I decided that I wanted to write a newsletter about directing three comedy shows for this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and what I learned from it, and what I’d like to do going forwards with that kind of work, but I wasn’t really sure how to approach it and every time I sat down to try and do it I cringed so hard that I turned inside-out. Then I saw a Looney Tunes movie that made me cry my head off, and now I know what I want to say about directing Fringe comedy shows.

So first up, why did I want to write about this in the first place?

No wait, first up, a riposte to anyone who read that first paragraph and did a double-take at my spelling of “Looney Tunes.” Since seeing Coyote vs Acme, I’ve been surprised to learn how many people have fallen for the fake news media narrative that it’s meant to be spelled “Looney Toons,” and that the spelling “Tunes” is incorrect. Quite why these people think there would be a widespread campaign of disinformation surrounding such a culturally defunct intellectual property I’m unsure, but presumably these same people are beginning to go down the wormhole of thinking the Monopoly Man used to have a monocle, or that Fruit Loops used to be called Froot Loops, or whatever.

NB. I have just googled the Froot Loops Mandela effect and am shocked to my core to learn that they ARE called Froot Loops, but that people think they USED to be called Fruit Loops. I thought people believed that they USED to be called Froot Loops, but are now called Fruit Loops, but then it turns out they were always called Fruit Loops. But actually it turns out they were always called Froot Loops, and people THINK they used to be called Fruit Loops?? What the hell?? I seem to have stumbled into a new layer of Mandela effect where I remember a Mandela effect that used to be the opposite of what it is. Has anybody else experienced this? Are we living in a simulation? Hope so cos the news is grim. Anyway, for the avoidance of doubt, it’s spelled Looney Tunes and always has been.

So, why did I want to write about this in the first place?

During the Fringe I saw some other comedy directors posting little Fringe directing tips on Instagram and thought it was a smart idea – just giving little sneak peeks at their approach to show-making boiled down into small digestible chunks. I thought maybe I should try to do the same when I got back, to share some of what I learned from the latest shows I worked on, and perhaps to put some feelers out and see if I could find any shows I might like to work on next year.

But whenever I thought about how to explain my approach to directing in the context of a short Instagram reel I started to feel incredibly anxious and unhappy about the idea. I realised that I don’t really have a top-down, one-size-fits-all approach that can be reduced to simple codes of practice that anyone could try. My approach is much more about sitting in the specifics of what someone is trying to do or say with their show, and looking at it from multiple angles until I find my way into it, then starting to work out how to make it into the best thing it can be. Quite where that starts and how it unfolds is radically different from one show to the next, because I ultimately see the director’s role as being the person who is there to help the artist make the show they want to make. I don’t want to impose my sensibilities onto them, or make them follow my process. I don’t want to draw a map for them, or do the driving, I just want to help them read the map so I can get them where they’re going. Comedians already know what show they want to make, but sometimes it’s buried deep inside them so they can’t quite see it. A director’s job, I think, is to uncover it. It’s much more about excavation than it is about creating from scratch.

This, I think, is a much harder process to condense into short clips than something more top-down or practice-led. So I kept struggling to work out how to articulate what I wanted to say with all this, or how to describe my experience of the directing process in a way that would contain anything interesting outside of the specifics of each individual show.

And then I saw Coyote vs Acme which, by the way, is one of the best films I’ve seen this year. You should go and see it. I’m told that at least part of why I had such a strong reaction to it is because its central theme – “Guy does self-defeating dumb shit for his entire life despite never getting anywhere with it for no clear reason other than because it matters to him” – is my kryptonite. For instance, while I came out of the film sobbing at Wile E. Coyote’s commitment to trying and failing and trying again, Miranda came out saying “Why was that coyote so obsessed with trying to catch that roadrunner, it was literally ruining his life? He was hungry all the time and his teeth kept falling out, he had a horrible horrible life,” so it just goes to show how differently you can respond to a piece of art.

I’m firmly in the “This is an incredibly beautiful film about purpose” camp rather than the “This is a depressing film about obsession” camp, but the thing I was most blown away by was how well the filmmakers managed to construct a genuinely heartfelt story out of the central metaphor of a nearly 80-year-old cartoon series.

