This was written in haste in a cafe on Monday afternoon before the Fringe kicks off. A snatched moment of productivity in the calm before the storm. But I do hope it might be useful for a few people bringing a show to the Fringe – their first, their third, their twelfth – who at any point find themselves succumbing to the festival’s tendency to drive us all completely insane.

This year I find myself in the enviable position of being up at the Edinburgh Fringe and feeling basically zero dread. This is because, while I’m going to be very busy up here and am working on far more shows than I thought I would be when I naively told myself that 2026 would be a comparatively “Fringe-light” year, I don’t need to carry the weight of any of them. The three shows I’m performing are a work-in-progress for a show that isn’t launching properly until next year; a show I’ve already done and with which I achieved everything I could’ve hoped to achieve with it; and a late-night nonsense fuck-around that brings me a lot of joy. Very little is riding on any of them, so I just want to enjoy them. The three shows I’m directing have more riding on them because they’re actually doing the full run, but none of them feel like my thing to carry – they’re my thing to help with and offer myself up to, but I don’t feel any anxiety or dread (partly because they’re all very good, of course).

The last time I came up to the Fringe in a similar capacity, with zero anxiety or dread or hope or fear about how it might go, was in 2024 when I did a handful of work-in-progresses of You Wait. Time Passes. That year, on the train up to Edinburgh, I texted a comedian friend saying we should hang out when I got there and asked how it was going. They replied saying it was a bit tough – they were feeling a bit demoralised and sad about it all. I said I was sorry to hear that and we should definitely hang out. When I got there later that afternoon I bumped into them in the street and asked them how they were feeling.

“Great!” they replied. “I’m just having a really lovely run this year!” I was happy to hear this, but slightly confused about this abrupt change of heart in only a couple of hours. I asked if they’d just done their show. “I did, it was a really good one today,” they replied. Out of curiosity, I asked how yesterday’s show had gone. “Yesterday was a bit of a tough one, actually.”

“Ah,” I thought, “I see what’s happened here.” I now often think of that pair of interactions whenever I’m trying to advise or coach people through the Fringe and how it feels. Even with all the emotional resilience you can muster, it is such a rollercoaster. A good show feels like such a triumph and a tricky show feels like such a crash. Time feels very weird during the Fringe. Individual moments come to feel like they represent the entirety of your month rather than feeling like individual moments to be experienced, processed and then moved past. It’s much easier to see this aspect of it when you’re not enmeshed with it and are working on it from a slight distance as I was in 2024 or as I am this year. When you’re in the midst of it, it’s very hard to consistently remember this.

So, being in the position of being a bit more clear-eyed about the whole thing this year, here are a few rules that have served me well over many years of doing this. I hope some of them help!

