Joz Norris

Quarantine Questions: Joz Norris

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© Ana Pio

As the UK begins to ease out of its coronavirus-induced lockdown, many of us find ourselves reflecting on the notion of a post-Covid world. What will this world look like, and how will comedy manage to sit within it? MoodyComedy continues to chat to comics about their hopes, fears and coping strategies.

What is the first thing you plan on doing once the lockdown is fully lifted?

I’m going to go to Deshaies, a village in Guadeloupe where they film the superb BBC murder mystery programme Death In Paradise, and see all the sights. Wanna see the police station and the shack and the Commissioner’s Office in Government House. I assume they’re all real locations. Really wanted to meet Harry the lizard too, but apparently he’s CGI.

What’s your current lockdown binge watch?

Well I finished Death In Paradise fairly early into lockdown, so now I’m working my way through Queer Eye (for when I feel like crying – those guys never try to change anyone, they just help people to be the best version of the person they already were all along and it’s so beautiful, oh no, now I’m crying while I type) and Twin Peaks (for when I want to feel incredibly on edge, am two episodes in at the moment and think I’m gonna find out who killed Laura Palmer pretty soon).

Has anything made you laugh recently?

Just for fun, I’ve recently started writing a musical called Honk Honk (nothing to do with the musical Honk), which is about an evil boastful King who murders a stick of butter then closes down a gym, and is afraid of points. There’s some great songs – ‘What’s The Point Of Points?’, ‘The King’s House’, ‘We’re Gonna Build A New Gym’, so much great stuff. It’s so unbelievably awful that every time I try to sing a song from it to someone I burst out laughing at how unfunny I have become. It’s shockingly dreadful. I think whoever it is I’m singing it to just assumes I’m having a breakdown, which in a way I am. So, yeah, the thing that makes me laugh most at the moment is the shocking quality of my own creative output. The situation is dire.

How are you trying to keep sane at the moment?

As you can tell from my previous answer, I have just given up on this. I think if ever there was a good time to just allow yourself to slowly drift off the chain and see what happens to you without suffering the social consequences, it’s now.

What thing would you like to draw our attention to right now?

I made a film adaptation of the show I was making for Edinburgh 2020, and we’re streaming it every day next week along with Q&A’s with special guests talking about how we can continue making stuff in a post-Covid world, and how we can change the comedy industry for the better. If anyone wants to book a ticket and come along then that would be lovely! I should point out I wrote it before I started working on Honk Honk, so it hopefully belongs to a time in my life before all my ideas became terrible. You should also check out the Live Comedy Association’s #SaveLiveComedy campaign; it’s a really valuable, important cause for an industry that’s brought a lot of happiness to a lot of people.

THE QUARANTINE QUESTIONS

Joz Norris: The Edinburgh Interviews 2019

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© Steve Ullathorne
Who? Joz Norris
What? Joz Norris is Dead. Long Live Mr Fruit Salad
Where? Heroes @ The Hive – The Bunka (Venue 313)
When? 16:40

What are your feelings as you enter into this year’s Edinburgh Fringe season?

Ooooohhhh boy, feeling great. Very proud of my solo show,  hope people really like it. Very much having fun with my double-act show, it’s a hot mess but I think it’s gonna be ridiculous. Learned a bunch of good self-care Fringe things last year and gonna be using them again to make sure I don’t get stressed or go crazy. Gonna see all my good pals, gonna eat scampi in the City Restaurant. Yes please yes please.

What is the premise of your Edinburgh show this year?

A man called Mr Fruit Salad has written a one-man comedy show and wants to perform it. This is odd, because he doesn’t exist. He knows he doesn’t exist, and doesn’t know how to write a comedy show, so spends most of the show just trying to get out of his head and convince himself to do the show. It’s a sort of nonsense musing on connections and anxiety and hiding, performed from behind a disguise.

What is the biggest obstacle you face(d) while putting this show together?

The character of Mr Fruit Salad first emerged as a way of engaging with live performance at a time when I wasn’t enjoying it because of some personal stuff I was having to deal with. As such, when it came time to build a show around Mr Fruit Salad, the show inevitably became about that stuff, it became a reflection on why I’d invented him and what he meant and where he’d sprung from, but I really didn’t want it to become a confessional show along the lines of “Hey, here’s some bad stuff I went through, isn’t it sad?” I knew it had to be a show that was informed by all those things, but I gradually learned they needed to be hidden in the background, and not shown, or it completely undermined what I was trying to do, which was to build something silly and hopeful out of old hurt. So realising that and sort of surgically removing the foundations the show was built on and seeing if it could still stand up without them was the hardest bit.

Has your attitude towards the Fringe changed at all in recent years?

I dunno, really. I know which bits of the Fringe I like and which bits I don’t these days. I love it as a creative playground and a place to share your ideas. And I really like that it’s an opportunity to build new audiences and build connections and find opportunities to work with new people over the subsequent year, and make new exciting things. I do like that side of it, and it’s important. But out of that side of things grows all the other things, all the ego nonsense and the industry stuff. I find that side of things hard, the careerism and so on. It’s all got to exist, at the end of the day, so I just try to let it exist and stick to the bits of it I know I’m good at, and the bits I know I like. So my attitude hasn’t changed, necessarily, but it has solidified.

Do you have any other Edinburgh show recommendations?

Oh boy, so many. I’ve been recommending a show every day for the last 70 days or so on Twitter, so if you find me @JozNorris you can read a whole bunch of recommendations there. For this Q&A, I’ll specifically flag up Ben Target and Ed Aczel, both of whom I’m working with this year and are two of the funniest, most wonderful people in the world, so check out their solo shows. I’d also highly recommend Ali Brice’s show – he always makes some of the funniest shows every year, and this year’s is much more personal and reaches some incredible heights as a result. And Laura Lexx has become one of my absolute favourite comedians, she is so much fun to watch and so incredibly accomplished at what she does. I missed her show last year but am very keen to see this year’s.

Where would you like to be in a year’s time?

I try not to plan too much. I think it’s good to be ambitious, because then it means you’re open to any and all of the good things that might come your way, but not necessarily to have loads of specific ambitions, because then it’s easy for them to not work out for reasons outside of your control and then to look back on them as failures. I’m working on a bunch of TV, online and radio ideas at the moment, and I’d love it if one of those took off, and if it did I guess that would become my big project over the next year. And if not, then in a year’s time I’ll probably be making another new Fringe show and keeping myself busy that way. I’d like to have been on a nice holiday by this time next year as well, and I’d like my houseplants and all the things in my herb garden to be absolutely enormous.

GET YOUR TICKETS FOR ‘JOZ NORRIS IS DEAD. LONG LIVE MR FRUIT SALAD’ HERE

THE EDINBURGH INTERVIEWS 2019