In my opinion, there’s a reason why the filmmakers identified Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner as the Looney Tunes (note spelling) characters they wanted to build an entire film around, and it’s the same reason why they were always my favourite characters growing up watching the shorts – the central metaphor of those cartoons is hugely compelling. The funny thing about that central metaphor is that it almost certainly won’t have been something that Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese consciously had in mind when they first made a cartoon about a coyote who injures himself while trying to catch a roadrunner. They presumably started with a simple funny idea. The metaphor only begins to take hold through repetition. From that initial point, they could easily have varied up the content of those shorts as they did with other characters – we could’ve seen Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner on an adventure in the big city, or one where the tables turn and the Roadrunner tries to catch Wild E. Coyote, or any number of variations.

But instead Jones and Maltese created a list of rules for the shorts, including:

• The Roadrunner cannot harm the coyote
• No outside force can harm the coyote other than the coyote’s own ineptitude or the faulty products he uses
• The coyote could stop at any time if he were not a fanatic
• The Roadrunner must stay on the road
• All action must be contained to the natural environment of the two animals (the Southwest American desert).

As these rules firmed up and the format became ironclad, those cartoons became (again, maybe just in my opinion, but clearly also in the opinion of Samy Burch and Dave Green and the other filmmakers behind Coyote vs Acme) by far the most iconic and impactful segment of those Looney Tunes shorts. Because it became more than just a series of funny sketches about a coyote injuring itself, it became a weird exploration of self-defeating Sisyphean obsession. That’s such a powerful engine to build something around, and I was amazed to see that nearly 80 years after that cartoon first launched, it was possible to make a film that made that metaphor explicit for the first time and was able to articulate it so expressively and powerfully:

What’s we’re seeing – A coyote is chasing a roadrunner around the desert.

What it’s saying – Sometimes we do the same thing, over and over again, achieving nothing, harming nobody but ourselves, to no clear purpose and with no sign of improvement or change, but it becomes part of our identity.

And funnily enough, this made my thoughts go back to directing comedy shows, because it made me realise what I like to do when I work on a show:

I like to work out what the central conceptual metaphor is.

It’s taken me a long time to learn it, but for me, one of the key things you need to do when making a show is make sure that your audience can understand it. It sounds so blindingly obvious, but I spent so long deliberately trying to make shows that were tricksy, or confounding, or resisted categorisation. You can do that, of course, but if the intention is to confuse then that in itself has to become something that is very clearly communicated – “I’m trying to confuse you” – otherwise an audience will just find it annoying.

I think very often when we start working on a show, we have so many ideas of what we want it to say and do, and what we want to happen in it, that it’s very easy for the show to quickly wriggle away from being easily comprehensible to somebody watching it from the outside who doesn’t have the context of all the thinking that’s gone into it. That’s where I think the role of the director comes in – to pin all that thinking and ideation to something the audience can clearly conceptualise and understand, before it all becomes too unwieldy. I think it’s really important to work with a director at a relatively early stage of the process, because if they come in too late, then it can be very hard to wrangle all that stuff back into the box. But if they come in early enough, then it’s possible to find the metaphor that easily contains all those different ideas and gives them to an audience on a plate.

From that point, then it’s possible to get clever, complicated, tricksy, mischievous. Of course a show can be all those things, of course it can be rich and dense, of course it can be baffling and mind-blowing. But I believe it can only do those things after it has found the conceptual metaphor that serves as the vessel for everything else that it’s doing, and after the rules of that metaphor have been established, just as Jones and Maltese did.

Looking at the three shows I directed this year, or my last couple of shows, I can separate out what it was doing and saying and what it contained, from the conceptual metaphor that anchored and explained those things to an audience:

Anna Leong Brophy: Born Sexy Yesterday:

What it’s saying – There are too few examples of stories we can tell about women as they grow older, and in cinema particularly, we too often squash women and girls into flat, two-dimensional archetypes to please the male gaze.

