on Sunday, March 2.

It all started life as a side project whilst working at a record label. Helping to write songs for artists, Archie, with the help of his friend Hunter Allen, collected £30 to create their first Jazz Emu video and posted it on Reddit. When the pandemic kicked in, Archie began to churn out more videos which became more and more popular until eventually he was able to focus full time on his new-found career.

“Jazz Emu is a character that I have developed over about five years or so. It started with the comedy songs I was doing in my bedroom during the lockdown and I just developed this slightly odd character through them. I had a picture of him as this tragic failed 70s lothario. I don't know where it came from but I had always been obsessed with the big comedy actors like Mike Myers and Jim Carrey and I had this voice in my head trying to let itself be heard. I had this character dwelling in my head, and a tone came out of this guy that is fixated on the tiny details. He is very vain, very narcissistic, very obnoxious and very deluded about his social competence. He thinks he is very smooth and charming but he is obsessed with the tiny, tiny details and cannot stay on topic.”

He's also work in progress: “I look back at the videos I found of the first show which I did maybe four years ago and you can see that I have got the idea but it's not quite the voice and it's not quite the moves. I think I'm still working on it now. But also part of this tour is to get a lot of people to come and see it that have not got any context for him at all. We did the show at the Edinburgh Fringe and we got a lot of people coming in cold. And I was thinking how I can make this guy come across in the first five minutes so that people did have a bit of context but that was hard because my temptation is very much to just dive straight in.”

As for the show itself Knight Fever, the premise is that Jazz Emu’s dreams come true when he secures a coveted slot at The Royal Variety Show in front of the King. At long last, Jazz Emu has a chance to secure the knighthood he craves. But there’s bad news: a series of recent criminal allegations are threatening to snatch the prize from before his very eyes.

“He is trying to work out what he's going to do for the King and he goes through these songs that are so ill informed and so exposing of his personality that he just gets himself in deeper and deeper.”