We sat down with Jazz Emu to talk about their new show coming to Edinburgh Fringe 2025. The Pleasure Is All Yours runs at Pleasance Dome (Queen Dome) 30th July -24th August. Tickets available HERE.
If Jazz Emu hosted his own self-help retreat, what would be the first mandatory activity – and how would it go horribly wrong?
Jazz Emu would initialise his self-help retreat with some “mindfulness numeracy”, and set all the attendees down at Excel spreadsheets in the welcome room. It would turn out to be a way to farm free tax-evasion off his wealthy and overqualified retreat attendees.
You describe Jazz as “Austin Powers crawling out of the Matrix” – what part of the Matrix do you think he’d get stuck in, and why?
Jazz Emu has woken up from the matrix but can’t work out how to get out of the slimy egg bed thing. He would spend a couple of hours trying to do that, and then give up and head back into the matrix for an easier go of it.
When the glitter settles and the synth fades, what’s the one truth about masculinity you’re most interested in exploding—or exposing?
I think the idea of masculinity that I’m sending up in Jazz Emu is a pretty timeless one: loud, brittle, fragile. But it’s been fun to me to explore how this fits into conflicting modern ideas of masculinity, with your foppish Harry Styles preeners on one end and your self-loathing Andrew Tate megalomaniacs on the other. Jazz Emu is both and all sides and ends all at once and upside down – he’s sort of a fever dream version of what it feels like as a young man trying to follow a role model map in the age of the internet. That’s all I’ve got so far.
The Pleasure Is All Yours promises explosive joy—what’s the most absurd thing you’ve done onstage in the name of delivering that promise?
I once came onstage in a student sketch show with my trousers round my ankles and pencils in my ears pretending to be the kid from those “they’re gonna taste great” Frosties ads from the 00s. I pretend to die onstage and one of the pencils jammed into my ear. Not a single laugh but the gasp could be heard from space. And that’s what we call audience satisfaction.
If Jazz Emu had to duet with another fictional egomaniac (real or imagined), who would he pick, and who would storm off first?
He has a lot of vendettas but this season is Barry Gibb from the Bee Gees. He would try to compete for who could sing higher and then burst an eardrum and have to be carried off set.
After years of strutting in that hypermasculine shell, what’s been the weirdest or most liberating thing about cracking it open for this show?
I’ve realised I’m a person who needs to dig into why things are funny in order to really understand them, and I think magnifying these ideas into hyperbole – putting on this big silly costume and prancing about – has helped me unpick the smaller ways I try and shape how I look and behave to personally try to fit in socially. And understanding those a bit better, I think it’s given me the freedom to pick and choose which parts of the performance are things I personally adore, and which are just boring cultural baggage to be jettisoned into the cosmic slop.