So I tried to film a video where I spoke sincerely to the camera about the creative process and offered a tip which I hoped might be useful to people currently making shows for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe. I fuuuuuuucking hated it. It felt soooooo bad. No shade to people who genuinely share earnest and insightful creative advice in video form, but I felt like I was trying to get people to sign up to my Masterclass, and I don’t even have one. “What are you, like a coach now?” I kept asking myself. “A life coach? You think you can post a video of yourself in a flatcap and glasses talking in a high-pitched voice hiding inside a duvet cover one minute, and then next minute give people advice on the creative process? Fraud!” This basic contradiction haunts essentially every aspect of my life and identity, but condensing it into video form felt like creating a rift in space-time that I could not walk back from. At one point I started doing some off-the-cuff ad libbing to try and inject some more lightness and humour into the video, then hated the video so much I deleted it and started again, then started trying to work in the ad libs as if they were scripted bits, and eventually I became so annoyed that I scrapped the whole thing.

So I’m afraid I will not be trying any time soon to turn into an influencer who posts tips on social media about how to do comedy, because I’d rather leave social media as a place to either promote things or do stupid shit. But I thought “Wait a minute, I already have a place where I can share earnest creative tips as and when they occur to me, it’s my wildly tonally inconsistent newsletter!” So this week – a tip! For people making shows, particularly if they’re making them for this year’s Fringe. I hope it might be useful for structuring the months remaining between now and the festival as you whip your show into shape!

The reason this thought initially occurred to me is because, now that I’ve performed Joz Norris Is Hugh Jackman Is The Phantom Of The Opera a jaw-dropping four times, people keep saying the same thing to me afterwards, and I find it very interesting. People keep saying some variation along the lines of “Wow, that feels more or less ready. I don’t think there’s that much work you need to do on it.” This is lovely feedback to receive, but I also feel very differently about the show from the inside – to me, it feels very obvious that the show is nowhere near ready, and it sometimes veers towards feeling like a complete shambles (albeit a very fun one). I mentioned this before, when I wrote about why I was developing the show over a longer period to officially launch at next year’s Fringe rather than rushing to get it in shape this year to capitalise on its early buzz.

To me, I know that there are a huge number of things I want to do with the show that I haven’t even begun thinking about which keep it feeling a long way away from “ready.” I probably could do those things this year if that had been the plan, but as I said in that earlier newsletter, I just don’t want to subject myself to the expense and mental intensity of fast-tracking all that stuff, I want to take my time over it. But the people saying “Hey, that seems nearly ready to me” aren’t idiots – they’re smart, funny people who are really good at making very funny shows of their own. So this got me thinking about the disconnect between how a show looks on the outside and how it feels on the inside.

I think the reason why the Jackman/Phantom show looks “nearly ready” is because it’s very obvious at this stage that a huge amount of work has gone into it. Most shows start their life in the form of a person stood onstage with some notes offering up some ideas and going “Is there anything in this?” This show is quite a complicated narrative musical in which I play three different characters, so I couldn’t ever really stage that version of it. Before I could even get any version of it onstage I had to write, record and edit a musical backing track with three different intertwining vocal parts. From the outside, then, even the earliest version of the show looks like something that’s already benefited from a huge amount of preparation and work, and I think that can short-circuit us into thinking “Wow, you don’t have much left to do” because the first stage of making a show is such a labour-intensive one.

That initial labour-intensive stage culminates in making something that’s “good enough” – it’s coherent, it hangs together, you can perform it all the way through without notes, the audience understands it, they consistently enjoy it. Tick, tick, tick. Great. Well done, getting to that stage is a huge achievement. But because it takes such a lot of work to get there, it’s incredibly tempting to stop there. I always used to stop there, and to consider the remaining work as being maybe the last 10% that needed doing – polishing, tweaking, appyling the finishing touches.

But over the last few years of show-making I’ve been internalising a lesson I initially learned from Miranda, who’s had a huge impact on how I make things:

The difference between bad and good is the same as the difference between good and great.

Working hard on Blink in 2022, watched by unforgiving slave-driver Ben Target

Once you’ve got a show to be “good enough,” that’s not the time to take your foot off the pedal and just fine-tune a few final elements. That’s the start of Stage 2, which is all about being bold and brutally honest with yourself. Honest enough to ask yourself questions like:

• What if this isn’t the bedrock that I’ve dug down to here? What if this is just more earth? What if there’s a whole load more digging to be done that I’m not giving myself permission to do because I want the work to be finished?
• What if I’m holding myself back from the work that needs to happen next because I’m worried it’ll break what I’ve made already? What if I need to break what I’ve made already in order to find out how to put it back together in a shape that actually works better?
• What if I looked at every single moment in this show and asked myself how I could do MORE with it? Are there more jokes I could put in, ways I can push it further, ways to make it more maximalist, more spectacular, denser, more bombastic, more undeniable?
• What if I looked at every single moment in this show and asked myself how I could do LESS with it? Are there moments where I’m getting in my own way, where I’m asking too much of the audience, where I’m making things complicated when they need to be simple, or trying to be clever when I need to be clear?

