From Press Release:

You know they say everyone has got a novel in them?

Well, you know what it’s called, that novel we’ve all got in us?

I, IDIOT

With verbal and physical buffoonery, Jem Rolls cartoons the personal and the universal in his own intercontinental epic of blundering idiocy.

33, 333 muck-ups. And counting.

He has received 40+ ***** reviews and 200+ ****.

Jem’s last show: “The Inventor Of All Things” received FIVE STAR REVIEWS from CBC, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Edmonton Journal and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix

so this year a suspiciously self-deprecating individual boasts

a whole new genre of performance

yes a whole new genre

VERBAL BOUFFON

for it’s a lyrical cartoonery

when, with verbal and bodily buffoonery,

Jem Rolls explores the comic universality

in his own ungrand epic of ungrand

stupidity

I, IDIOT

after a ragingly successful self-reinvention as storyteller

in his last show THE INVENTOR OF ALL THINGS,

itself a bigsized risk… [the kind of comedy which ends in Hiroshima, anyone?]

Jem could perhaps have ploughed a similar and now safer furrow

instead he continues dangling himself over the edge of risk

on a slender branch of poetically adulterated silliness

above a bottomless lake of ever possible Fringe failure

for, unfortunately, he been infected by the clown virus

has learnt more from the clowns on the Fringe Tour than from anyone else

Jonno Katz, Chris Gibbs, Red Bastard and more

and so is transmogrifying himself again, same but different

into a more physically performative poet than any poet he has ever seen

with poems, song, monologues, bad jokes, good jokes, knock-knock jokes, neologisms, lousy lipsyncing, and an unwise but contractually obligated first foray into interpretive dance

including… an unsightly piece of savage introspection: “HOLD STILL JEM, I‘M GOING IN”

a wilful rejection of truth knowledge language and history, “NOTHING IS TRUE BUT SOME THINGS ARE MORE TRUE THAN OTHERS”

Photo of Jem Rolls by Jem Rolls.