Roy Jay: How An Obscure Northern Comedian Became An Internet Demon

A man walks on stage wearing eyeliner, a prisoner’s uniform, and white gloves. He gesticulates as he skulks about the place with action figure arms. “Slither!” he says, to audience bemusement, as he beckons them closer. “Spook!” he shouts, before jumping back on stiff legs. A jazz track plays in the background as he speaks in an accent that slips between ersatz American and undoubtedly Lancastrian. He tells jokes but the audience doesn’t seem to know when to laugh. It’s like a deleted scene from the Black Lodge. The man is Roy Jay – a fairly unknown Northern comedian from the 80s – and the internet thinks he’s a demon. 

Until a few weeks ago, knowledge of Jay was reserved to those with an interest in niche North West towns and long-forgotten entertainers of Butlin days gone by. But that all changed when users on 4chan concocted a conspiracy theory claiming that Jay never existed. Not only that, but all evidence to the contrary is actually part of a psychological operation – orchestrated by anyone from Big Tech, an artificial intelligence gone rogue, or even a demonic digital presence.

Forum posters felt that Jay’s act was too weird, his voice too strange, the videos too fake-looking, to be real. “Literally he doesn’t sound alike a good chunk of the time,” one anonymous 4chan user writes, “I’m not talking about the accent specifically. Listen to the songs, the Schweppes commercial, and the live performances. Voice sounds absolutely nothing alike.”

There was little reason why this could be the case. Something was off, and Roy Jay most certainly never existed. “I’m finding videos of him that weren’t there 3 days ago that are older that [sic] 3 months,” says another user.

It should go without saying that Roy Jay did very much exist, and there is plenty of evidence to prove this: there are videos of his routines that go back years; dozens of users online have memories of Roy’s comedy and anecdotes of meeting him; there are newspaper clippings about him; there are books in local libraries that mention him; there are old forum posts about him; his family members are on Facebook; people in his hometown of Atherton remember him; STAT has even acquired one of his vinyl records.

So if Roy Jay is not some kind of AI-fueled British comedian daemon, who is he? And how did the internet get so spooked by him?

Graham McCann – a veteran author on the British entertainment industry who has written what may be the lengthiest biography of Jay’s life – says Roy was “a club comic who spent years trying and failing to find a stage persona and style of delivery that would make him stand out from the crowd.” This experimentation, according to McCann, lasted over 10 years, but Jay’s work didn’t bear fruit until he finally landed on his “slither hither” character – which would become the catalyst for an existential conspiracy over four decades later.

Roy Jay, born Roy Jørgensen, had a very colourful life. In his writing, McCann details the comedian’s path from aspiring teenage musician, to Norwegian navyman, to Pontin’s bluecoat, to minor celebrity, and finally to washed-up entertainer in Spain for British ex-pats. “He’d had skirmishes with the police as a teenager, suffered far too many binges and black-outs, been mugged in Johannesburg, arrested in Jersey and sacked by Smith’s crisps,” says McCann. The aforementioned arrest in Jersey was when Jay, after losing his temper with hecklers during a performance, dropped his trousers in front of the family-friendly crowd. He was not wearing underwear at the time and was fined £200 for indecent exposure.

With records of Jay’s life – as few in number as they are – being readily available, the denial of Jay’s existence appears to stem from cultural, linguistic, and technological misunderstandings. When the conspiracy’s believers decry that Jay’s accent is unusual, they unwittingly reveal their US postal codes. Anyone who’s witnessed the entertainment offerings in Northern working men’s clubs will recognise the strange transatlantic pronunciation that often code-switches into the performer’s native, regional accent at a moment’s notice (you only have to watch Jay deliver his “You’ll all be doing it tomorrow!” catchphrase to see this in action). Any strangeness on Jay’s part was a concerted effort to stand out from his contemporaries, as much of his joke material was fairly pedestrian. And any so-called evidence of AI interference is simply a result of decades’ old footage being digitised into low-resolution YouTube videos, or a byproduct of some archivists’ attempts to upscale their video files, resulting in various odd-looking artefacts – not unsimilar to those seen in the current state of generative AI.

All other “evidence” is the works of creative writing students or utter cranks. When believers are positing that dates of videos, comments, and forum posts could be easily manipulated to suggest they’re much older, or that books in libraries are also part of some metaphysical past hijack, we can only assume they’re: 1) in on the joke; 2) mentally ill.

That said, the Roy Jay conspiracy reveals how internet users are becoming increasingly paranoid and skeptical of the authenticity of media. Not only has the proliferation of AI-generated content left us questioning whether fake things are real, but it also has us questioning whether real things are fake. Mix this in with an unfamiliarity of certain cultural norms, and the uncanny horror of AI video can be accidentally conjured by some grainy footage, a bit of 80s TV razzmatazz, and an all but forgotten entertainer.

As one anonymous user wrote: “Either he’s a demon who can manifest himself digitally and physically and there’s absolutely no way to prove anything, or he was really just some forgotten bong boomer comedian who, at worst, had some of his old content fucked with online.”

“People may forget things that have happened or ‘remember’ things that have never happened,” says Qi Wang, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Cornell University, when asked about the Roy Jay conspiracy. “Memories are constructed in line with our self-goals and motive; so errors are commonplace. In this example, I think it’s more about beliefs about memory (or metamemory, I’d say) instead of memory. Those people did not claim that they ‘remembered’ the nonexistence of Roy Jay; they just disbelieved the memories concerning his existence.”

Wang says it’s unclear what the real group motive is behind the urban legend, but that “What is clear is that at our time when technology is capable of (almost) anything, people are losing trust in information and the memories it creates.”

Memories are at the crux of the conspiracy, and when tracing back Jay’s life you can still find many of them by the people that knew him. Jay spent his earliest years in South Wales and Cork before his family eventually settled in the small mining town of Atherton, Greater Manchester. Among the town’s older population, he is easily remembered. “We used to go on bike rides through the fields to Daisy Hill,” says Margaret, a 78-year-old Athertonian. “One day as we were going to get over a stile with the bikes there was a massive frog right in front of us. I’m terrified of owt like that so Roy went first and picked up a stick. He proceeded to push the stick on the frog’s back head. All I can remember was the frog’s guts spewing out of its mouth.”

The Roy Jay conspiracy is bizarre, yet the story behind it – the real life of Roy Jørgensen – is full of far more banal twists and turns, mundane rises and falls. Jem Taylor, a friend of Jay’s from his later years performing in Spain, says “He had his flaws; liked a drink and a smoke, but this made him a real person.” It was around this time that Jay became chronically ill and required a wheelchair, something that Taylor recalls. “I played guitar in my act and would wheel him about, and he would get up with me and he sang and was funny till the very end. I shall value his friendship forever.”

Conspiracy aside, it’s important to remember that Jay was a real person. He had a career, friends, managers, lovers, and family who can all attest to that. Ironically, while no malevolent digital presence has leapt from the internet into the real world, the Roy Jay conspiracy has had effects on the people at the centre of the story. The unexpected attention brought upon Jay saw one of his children, dismayed at the suggestion that her father hadn’t existed, clap back at one poster inquiring about the conspiracy in a now deleted thread on the Roy Jay Facebook group.

We can’t know exactly how Jay saw the end of his career, or how he would’ve taken the news of his memeifcation. “By the end,” McCann speculates, “I think he looked back on all the highs and lows more in amusement than anger, and I suspect his strange posthumous fate would merely have made him laugh.”

STAT Magazine reached out to Roy Jørgensen’s family, but no reply was given. The original version of this article stated that Jørgensen died in 2015, which has been updated.