A musical and comic bull’s-eye from marvellously ridiculous star-in-the-making Jazz Emu

Jazz Emu is not exactly jazzy, and he is unquestionably not an emu. What he is, however, is one of the funniest and most original musical acts since Flight of the Conchords – which is praise indeed.

The creation of twentysomething British comedian Archie Henderson, “Jazz” looks like a sarky junior IT consultant and sounds like a Danish exchange student who learnt his English entirely from Loyd Grossman and Cary Grant. Now at Soho Theatre, Henderson’s hour-long show You Shouldn’t Have premiered at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, but its short, two-week run there will have ruled it out of consideration for the big prize – presumably to the relief of those who did make the shortlist.

Its daft, twofold backstory is that “Jazz” comes, reluctantly, from a long line of foley artists (cue video calls from his satanically disapproving father), and that he unwittingly insulted a goblin in the audience while playing in Helsinki and is now trying to make amends. The whole surreal thing amounts to a conceptual, logistical, musical and above all comic bull’s-eye, propelled by Jazz’s epic delusions of coolness and Henderson’s astonishing one-man-band performing skills.

As he ricochets between keyboards – both regular and “mouth” – electric bass and vocals, his (all-original) music is as slick and as groovy as The Weeknd, but the lyrics err more towards Rainy Sundy in Sheringhm or Revng of the Nrd. In fact, his intended public apology climactically morphs into a kind of fascistic flowering of the character’s fragile-but-vast stand-up’s ego – the faux-modesty is all up there in the title.

A spirit of preposterous fun permeates the entire hour – and my, those songs. Miami (Is Where I Definitely Live) is an instant classic that sees Jazz, in the accompanying, painstakingly produced video, flapping around the Norfolk coast like a desperate Don Johnson wannabe while extolling the water-resistant virtues of his windcheater.

His baffled exploration-in-song of the English language’s phonetic idiosyncrasies is identically inspired, and the “encore” – centring on the sub-Metal Mickey “Funk Bot” who inexplicably emerges from the Cern Large Hadron Collider – is also tremendous. Oh, and a special mention, too, for the creepy fourth member of the Kellogg’s Snap, Crackle and Pop ensemble who apparently blighted his youth while nevertheless expanding his awareness of the financial markets.

The one, audience-participatory time Henderson breaks his 24-carat-golden rule of not having choruses – a rule that avoids the millennia-old musical-comedy pitfall of tediously repeating and depleting the lines in question – he’s slightly less funny (if still, admittedly, fun). Otherwise, I swiftly lost count of the number of times I laughed out loud at this marvellous, ridiculous star-in-the-making.

Until Dec 20; sohotheatre.com