Simon and Aaron are Plastic Jeezus, a deadpan musical comedy duo performing hilarious surreal and unique original songs. They’re heading to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe to make their debut with Plastic Jeezus: Leave Them Wanting Less and they took the time out from preparations to fill us in on the details.
Q&A with Plastic Jeezus
How does it feel to be making your debut at Edinburgh Fringe?
We don’t really get excited about things, but if we did, we’d probably describe ourselves as ‘excited’ about it. We’re taking up a show that we know people will enjoy, and if there’s one thing that there’s lots of at Edinburgh Fringe, it’s people. And flyers. And people handing out flyers. So we reckon we’ll be in just the right place.
What can you tell us about your show and its inspiration?
In recent years, comedy shows at Edinburgh all seem to have a deep, emotional theme or a message to take away and ponder. Our show, ‘Leave Them Wanting Less’, doesn’t. There’s no deep meaning to it at all. It’s a bunch of absurd songs sung by two men who may or may not even like each other. There’s some talking. There’s some other stuff (which we’re contractually obliged not to mention) and then there are some more songs. That’s kind of what we do. We’ve won awards for it and everything. It’ll be great.
How do you think audiences will react to the show
If you were to plot the audience response on a graph – we think it’d slowly go from ‘baffled’ to ‘laughing hard’, occasionally dipping back into ‘baffled’, with a quick dip into ‘pity’ and then back to ‘laughing hard’. Repeat that pattern a few times and then end on ‘actually quite impressed, considering they were playing ukuleles’.
That said, if you were to plot the audience response on a graph you’d clearly be somebody with way too much time on your hands. Get a hobby. Have you considered cross-stitching?
How have you been preparing for the festival?
We’ve been staying up too late, eating takeaways and drinking a bit too much. In many ways, our entire lives have been preparing us for the festival.
We’ve also been performing a bunch of previews of our show at festivals around the UK, and – if we do say so ourselves – they’ve been going pretty well. There. That’s jinxed it.
Will you get a chance to enjoy the rest of the festival?
We hope to! There are loads of great acts who we’d love to go and see; and no doubt we’ll discover even more when we’re up there. We’re going to have to be pretty ruthless about who we don’t go and see, to be honest. A bunch of our pals will be there and we’ll be looking to support them. Because, despite the frosty veneer, we’re actually super-nice guys. Just ask our Mums.
