Billed as a psychedelic western musical, Cactus Blactus is the new show for comedy duo Jekyll x James, otherwise known as Sydney comedians Jared Jekyll and Cameron James, and recently heard on Triple J’s weather rap. Currently playing at Melbourne International Comedy festival, their show is a blend of music, sketch comedy, clowning and stand up, and will soon be part of Sydney Comedy festival.
How do you work as a partnership? Does one come up with the ideas or do you share the process equally?
James: Both. We rarely bring ideas separately, they generate when we’re sitting in a room with our instruments, trying to make each other laugh or spit up whatever drink we’re drinking.
You must know what makes the other laugh?
Jekyll: Cameron laughs at really stupid things. Really highbrow comedy and really lowbrow comedy.
James: Both of us respond to something that seems clever or well structured but has a vein of stupidity running right through the middle of it. And no matter how clever your writing is, nothing will ever be funnier than a fart joke.
Jekyll: You can spend hours slaving over words to craft the perfect one-liner, and then somebody can fart and you’ll laugh harder at that than you will at anything you’ve written.
James: We both try to make each other laugh from an unintellectual place. It’s like shocking someone, making them laugh, making them upset, you can’t pinpoint why you feel it, you instinctively feel like that. It’s a visceral emotive experience.
Jekyll: We’re so theatre.
How much is scripted, how much is improvised on the night?
James: The show we’re working on has the most amount of improv that we’ve ever done, by design. It’s structured, there’s a narrative and there’s theatrical elements but we have chunks of the show that allow for us to play with the audience in an antagonistic way.
Do you ever look at the other one and think I have no idea where he’s going with this?
James: It happens a lot and I love that feeling. You don’t have time to be scared, instinct kicks in and you think I better just say the first thing that comes into my head and hopefully I’m funny right down to my core. If the worst thing that happens is the audience don’t laugh, that’s one second and you move onto the next bit. Nothing that awful is going to happen. Unless they hate it so much that they stab you, I guess that’s the worst thing that can happen.
Jekyll: But we’ve only been stabbed twice.
You each perform solo too. How do you judge what works together and what works solo?
James: We use live music, we play, sketch and clown [in our show] and it relies exclusively on the chemistry between the two of us on stage. It’s not something we could replicate on our own; it all comes down to the two of us being idiots together.
Jekyll: If we are doing something together, it’s much stronger because we have two dynamics happening at once. One of us can be creating some kind of musical set up, while the other one is talking and vice versa, so we never drop the ball, there is always momentum building.
James: I’ve never thought about that before so this is enlightening to me as well as to you.
So what can the audience expect?
Jekyll: They can expect it to be an adventure that they’re going to be very much a part of. They are coming to the west with us, they’re going to be on the horses with us, in the train carriages, in shootouts and in brothels with us. They are going to get dirty and they are going to get bloody.
What’s the strangest place you’ve performed a show?
Jekyll: Recently we had to perform at the Secret Garden music festival in Sydney. It was a rave in the bush and we had to perform for four hours to a sea of drugged out teenagers.
Four hours is a very long show.
James: It was a surprise to us too. We thought we were only doing an hour but we ended up going into the night. It became insane by the end, exactly what we replicate on stage like a psychedelic trip into absurdity.
Jekyll: Nothing is going to be scarier than hundreds of 18-year-old ravers dressed up as Pikachu.
There’s been a significant growth in the amount of female comedians performing at the Melbourne International Comedy festival. How do you feel about that?
James: 51% of the population are some of the funniest people I know. And some of the acts that I am most excited about seeing this year are all women, like Becky Lucas with her debut show, Gen Fricker, Tessa Waters, Anne Edmonds.
Jekyll: Women do tend to be quicker on their feet and have a more acerbic wit, so it makes perfect sense that they would be great at comedy.
Who else are you looking forward to seeing at MICF?
James: Apart from the ones I mentioned, Suren Jayemanne has a show, and Tobias Comedy is really funny. Also Sam Campbell and Trygve Wakenshaw. More alternative acts in Australia have been rising to the top lately. People are starting to love the weird and wonderful take on comedy. There’s always going to be the Adam Hills and the Wil Andersons right at the top of the pile, because the mass eat that stuff up but the alternative industry isn’t that far any more
When you watch a comedy show, do you sit back and enjoy it or are you watching what they are doing?
Jekyll: It’s great when you can turn your brain off and start laughing. Last year the highlight was Trygve Wakenshaw’s show Kraken, which I couldn’t analyse, it was too funny.
What does success look like?
Jekyll: If I’m honest I’ve always wanted a large swimming pool filled with jelly. If I ever have enough money to buy that many packets of jelly or to have a large pool, I would say that I would be quite successful.
James: I’m not in it for the money. All I want is for my artistic heroes to look at me as a peer – and to give me some of their money. That’s all I want.
Cactus Blactus, 26 March to 19 April, Forum Theatre, Melbourne
