Archie Henderson, aka Jazz Emu, on how he used that fan base to make something more interesting

I started uploading content as musical character Jazz Emu in late 2018 in a very different comedy environment. At that time, most people who enjoyed watching comedy content online were still rotating their phones 90 degrees to watch landscape sketches on Twitter and YouTube. Yes, young interloper TikTok was young and interloping, but that was still almost entirely just teenagers lip-syncing to songs at double speed. It was a few years away from convincing anyone ‘very serious’ about comedy (including me), that it offered any artistic or cultural or career value whatsoever.

And here we are in 2025, with so many of us having bitten the Bullet of Cringe and uploaded relentless biweekly footage of sketches and gigs and crowdwork until we’ve finally bludgeoned the duplicitous algorithm into submission. 

Some of the people I used to do open mics with when I started in 2018 are now selling out venues with capacities in the thousands off the back of their content. And with comedy suddenly Everywhere All At Once, the light-entertainment itch that used to be scratched by settling down sofaward to watch a beloved TV sitcom for 30 minutes has been much more efficiently and addictively scratched by two nightly hours of scrolling. 

Delicious scrolling. Sharp, shiny and, most importantly, short. So where does this leave longer form comedy fit, in the new world of intravenous entertainment efficiency?

I got personally lucky in short form vertical content’s first boom, in that my skill set - writing weird songs and editing shonky green screen footage (a skill set that I started developing as a nerdy ten-year-old enrollee at the school of late 00s YouTube) - turned out to feed perfectly into the TikTok algorithm. 

And to make matters better, we were all suddenly locked inside, and it was all so extremely achievable from the comfort of my bedroom. No more gigging to five people in a brightly lit pub function room! So much spare time! Time - to spend three full days making an un-giggable but eye-catching short song about dropping a piece of chopped onion down the side of the oven! I was in heaven. 

Thus I became one of those now slightly embarrassed people whose career was actually benefitted by lockdown. With the help and skill set of my ingenious friend and director Hunter Allen (who now edits Taskmaster), it helped me reach a niche and an avid audience who never would’ve found me if I was gigging in pub venues five nights a week. It’s helped me sell tickets to live shows (including Edinburgh Fringe… winky wink), earn money from streaming and build the full-time comedy career that seemed so far out of reach in 2018. 

But after a few years of having a lot of fun working out how to slurp up online eyeballs, I suddenly realised something terrifying. I was bored. So bored of the churn of tiny ideas that get wrapped up just as they start getting good. And to make things worse, I felt like a stooge of The Man. Pawn of Zuckerberg. A sleeper agent sent with the simple mission of harvesting eyeballs for the sake of getting people to stare.

 Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of attention. But it all started feeling pointless, ephemeral, and too precarious. I’d spent hundreds of hours of my life painstakingly building a presence on Twitter, only for it to be bought up by a demented technocrat and transformed into a cesspit of bots and hardcore porn in the space of a few months.

So Hunter and I decided to attempt something bigger. A longer form music video - a 30-minute visual concept comedy album, with the story running through it. Maximum hubris. Minimal experience. 

With the help of Alex, our producer at Country Mile, we dived into promoting our Kickstarter fundraiser, planning the rewards, building up to filming and production around our other jobs, with a month to film it all in October last year. In a crazy and unexpected turn, we raised all our initial budget in 48 hours, and were swamped in that ecstatic feeling so longed-for by any writer: the Green Light. Go Ahead. Two thumbs up. 

But instead of being greenlit by a corporation, with obligations and endless layers of feedback and neck-breathing and red tape, we had been greenlit by a few hundred people, with much smaller investments and with no demand in exchange for their cash other than: finish it, and do your utmost to make it as good as possible. 

It was so liberating, and I like to think we ended up making something with real 'bang for your buck.’

 Mainly, we noticed, this was because without the corporate red tape, we hit our walls against fewer obstacles than a big TV corporation would (rightly) face with regards to, ahem, health and safety. There we were, on our first shoot location - the basement of an abandoned dance school in Woolwich that was due for demolition in two weeks, with a door labelled ‘Fire Exit’ that led into - I am not exaggerating - an unlit, waterlogged tunnel with loose electric cables hanging from the ceiling. I’m not sure it would’ve got past internal risk assessments at the BBC. But we’d landed the location for free as a generous favour, and so were able to achieve something of probably double the ambition and scale as we would’ve on the same TV budget.

Sure, we booked a whole day shoot very cheaply in what turned out to be a penthouse apartment for shooting pornos (no amount of incense can mask certain smells). Sure, we relied so heavily on generosity and favours that our unbelievable cast (including Harry Enfield and Alex Horne) got paid less than the rat and professional rat-handler we hired for one 10 second scene. But we made something well-loved and creatively ambitious, everyone got paid, and that was entirely due to fans being able to directly access and fund our project through the internet.

I think we’re at a really interesting junction for longer-form comedy content right now. With audience-expansion abilities becoming more meritocratic, with the tight fist of industry gatekeepers losing its grip, with more and more platforms popping up to support small creators in connecting with fan bases of people who love specifically what they’re doing, there’s a much easier pathway for many more comedians to make unique, odd, interesting comedy - for the sake of it, with their own niche audience’s blessing. 

And with their chokehold on national audience attention diminishing, maybe corporations with infrastructure should start thinking how they can invest in smaller ways, to be part of this bright and glorious independent comedy future. 

That is, of course, until all internet servers simultaneously implode in The Great Reckoning (2029).

• Archie Henderson's Jazz Emu: The Pleasure is All Yours is on at Pleasance Dome at 9.50pm during the Edinburgh Fringe

Published: 22 Jul 2025