Exactly which questions your show might benefit most from asking will vary depending on the show, but for now, the hot tip for this introductory sneak peek at my Masterclass (please sign up, it’s only £964) is simply that when it starts to feel like maybe your show is “Good Enough,” the easiest thing to do is to relax and go easy on yourself. That’s also a good way to allow your show to fall short of becoming something really great. This doesn’t mean you should torture yourself over it, or beat yourself up, or make the process of making it any more unpleasant or stressful than it needs to be. I just think all my shows now benefit from my continuing to push myself past “Good Enough” and treating that second stage with as much seriousness and rigour as I did the first.

A couple of caveats – obviously not every show benefits from this level of rigorous analysis. Some shows are just dumb fun. I imagine that if John-Luke Roberts and I subjected our Barry & Tony show to this kind of treatment the joy of the whole thing would dissipate and it would fall apart. But that’s only really true for shows where the anarchy and the flimsiness and the sheer silliness of the idea are baked into what it’s doing, and I’d argue that most shows being made with the intention of performing them for a full month at the Fringe don’t fall into that category.

Secondly, just because I’m aiming to spend a full year embarking on that second stage doesn’t mean that you should feel stressed about whether you have time to subject your own show to the same process in the time between now and August. Three months is plenty of time to subject your ideas to this kind of treatment. But I do think that around now is a good time in the general cycle of Fringe show-making to make yourself start thinking that way. It’s a time when it’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that you’re into “the final stretch,” but don’t give into the temptation to short-change these final months like that. Last year a friend of mine saw a preview of my show in July then saw it again at Soho Theatre in September and said they’d never seen a show change so much in that timeframe before. These last few months are the time when you can get a LOT done, if you allow yourself to. So be bold and brave and honest with yourself, and don’t settle for “good enough” – aim for “really brilliant” and you’ll end up feeling so much prouder of what you achieve.

A Few Quick Plugs – I had naively hoped that the tour of You Wait. Time Passes. nearing its end would mean I had less shows to plug but it seems this is simply my life now. Miranda and I are bringing our latest Eggbox show, with short films and brand new scripts, to the Pleasance on the 26th of May and it’s getting busy! Do book soon. Then the next few weeks see a few more outings of the Jackman/Phantom show at a couple of festivals – Brighton Fringe on the 23rd of May and Exeter Comedy Festival on the 6th of June. If you’re near any of those shows then I’d love to see lots of you there!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Huge congrats to Tom Crowley whose indie comedy podcast Crowley Time beat out other big names and heavy hitters to win the Funniest Podcast of the Year Award at the Golden Lobes! I had the pleasure of guesting on a live edition of Crowley Time in Machynlleth this year and it’s such a fun, joyous, silly show and deserves to reach an even wider audience off the back of its amazing win!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – A new short film which has become the final piece in the puzzle of our Eggbox programme on the 26th. I’m not going to reveal it here in order to create intrigue for the show (ooh, marketing), but it’s such a funny short and I can’t wait to show it to everyone!

Book Of The Week – The Names by Florence Knapp, which is a novel about the three different lives that could be lived by someone based on what name is chosen for them. I’m only a little way into it but it’s a fascinating premise and already a really gripping, if grim, read. Highly recommended!

Album Of The Week – In Times Of Dragons by Tori Amos. For some reason while doing a deep dive into Tori Amos’s discography years ago, I decided to draw a line under things after 2002’s Scarlet’s Walk, I think mainly because all her albums are really long and I was getting exhausted. But I heard this new one was her best in decades so gave it a go. It’s an hour and fifteen minutes long, but if you don’t mind sitting with it, it really has impressed me. It’s like her classic 90s stuff but a bit wearier and sadder at the state of the world. There’s a lot of fun stuff about witches and dragons because she’s still mad. Maybe I’ll even go back and fill in the gaps.

Film Of The Week – The Sheep Detectives. Hard to tell if this is actually a good film or if it’s just tailor made for my interests right now (Hugh Jackman and murder mysteries). Jackman plays a dead shepherd whose sheep have to investigate his murder, and do you know what, I’m calling it, it’s really good. It knows exactly what it’s doing, and what it’s doing is being adorable and really fucking stupid.

That’s all for this week! Let me know what you thought, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe then that’s hugely appreciated. All the best til 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 Do go see this movie:

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