I can’t believe it’s gone so quickly, but remarkably, the tour of You Wait. Time Passes. – a tour which my pride forbids me from referring to as “a UK tour” because there was a date in Amsterdam, but which my humility forbids me from referring to as “a UK and European tour” because surely you need to do more than one date in Amsterdam to qualify for that – is nearing its end! (I think I’m just going to call it “a tour of fine cities across God’s green Earth,” that’s got a nice ring to it).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a series of dispatches from my tour of fine cities across God’s green Earth, but decided at the last minute to write tongue-in-cheek joke entries in which I characterised myself as a dick who hated his audiences and whose tour was going very badly. After much speculation from friends and foes alike, I am thrilled to confirm that this was, indeed, a fictionalised account and that the tour has actually been going very well and enabled me to meet lots of really lovely audiences all over the shop. So I thought I’d go back to the well of “Notes on what it’s been like touring the show” and this time write something a bit more earnest in which I actually reflect on what I’ve been doing and condense it into a few key takeaways. Apologies in advance to anyone who is only here for me shit-talking about my own fans and career, I’m just going to be nice about both of them today.

1. I can finally kind of see how this works as a career

Doing this tour of fine cities across God’s green Earth was a massive leap of faith – everyone I spoke to said that if you can break even on your first ever tour then you’ve done pretty well, so I had no idea if I’d be able to justify the cost of doing it with a producer or a tour booker or anything like that. I’ve seen The Apprentice and I know that the key to a profit-based task is keeping your costs low, so I decided to book and promote the whole thing myself, with my incredible Fringe tech James Hingley as my only regular “employee” for the whole thing. I slotted shows into the gaps where venues would have me. As a result, it was a pretty low-key and sporadic tour full of large gaps, but the goal for it was just to crack open the nut of touring and find out how it works, and then plant seeds in cities around the country (and the continent, let’s not forget) that could grow into regular stops on a bigger and more comprehensive tour (crack open the nut and then plant seeds inside the nut? What am I on about?) If I could make enough to pay James, cover my costs and maybe even take a tiny bit of money home, while also starting to build and consolidate audiences in various places and learn how it all works, then I’d have been very happy.

It’s been really nice to discover, then, that the tour has sold much better than I’d have predicted for something I was running all by myself, and that I’ve actually made decent money on the whole thing. Lord Sugar would be proud of me, except he probably wouldn’t because I doubt he sees the comedy industry as a particularly worthwhile endeavour. “What a load of old toot,” he’d probably say if he ever went to the Fringe. Of the nine dates I’ve done so far, only two sold in numbers that I found a bit disappointing (and both were still really fun shows!), and most of the others sold between fifty and a hundred tickets. I already talked about the fact that next year I’m deliberately trying to make something a little “bigger” and easier to market, so my hope is that the rooms I half-filled or almost filled this year can sell out if I come back with the new show next year, at which point the whole thing starts to be something that can earn proper money.

For years the only way a comedy career has worked for me is by my wearing a lot of different hats – I’ll make a chunk of money from live shows one month, then nothing the next, at which point I’ll do a bunch of writing, or comedy directing, or acting, or whatever it might be to balance things out. It’s by combining a number of different roles and skillsets that I manage to make it add up to a career, mainly because I’ve always struggled to see how any one of those things by itself can do more than that, particularly being the sort of comedian I am who’s better suited to making full shows for arts festivals than at regularly headlining weekend club gigs.

Touring seems to be the answer to this. I can now see the viability of a career that involves making a new show every two years, and touring the latest one while developing the new one, with the work-in-progress shows paying for themselves and the tour shows actually being a way to make a decent living. It’s not that different from what I’ve always done, where I’ll develop a new show around the country at various Fringe preview festivals, but touring to proper theatres with a finished show means you can sell in numbers that actually change the nature of what you’re doing.

I’m not going to stop doing the writing or the directing or the acting because I love it all, but I can see that if I can successfully build on what I’ve established with this tour then I might be in with a shot of reshaping my career so that it no longer feels unpredictable and precarious and starts to feel sustainable and even, dare I say it, comfortable. God, imagine if I worked out how to feel comfortable before I’m 40, that would be an absolute game-changer.

I feasibly could have prised the lid off this way of making work years ago, but I felt I needed to have a show that could justify the risk of self-funding and self-promoting a potentially costly tour, and the reaction to You Wait. Time Passes. felt like the time to try, and I’m so glad I did. It’s a few years overdue, but it’s really changed the way I’m thinking about making work going forwards.

2. The Fringe is just a small part of the equation

It’s been so nice meeting people around the country who are hungry for weird, unusual, inventive comedy. Don’t get me wrong, most of the tour shows have had at least one or two people who are confused by what they’ve come into. But there’ve also been so many people who have been genuinely excited and grateful to see a weird, chaotic, meta show about the messiness of making art in their local town. After years of doing the Fringe, it’s so easy to think that that’s where the audiences for weird comedy gather, and that once you’ve done it there, it’s time to move onto the next thing. But I’ve met so many people who said they used to love going to the Fringe but can’t afford to go any more, so are really appreciative when weird little cult shows go on the road, because it means they can still feel part of the conversation when it comes to the stranger corners of the comedy world. The Fringe is still the epicentre of the whole thing, of course, and is still the place to launch something or set out your stall or even to just go and hoover up some fun bankable shows where you know there’s going to be a passionate audience. But it’s also very clear that it’s the tip of the iceberg, and that people all over the country want to find ways to access what’s going on up there.