1. Protect The Show At All Costs – This is priority number 1. There is so much pressure to feel like you need to go and see as many shows as possible, go to as many networking opportunities as possible, be as visible as possible, in order for the Fringe to do what you “need” it to do for you. It’s all bollocks. If any one of those things means there’s a risk you’ll arrive at your show tired, stressed, distracted, or in any way unprepared to give it everything and find your joy in it and give the audience an amazing experience, then it’s not worth it. Do those things if they align with what will make you feel joyful and proud for the month. If they will in any way get in the way of the show, do not do them. A month spent networking and socialising and putting words in the right ears to get big-wigs to come and see a show that then isn’t as good as it could be because you’ve become tired or burnt-out or haven’t had enough time to work on it is ultimately less in your interests than spending the month performing an incredible show that audiences love and which trendy industry types only hear about after the Fringe is over and are told they should’ve seen.
2. Listen To Your Body – Connected to the above, but less about industry stuff and networking and more about actual physical energy levels. I often think of this one as it applies to flyering. I always flyer for my own shows, because if I don’t and then it doesn’t sell out then I beat myself up for not doing enough to get the word out. If I do and it doesn’t sell out, then at least I know I did all I could. Sometimes I find myself flyering and then start to sense that my energy is going and that I simply do not want to do it any more, but a part of me feels like I should keep going so that I don’t feel like I’ve let myself down. If that happens, stop flyering. Go and get your energy back so that you can do an amazing show to whoever is going to come, rather than doing a lacklustre show to whoever you manage to half-heartedly flyer from that point onwards.
3. Block Specific Websites – Your mileage may vary, but there are some websites that are just not going to be good for you during this month because they invite comparison. You know which ones they are. Comparison is going to absolutely ruin your month. However things are going, it will always be possible to find someone who seems to be having a better time than you, and that will make you feel sad and anxious. It will also always be possible to find someone who seems to be having a worse time than you, and that will make you feel a little bit better about things, but that feeling will start to make you cruel, and go looking for those people. Block those websites, they can only do you harm.
4. Be A Creator On Social Media, Not A Consumer – Obviously it’s very hard to do a full run at the Fringe without engaging with social media in some way, because it’s become a big part of how people discover and recommend things. Just make a rule for yourself – you’ll go on it to post things and respond to things, and that’s it. As soon as you’ve responded to any messages you need to, or posted a story or a review or an audience recommendation or whatever else it is you need to do to help keep your show in people’s minds, get off it. Do not consume it, because that way you’re straight back into the comparison thing again, and I’ll repeat it one more time – Comparison will ruin your Fringe. Stop looking at what’s going on in your neighbour’s garden. Water your goddamn plants.
5. Find Places That Have Nothing To Do With The Fringe – I spend so much of August just walking around the Crags, or Arthur’s Seat, or Prince’s Street Gardens, or Calton Hill, or the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, or in other secret places I won’t be mentioning here because they are precious to me and I am selfish with some of my sanctuaries. Most of my happiest memories of the Fringe are in these places. Seek them out. Carve out time to go to them.
6. Schedule Coffees/Walks/Games Of Pool – Last year I had almost a perfect run mental-health-wise, I had such a lovely month – apart from one day right near the start when I had a massive wobble. The show was proving tricky to sell, audiences weren’t huge, reviews were slow to come out, and I was really losing heart and worried that the month would be a total disaster. I messaged my producer and PR and asked them what we could do to fix things and get the show back on-track, and I wasn’t a total diva or anything like that, but for one day I let my stress about the show leak out and I leant on other people to help carry it for me. The next day I felt terrible about it and just went for a coffee with my producer and hung out and chatted about things other than the show. It was just really nice, and I told myself I wouldn’t let myself feel or act like that again for the rest of the month. The rest of the month was a dream. Meet up with your friends. Chat to them about life. Eat nice food with them. Ask them about other things. Play games with them. Go for walks with them. Fill your month with the stuff that makes the rest of the year pleasant too.
7. Remember That Things Change Fast – I walked away from that coffee last year already feeling so much lighter and happier, and as though the rest of the month was going to be ok. Twenty minutes later, I got a call from my producer telling me a big 5-star review had just come out, and the rest of the run sold out off the back of it. It was almost like I needed to meet up and have that coffee and make that promise to myself before the universe went “Ok then, don’t do that again, now here you go, here’s the momentum you were looking for.” Obviously these things can’t actually be engineered – you’re not actually going to get that perfect review, or that sellout, or that specific bit of external feedback that makes everything flow smoothly, purely as a direct result of letting go. But when they do happen, they often come out of nowhere. I was in no way anticipating that review, or what it would do for my run. In 2019 I emailed myself six days into the Fringe saying “Do not come back here again. You hate it here” and that ended up being my best run up to that point. How you feel in one moment simply does not reflect what this month is going to be. You can’t walk round expecting something huge to drop into your lap at any moment, because that way madness lies. But you can get yourself to understand that every moment in your month is just a moment in your month, and the rising and falling fortunes of your show are largely things that will come in unexpected waves that you have no control over. The one thing you do have control over? Making sure your show is really really good every day (See Rule 1).
8. Find New Questions – “How’s your show going?” is going to get really boring for everyone really quickly. It’s boring to answer and it’s boring to hear other people answer. If your run is going well then talking about it can feel embarrassing because you don’t want to look like you’re boasting or to accidentally cause hurt to someone whose run isn’t going well. If your run isn’t going well, it can be quite painful to talk about it honestly and you’re not going to want people to think you’re fishing for their pity. So get in the habit of finding other interesting things to ask. What amazing things have people seen? What have they been doing outside of their show – what’s their daily routine settled into? Have they got any good gossip? Etc etc.
9. Go And See Your Friends, But Also Go And See Things You Are Just Drawn To And You’re Not Sure Why – Last year I saw Brian Eno do a talk in Hay-on-Wye about paying attention to what you’re actually interested in. “We live in a world where we’re told what we should be interested in a million times a day,” he said. “But somewhere in you is a little voice that says “But I’m interested in this” and it’s being drowned out all the time. Pay very, very close attention to it.” This is as true at the Fringe as ever. Of course, go and see your friends to support them. Of course, go and see the buzzy “must-see” shows that everyone is raving about. But somewhere out there are some shows that speak to something in you and you won’t even know why. Go and see them as a matter of the utmost priority. You might not find “the show” every year, but some years you will, and speaking from experience, those shows will change your life. I think I’ve found three of them in over a decade of doing the Fringe, but I never stop looking for them.
10. Never, Ever Kid Yourself That Any Of It Matters – The year I finally cracked the Fringe was in 2019. I finally made something that properly resonated with audiences and managed to keep a handle on my own emotions in response to it all. That year, I had to leave the Fringe halfway through to go to my best friend’s wedding. When I left, there was starting to be a real buzz around my show and I was starting to get the feeling that maybe finally, after many shows of experimenting and not quite being satisfied with the results, I’d got it right. When I got to the wedding people asked me how the Fringe was going and I would begin to describe my excitement about this and people would go “That’s amazing, well done” and then move on and talk about something else. It simply does not matter. The vast majority of people don’t really care about it. It’s enormous, and overwhelming, and incredible, but it’s also such a small, odd little bubble. Take pride in it and take your responsibility to your show and your audience deadly seriously, but don’t take any of the rest of it seriously in the slightest. It’s all just very silly, really.

