MBC Chats To: Joz Norris

Joz Norris is an award-winning comedian, writer and performer known for his wildly inventive, high-concept comedy. A favourite at the Edinburgh Fringe, his work blends meticulous structure with gleeful absurdity, earning him a reputation as one of the most original voices on the circuit.

After a critically acclaimed, sold-out Fringe run, he’s bringing his latest show, You Wait. Time Passes., to Monkey Barrel on Saturday 21st March, so we sat down with him for a chat.

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You’re bringing your new show, You Wait. Time Passes., out on tour after a hugely successful run at the Fringe. If anyone hasn’t seen you perform before, what can they expect to see?

Well there's that old formula, isn't there, that happiness equals reality minus expectations. So I guess if anyone new to my work wants to really enjoy it, then they should come expecting to sit in a dark room staring at an empty stage for a full hour, with nothing happening. This is very much not what I do in my shows - I in fact come onstage and perform sort of absurdist semi-philosophical nonsense character comedy, but if expectations are set for literally nothing, then they're very likely to really enjoy what ends up happening.

The show is built around the idea that you’ve completed your “life’s work,” which is such an intriguing idea. Do you remember the origin of that concept, or if a specific event got you thinking about your ‘body of work’?

The initial idea was actually about a guy giving a TED talk about his favourite subject, but he was so excited about the idea of doing this TED talk that he'd been looking forward to for ages that he forgot to do it. That was the essence of the show, really - I just really liked that central gag of doing a show about a guy who kept forgetting to do his show - and "I've completed my life's work" just became a more convenient shorthand to convey that premise. It also enabled me to make the show resonate more with the kinds of things we all tell ourselves we're going to get around to one day, that make us feel like life hasn't really "begun" yet, because we've just got to get this other stuff done first.

Your comedy has been described as both absurd and meticulously constructed. Is there ever a tension there you’re having to balance, between impulses toward anarchic silliness and more logical ideas?

I basically allow myself to lean into chaos whenever I'm rehearsing a show or developing it as a work-in-progress - the more anarchy, the more happy accidents, the more unplanned discoveries I can make in those stages, the better. But I'm always thinking about what I can learn from those accidents and mistakes that I can fold back into the text of the show itself. So it ends up being filled with things that look like slip-ups or setbacks but actually end up being key elements of the texture of the whole show, and as it goes on it feels a bit like a magic trick as the audience gradually thinks "Oh wait, this is all deliberate!" I always try to keep that sense of spontaneity even when I've performed the show dozens of times, partly because you can always find new things to work in, and partly because it's that spirit of presence and connection that makes it fun in the first place and you can't lose it even when the script is more or less locked down. But it is a process of gradually refining chaos into order but trying to make sure it never stops seeming chaotic, if that makes sense.

Some of the ideas in the show touch on that line between comedy and something a bit more melancholy - the sense that things will shift from funny to sad over time. Did you consciously set out to have a more emotional thread to this show?

I think I never set out to do that necessarily, but it's a big part of how my brain approaches comedy and what I love about it. Most of the films and shows that have moved me more than anything else were comedies. I think life is funny, and when it's hard our impulse is to flock towards the parts of it that make us smile and make us laugh. But something funny can shift into being sad in the same way that something sad can shift into being funny. They sit so close together, I think, and I often think they both cause and resolve one another. So I think comedy as an art form can actually speak to those bits of us that are melancholic or sentimental much more than serious drama can, because it actually reflects how it feels to be alive. People don't really wander around being serious all the time like drama asks us to pretend they do. Just when you start trying to act all serious, you'll probably walk into a pole or drop an omelette on your lap or something, and you'll remember there's just no point.

On top of the elements we've already discussed, there's also a real physicality to the show. Is that something you've explored more over time as a performer? How does your presence on stage differ now to when you were starting out?

These days I always work with my dear friend and movement director Grace Gibson whenever I'm making a show, because she gives me such a good handle on what my body is doing on the outside. Whenever I watch myself back I'm so appalled by my own physicality - I'm so much less coordinated and graceful than I think I am in my head, I am utterly disconnected from my body. So Grace helps me to really internalise what I should be trying to do. She's an amazing dancer and choreographer herself, and we always work with this approach that there is no way I can successfully imitate the things she asks me to do, but she gives me rules to try and follow, and the act of trying to follow those rules makes me feel much more present in my body onstage. So the end result is never the ballet of meticulously choreographed slapstick I want it to be in my head, it's always a shambolic car crash because I'm simply not a graceful enough person to do the things I wish I could do, but she helps me to embrace what my body does do, and I think it makes the shows feel much more alive and exciting, even if what I'm doing just looks mad.

As a show with such a strong conceptual element, did it evolve much over the course of your Fringe run or was it pretty much fully formed at the start of the festival?

I'd say it locked in over the first week or so. A friend saw it in June and then again in September and said they'd never seen a show change so much over the course of the Fringe, but most of those changes came as last-minute tweaks and additions in July. By the time we got to Edinburgh it was pretty locked in, and the room itself became the final ingredient in terms of fine tuning it - there's always a bit of adjustment as you settle into the actual space you're going to be doing it in for the month. Oh, and for the first three days there was a sponsored ad break halfway through where a guy who runs a productivity app called Time Crunch started using the show to promote his business. This was cut because it was rubbish. Sorry to anyone who saw one of those first three shows.

There’s been a lot of critical praise for the show, with one publication describing it as your ‘Mona Lisa’, but if you had to liken it to another piece of art, which would you choose?

It feels a bit obvious to say Munch's Scream, but I do think it has a lot in common with it. Whatever is going through the mind of that guy in The Scream, I think that's the constant mindset of my character in this show. Just howling for all eternity, hoping one day he can stop howling, but knowing he never can.

And after this tour, and a show that’s framed around completing something so significant, what actually comes next?

The next show is called Joz Norris Is Hugh Jackman Is The Phantom Of The Opera and was deliberately conceived as an attempt to do something that was purely big, dumb and silly. You Wait. Time Passes. is very meta and intricate and concerned with big themes of legacy and obsession and delusion, and I just wanted to go in the opposite direction and just have fun. Annoyingly, the Jackman/Phantom show just won Best Show at Leicester Comedy Festival after only its second ever performance, so it might actually be that now THAT one has to become a "great masterpiece" as well, but hey, that's next year's problem.

Lastly, you wear all white in the show (except your headband). How did you stay on top of your laundry last August?

Oh God it was a nightmare. I worked out that the costume could survive three performances before the smell bordered on radioactive, but alas budgets were tight and I could only afford one costume (very risky and dumb of me!) So I would spray it with vodka between shows for three days, then on the third day take it home after the show and hand wash it at about midnight and let it dry overnight. Soft linens, so it would usually be more or less dry by lunchtime the next day, but maybe the fifty quid or so it would've cost to buy a second version of the costume would've been worth it to get some of my evenings back. Hey ho, we live and learn.

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Joz Norris: You Wait. Time Passes. comes to Monkey Barrel Comedy on Saturday March 21st at 8PM. You can get tickets here.

You can follow Joz Norris on Instagram here.