For these days Rees is what the youth have probably long ago stopped referring to as a “viral phenomenon”,taking the internet by storm with his homemade one-man comedy sketches taking aim at myriad elements of Australian life. How does such a transformation happen? The answer is that the new Jimmy Rees is one of the happy silver linings of the COVID pandemic – it was videos wherein he poked fun at the government’s response to the virus that caused his new career path to go supernova.
“It was kind of born out of a bit of necessity,” he muses.
“Giggle and Hoot ended in 2019,I had a bunch of gigs booked forGiggle and Hoot,we had a little tour that was planned,then 2020 rolled around and the single live event I had planned that was going to be my income for that year disappeared.
“And we had to deal with being in lockdown. I was confused about to what to do,I was bored basically,and I was like,this is my chance to make some silly videos for the internet,this is something I’ve wanted to do. I wouldn’t have been able to do the stuff I do now when I was Jimmy Giggle,so I thought this is my time.
“I started making some silly videos,I think the first ones I made were about parenting,things my five-year-old does around the house. And it just blew me away how far it reached:Facebook would send me stats and I’d never had more than 20 or 30,000 on any of the posts I’d done … and this one was a million.
“I said to my wife,I’m gonna make another one tomorrow. So I did another one the next day,and it did the same thing. It was gaining so much more reach than I could ever have imagined. I guess the rest is history,it just kept going and going and going. And I took the layers of my ABC hat off more and more.”
And yet his soaring fame online has led him to don that hat again:having moved from kids’ television to grown-ups’ internet,he’s back on Aunty,now as Jimmy Rees rather than Giggle,presentingTiny Oz,a documentary series about the curious community of passionate artists who dedicate their lives to recreating important moments in Australian history in miniature.