Jeremy Williams, better known as J. Williamez, is a Winnipeg musical comedian. 

“I’m not a traditional comedian,” Williams says. “I don’t do stand up, I do musical comedy, so I write pretty songs about silly things.” 

Aside from the musical aspect, what sets a J. Williamez show apart from other comedians, is that he actually encourages heckling. 

“What I do is I get the crowd to heckle and yell mean shit at me, so it gets them involved in the show too,” Williams says. “There are people that come to see me every single week without fail, because they just love coming and yelling mean shit at me when I’m playing.”

Although usually afraid of commitment, Williams has started up a yearlong project titled 52 Songs, in where he plans to release a new song every week of 2014 on his blog jwilliamez52songs.blogspot.ca. 

“Currently I’m terrified,” Williams says. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it, but I’m going to force myself to do it. I’ve got a lot of feedback from friends and family and not one of my friends or family thinks I’m going to able to do this and that’s exactly why I’m going to do it.”

You can catch J. Williamez on Monday nights at Shannon’s Irish Pub. 

1) Little Murray

“He’s my partner in crime fighting. He’s helping me out on 52 Songs. He’s going to have his own song but for now he’s just my partner in crime fighting.”

2) Personal shrine

“Somehow I have a massive shrine to myself which I think is pretty funny. My favorite thing about that picture of me and Fred Penner is that he signed it and then put arrows from his name to him and my name to me like I wouldn’t know which one was which. So awesome.”

3) Bean Boggler

“A product I marketed. It was for a comedy show I did. I made this fake infomercial for this thing called the Bean Boggler. You pour beans through the top and they come out the bottom and they’re all of a sudden magically boggled. It doesn’t make any sense at all.”

4) Life influences

“My two biggest influences, obviously the Blue Demon, the Mexican wrestler, and Matthew McConaughey.”

5) Motivational wall

6) Brown album

“These fans of mine, after I put my album out, they gave me that the next week and instead of it going platinum they said it went brown. So my album came out and went brown in the first week. I was pretty pumped about that.”

Published in Volume 68, Number 17 of The Uniter (January 22, 2014)