3. But the Fringe ecosystem does change how people watch things

An interesting thing I’ve noticed is that when people are coming to watch a comedy show on tour, the on-ramps for getting them to watch that show in the right mindset are slightly different from what they are at the Fringe. At the Fringe I rarely needed to put much effort into trying to sell to the audience the idea that I was playing a fictional character who happened to have my name, and that the show was a theatrical narrative about something happening to that character. It always felt fairly obvious to me from the way the show initially plays its hand, and it felt like everyone came already primed to pick up on those cues. Perhaps some of the buzz around the show had got people to come already knowing what sort of thing they were watching, or perhaps the Fringe ecosystem itself gets people to come into a show with less of their own preconceptions so they’re more ready to go on the journey of that particular show. On tour it sometimes felt slightly different – perhaps because people aren’t constantly assaulted by advertising for literally hundreds of shows every day, maybe people feel less need to read up on something they’ve booked tickets to, and come ready to take it at face value rather than coming with the expectation that what they’re seeing is going to trip them up in some way.

In the early tour shows, I noticed that some audience members seemed more primed to watch the show as though I were a stand-up comedian talking about my own life, meaning some of those on-ramps we’d put in place at the Fringe that establish me as a fictional idiot played out slightly differently. In the first few minutes there sometimes seemed to be an energy of “Oh wait, have we come to see a fucking idiot?” that would only settle as they relaxed into the realisation that the show actually knew what it was doing.

It was an interesting energy to pick up on, and slightly changed how some of those early moments play. I’d try to meet the audience halfway a little bit and gently walk them into the world of the show rather than assuming they all knew what they’d come to, and that opened up some really fun new moments that I wouldn’t have stumbled across otherwise. It’s been really nice feeling like the show is a living thing and not a frozen object, and that where I perform it and who I perform it to and what sort of thing they’ve come into it expecting causes it to continue morphing and changing shape each time I roll it out. The most dangerous bit of a show’s life is always the bit where you’ve stopped being present enough to still make these discoveries, so I’ve been really grateful to keep finding them along the way.

4. SPACE!

Finally, I mentioned that in some ways doing this tour isn’t that big a difference from what I’ve always done – I’ve always taken a new show to venues around the country to help me build it, so why is taking it to venues around the country after I’ve built it that different? Simply, touring a finished show with a bit of a fair wind behind it has meant I’ve got to play some really lovely theatres, and there have been moments on tour where the sheer fact of being in that space has felt like a big enough reward in itself. I’ve never really been much of a pure stand-up comic – even when I try to make a stripped-down, back-to-basics show, it ends up transforming into something more theatrical and over-the-top. My shows are usually about characters who desperately want to fill a space in as many ways as possible – they want to caper and leap and grandstand, and often they end up looking delusional because I’m usually performing them in shonky little Fringe venues.

Taking those shows and doing them in places where I have the space to run around, and where we can actually do things with the lights and the sound to bend the atmosphere around the show, and shape the audience’s experience of it, is an absolute joy. Happily, it doesn’t even diminish the sense of delusion, because by this point the delusion is baked into the fabric of the show. It just makes the whole thing feel more maximalist, and more like the version of it I always had in my head. The people who work in theatres around the country have been so wonderful and welcoming and have been so effortlessly brilliant in their ability to help me and James transpose the show into their various spaces, and each one has brought its own personality and vibe to it, and it makes every single performance feel like a discovery. As I say, I’m nursing a naive but bright little hope that the next time I come back to those rooms I might be able to sell them all out, and keep making work that thrives in the space they offer. For now, I’m just very humbled and grateful to have had the opportunity to bring this show to them!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Following on from their weekend at Leicester Comedy Festival which saw award wins for both Best Show (ahem) and Best New Show (hat tip to Luke Rollason), Liebenspiel are returning to Brighton Fringe with another Weekend of Weird, featuring another rollout of the Jackman/Phantom show alongside other legends like John-Luke Roberts, Anna Leong Brophy, Sean Morley, Rosalie Minnitt and many more. Start planning your trip now!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – I saw Rich Fulcher doing a work-in-progress at the Bill Murray this week and it included a poem about an owl and a bit about shared calendars that really got me.

Book Of The Week – The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett. This is the third in his trilogy of weird fucked-up little novels. This one is a monologue by an unnamable entity that can do nothing but narrate its own existence but seems to have no physical form or identity of its own. There are no characters and there is no plot. Sounds impenetrable? You’d be right! But I love this shit, I could read meaningless opaque twaddle like this all day.

Album Of The Week – Tropical Dandy by Haruomi Hosono, founder of the Yellow Magic Orchestra alongside your friend and mine, Ryuichi Sakamoto. This is my first foray into Hosono and I think I was expecting electronic weirdness akin to Sakamoto’s early stuff, but this is a very whimsical and quirky and adorable tropicalia-inspired album. It is perhaps best known to comedy fans as the inspiration behind the artwork for Andy Barr’s show Tropic Of Admin.

Film Of The Week – Project Hail Mary. This is soooo good. I laughed, I cried, I gripped my seat with my fingers due to unbearable stress. Ryan Gosling has to go on a mission to work out why the sun is dying and makes friends with an alien on the way, and I love that alien now.

That’s all for this week! Let me know what you thought, and as ever, if you wanted to send the newsletter to a friend or encourage others to subscribe I’d hugely appreciate it. Take care of yourselves until next time,

Joz xx

PS Feel free to send me a tip on Ko-Fi if you enjoy my work and would like to support me to keep making it!

PPS Always lovely to stop in at the Glasgow Botanical Gardens:

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