Comedian Simon Hennessy spoke to David Hennessy ahead of bringing his show Notice Box, which explores society’s relationship with smartphones, to The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith.
Comedian and performer Simon Hennessy, from Donnybrook in Dublin, brings his show Notice Box to The Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith this weekend.
Presented by the Irish Creative Collective, the show is a concept comedy show about life on our phones, from the most chronically online of creatures – the internet comedian.
Notice Box is internet sensation Hennessy’s sophomore solo show.
His London date is part of a wider tour of Ireland and follows a sold out run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Dublin Fringe Festival in 2024.
Combining songs, sketches, and stand-up, it’s an hour that blends farcical humour with honest introspection on the allure and anxieties of the digital world.
Also using music and multimedia, Hennessy explores the online world we carry in our pockets and spend a great deal of time on.
Writer, creator, and performer Simon Hennessy rose to prominence via his satirical social media sketches and viral characters such as Remy and Adam from Bumble, seeing him amass 396,000 followers and over 300 million views.
His first solo hour Afters completed a sellout tour of the UK and Ireland in 2023.
He has also been featured in TV series on RTE and Virgin Media.
Tell us about the show..
“It’s a musical comedy about living on your phone from the perspective of a chronically online smartphone comedian.
“It’s the one thing I feel truly qualified to talk about.
“They say write about what you know. I don’t know a lot but I do know what it’s like to spend too much time on your phone.
“But what I found in writing it but especially performing it is that most of those experiences of spending too much time on your phone, they are not unique to being someone whose job revolves around the internet because regardless of what you do, we all spend too much time on our phones.
“It’s funny because I think it’s a more modern subject matter in that sense but it’s pretty universal in the sense that we all have a phone and I imagine all of us would say we should probably spend a little less time on it.
“And also once you get into the weeds on it, it’s a really weird world the way we interact there and the way we treat ourselves and each other there.
“This is probably making it sound more deep than it is.
“There’s a little bit of sincerity in there but it is a comedy show after all so there are fart noises and crude jokes and all that other silly stuff which make up the bulk of the show with the occasional hopeful, slight insight along the way.
“It is mostly about my own kind of experiences.
“There’s kind of a sequence which I think is good but it’s a little strange where I basically duet with my most recognisable internet character which is a French student called Remy.
“That stuff will be more specific to me but along the way, there’s a game show about dating apps and there’s a rap song about leaving people unseen and not replying to their messages.
“It is stuff that we all experience and we all deal with in the weird and wonderful digital lives that we are all living in our own pockets.”
Tell us about the kind of reactions you get. I imagine wherever you do it, people can relate..
“Yeah, I think so.
“I suppose the people who it has resonated with the most would also be friends of mine who also are comedians that came from the internet.
“They are the ones who will say, ‘I know exactly what you mean’ for some of it and which makes sense because it’s written from that perspective.
“But it’s always nice.
“Thankfully the runs we had at Edinburgh Fringe and Dublin Fringe went really well, and the show was really positively received.
“And that’s always nice to see when you do something, because you never know for sure when you’re preparing it, ‘Is this only my experience? Is this really going to resonate with people?’
“But it’s really nice even when they’re talking to you afterwards or even in the moment when you can tell if you’ve made a joke about something and you see it click with people and they’re like, ‘I know exactly what he’s talking about’.
“You can sort of see it in people’s faces and then how they react.
“I think that’s been the case in the shows that we did over the summer.
“But the world of the Internet changes pretty fast so maybe all of the jokes and songs will be obsolete when I do the show this May, we’ll find out.”
You rose on social media so social media has been good to you in that respect but you do talk about its pitfalls.
Would you say you have a kind of love/hate relationship? Do you see the whole digital world as a bit of a double edged sword?
“Yeah, definitely. 100%.
“I was even talking about this actually last night with my brother.
“He has gone off social media entirely and he was like, ‘Sorry Simon but the world would probably be a better place if we got rid of it entirely’.
“And I couldn’t, in all good conscience, completely disagree with him because so much of it is negative and used for negative purposes.
“People have negative experiences with it and I’m not immune to that.
“First and foremost, it’s a comedy show so I’m not trying to solve all the problems of the internet.
“And secondly, it’s sort of about my own experience with it so I don’t go too heavy into the darker sides of the internet.
“But even in my own experience, and I do touch on this a bit in the show, there is a bit of a push/pull before doing TikTok in COVID which was what led to everything for me.
“Before that, I wasn’t really on social media at all.
“I had it but I barely used it.
“I mean I had a Facebook that I deleted before I even got to college because I was like this, ‘I don’t really like this’.
“And I had other social media but I it was only really a functional thing to message people and now as a result of this, it’s where I spend so much of my time because it’s a huge part of what I do but I’m aware that it’s not necessarily the healthiest thing.
“But on the other hand, I love making the videos and it’s led to a lot of opportunities for me such as doing this show.
“I think there’s a nice community around the people who follow me and I’ve met loads of other really great, creative people doing similar things through it.
“It is a double edged sword and there is good and bad that comes with it.
“And in the show, I try and make that point.
“It’s just impossible to pin it all down and definitively say ‘it is a bad thing’ or ‘it is a good thing’ when it’s too big and too sprawling and there’s too much going on to say anything like that.
“It’s easier to just make silly jokes and do silly songs at its expense.”
Has it had its lows for you?
“No, I wouldn’t say extreme lows.
“I think I’ve been very lucky in the sense that the interactions I’ve had and the responses I’ve got have been almost exclusively positive which I’m very grateful for.
“That’s not everybody’s experience who tries to make things and put stuff up on the internet so I’m very lucky in that respect.