That’s it! Good luck, everyone. I’m rooting for you all.

A Quick Plug – Here’s an Instagram post about everything at the Fringe that I’ve worked on this year. Do come and see some of them if you’re up here!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – God knows. Apparently the Edinburgh Fringe is on or something? Beyond that, no idea.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – I rewatched Monty Panasar on Mastermind last night.

Book Of The Week – Careless People: A Story Of Where I Used To Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams, about her time working on the international policy team at Facebook. A chilling read. We probably don’t need extensive written confirmation that Mark Zuckerburg is a reckless, amoral sociopath, but hey, it’s all here.

Album Of The Week – Queen II by Queen. I’m finally doing it. I’m getting into Queen. I’m amazed to say that this is really good and fun!? Why did nobody ever tell me Queen were good and fun? I thought they were supposed to be annoying and crap. Very interested to see where this discovery leads me.

Film Of The Week – Spider-Man: Brand New Day. I really don’t care for the Marvel movies, but I go to see the Spider-Man ones due to my long-standing affection for Spider-Man – me and him go way back. This is actually quite a good film, it has a genuinely interesting character-driven story at the centre of it, but I’ve been winding Miranda up by claiming it was a terrible film because there weren’t enough Spider-Man baddies in it, and it would’ve been far superior if we’d seen more of Scorpion and Tombstone. She’s been finding this quite tedious and says she couldn’t care less about the stupid bad guy in the robot scorpion suit and that she thought he was really crap and easily the worst thing about it, so I’ll stop doing it now.

That’s all for this week! If you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it 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 I met my hero in Berlin, the big Pink Floyd bum-judge from The Wall. He was really nice and let me take this photo with him:

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