“You have to be very careful to make sure that the lines between the real world and the digital world aren’t blurred because you have to remember it isn’t really real.
“It is just happening on a screen but it can be very easy to fall into that trap of spending too much time in it and spending more time living in that world than in the real world and the effects that that can have on how you approach the world and your own mental attitudes and stuff.
“There would be a bit of that for sure and it is cathartic to deal with it through making a show and getting to perform it and all that stuff.
“For the most part I’ve been pretty lucky with regards it.
“I don’t think I’m old but I think I started posting videos on the internet in lockdown and I would have been around 25 and I think having that experience then in my mid 20s and then through my late 20s, I think it would have been a very different story had that happened to me in my teens which is the case for a lot of people.
“I think I would have taken it all a lot more seriously, not that I don’t take it seriously but it would have affected me more, any success or the opposite.
“I’d say it would have had a stronger effect on me being younger.
“I’m making it sound like I’m a world weary elder statesman.
“Obviously 25 is not old but I think it’s just about old enough to know not take it too seriously and to kind of treat it with a little bit of detachment which I think also helps in writing a show about living on your phone if you have that little bit of detachment and a little bit of a helicopter view and being able to look at and be like, ‘This is so weird’.
“It is so weird that in one sense, hundreds of thousands of people are seeing this thing that I’ve made but in a much more real sense, I am sitting alone in a dark room in my apartment and there is not a human being in sight.
“I think being able to have that little bit of detachment probably means you can see it with a clearer eye and it doesn’t have as strong an effect and makes it easier to talk about it and write about it, sing about it, joke about it, all the rest.”
It began in lockdown for you. Was it a case of finding a creative outlet in that time? What were you doing before lockdown?
“In terms of what I was doing before, not much.
“I had been living in Australia and I was doing marketing for a tech company.
“Then I came home and went from that to a couple of months later, living in my parents’ house, no job and the world shut down.
“I found myself in the same position as a lot of people, being back at home with endless time and nothing to do and no idea of how long this was gonna last and that sort of weird state we were all in of simultaneous fear and boredom which don’t sound like they should go together, and yet, that’s what we all lived through.
“But it was exactly that I wanted a creative outlet of sorts and posting little 30 second clips to TikTok felt like a very appropriate creative outlet for the time where what was the sense in trying to do anything longer form or with an eye towards an audience or anything because we were stuck at home and we didn’t know how long that would last.
“I just started doing it really to pass the time because I had a lot of time and couldn’t think of anything better to do.
“And at first, they were truly awful.
“I would really discourage anyone from going all the way back to the start of my TikTok page because you will find nothing but drivel.
“But I think honestly because I was just doing it as something to pass the time that I kind of stuck with it and I think they sort of slowly got a bit better and people started to pay attention so it sort of went from there.
“But yeah, it all started from being in lockdown and not being arsed learning how to make banana bread and so deciding to do this instead.”
You wouldn’t have believed then that it would take you to the Edinburgh Fringe…
“No, genuinely which sounds like one of those sort of contrived, fake things that people say where they’re like, ‘I never would have believed…’
“But I didn’t.
“I didn’t have that intention but if you’d told me then that ‘you could do that’: ‘Yeah, great class. Looking forward to it’, but didn’t have them.
“The intention going in wasn’t to make any sort of a career out of it and so it was sort of a complete accident that that’s how it has panned out.
“But yeah, I was just trying to pass the time.”
The show is presented with the Irish Creative Collective, you lived in London for a period..
“Yeah, I lived the first sort of seven, eight months of 2023 I was living in London.
“I was introduced to Joe (O’Neill, founder of Irish Creative Collective) by a mutual friend and I did a couple of stand up nights with the Irish Creative Collective.
“And just hit it off with Joe.
“He’s a go getter.
“He’s full of gas, that guy, in the sense that he’s full of energy, not in the sense that he’s full of farts.
“We just became pals and we kind of worked together on his events and even when I was doing a solo show in London, which was kind of organised and produced separately, he kind of chipped in.
“That’s how that kind of started and we were in Edinburgh together.
“He did the tech for the show as well which was all the more impressive because Joe is even less technologically gifted than I am but he somehow managed to not only press all the right buttons but press all the right buttons at the right times.
“And now through Dublin Fringe and through this run of shows that I’m doing, still working together on it and having fun and yet to have a massive falling out so let’s see if we can get to the end of May without that.”
Your narrative style has seen you compared to Aisling Bea..
“This is news to me that someone’s made that comparison.
“To whoever that is I’ll just say a massive thank you.
“I’m not sure it’s warranted or earned but I’ll absolutely take it.
“She would definitely be someone who I would kind of look up to in the sort of the scene of comedy and writing and performing, and she’s got it.
“Maybe there is a bit of influence there in terms of her style and what you’re saying about that kind of biting, quick sort of approach which probably I’ve tried my best to emulate as well amongst drawing on other influences along the way too.
“I’ll happily take that comparison.
“Whether it’s deserved or not is another question but I’ll happily take it.”
You have also now been featured on TV…
“Yeah, I’ve been lucky enough to get to do a couple of things.
“It’s something I’d love to do more of, acting.
“Maybe what you’re thinking of is Darren and Joe’s Free Gaff which is an RTE player series that two brilliant comedians over here, Darren Conway and Joe McGucken, who kind of came from the internet as well.
“They invited me on to appear in one of the episodes in the second season which was really great, so much fun.
“As I say it’s something I’d love to do more of moving forward so really enjoyed it.
“Just put me in front of a camera or on a stage and have people look at me and I’ll be happy.”
Notice Box is at The Irish Cultural Centre Friday 16 May.
For tickets, click here.
For more information about Simon, click here.