What’s we’re seeing – A powerful alien with the mind of a child realises she is a character in a misogynistic movie and sets out to find an identity that works for her.

Alice Fraser: Oh Man!

What it’s saying – The crisis in masculinity is inextricably tied to the rise of optimisation culture under late-stage capitalism, and the selling of frictionless, optimised lifestyles to young boys is eroding the need to think about how we actually connect and interact as human beings.

What’s we’re seeing – Alice has been sponsored by an AI company to programme a sentient Roomba in order to help it understand how to be a good man.

Emmeline Downie: Gail

What it’s saying – The kinds of deluded, narcissistic, oblivious middle England-type characters we often like to laugh at in our comedies are not simply bigots or idiots, they are scared and lonely and there are complicated reasons why they end up forming opinions and making decisions we feel compelled to laugh at.

What’s we’re seeing – Gail is giving a presentation at her life-coaching course so we get to see how she wants to be seen by others. Then she goes home afterwards and we see who she actually is.

Joz Norris: You Wait. Time Passes.

What it’s saying – You can waste your entire life waiting for the moment when it begins, and the narrative you have about yourself in your head matches up with what other people can see, but in many ways what other people can see IS who you actually are, whether you like it or not.

What’s we’re seeing – A deluded artist claims to have finally completed his life’s work and is going to unveil it for the first time, but it’s really shit.

Joz Norris Is Hugh Jackman Is The Phantom Of The Opera

What it’s saying – It’s easy to imagine some other version of yourself who made a different decision and whose life went in a different direction, but you are ultimately the product of your choices so you might as well make peace with them.

What’s we’re seeing – Hugh Jackman is trying to retrain as the Phantom of the Opera because he regrets turning the role down.

I’d say all of those shows had big, weighty, complicated themes they wanted to explore and communicate, and none of them did it by simply diving in and talking about them, they all employed ambitious theatrical narrative elements to dig into this stuff in surprising and inventive ways. Looking at it objectively, the reason why they all succeeded to the extent they did – sold out shows, rave reviews, award wins and nominations, you name it – is because those big concepts weren’t just thrown at the audience with the vague hope that they would keep up. They were all contained in a simple, easily comprehensible conceptual metaphor that articulated the point without labouring it, or disappearing into self-indulgence.

Now, I’m not trying to claim here that I came up with all of those containing frameworks – some of them arrived fully formed and I just really took to them and wanted to help develop them, some of them emerged from the conversations and workshops I was leading with the acts themselves – but all of them together have painted a picture that helps me to understand the way I like to work on shows going forwards.

Obviously, it’s not an approach that converts well to short-form online stuff – it’s taken me this long to explain it here – but I do feel really proud of the results that approach has produced over the last couple of years of making shows with amazing comedians.

Looking forward, I’m planning on scaling back the directing a little bit this year, as I’m going to be working hard on the Jackman/Phantom show and that’s going to take a lot of time and mental energy. But I’m thinking that I might allow myself to end up directing one show, and just try to make it into the very best thing that it can be. I’m planning on doing some exploratory sessions with a few artists over the autumn to see if any of them feel like the show that I would be the right fit for. So if any of what I’ve been discussing here – finding the correct metaphorical framing to build your show out from in a way that allows you to be ambitious and explore big themes without ever overwhelming or turning off your audience – sounds like an approach that you would benefit from in a show you’re currently developing, then feel free to get in touch! I’d love to hear about what you’re working on, and see if we could be a good fit.

A Quick Plug – Next week we’ll be announcing the first half of the lineup for our next Eggbox show at the Pleasance on the 10th of November! They’re always such lovely shows and this one will be no different, so if you always come down to it, or if you’ve been meaning to come down and check out what the fuss is about, do book ahead! We’ll have a bunch of awesome short films and a couple of live readings of very exciting new comedy scripts.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – ‘Tis the season of the Fringe transfer, so check out some of the very best shows coming down after storming it up in Edinburgh! At Soho over the next couple of weeks you’ve got Crybabies, Katie Norris, Xhloe & Natassia, Frankie McNair, Kate Dehnert, Zoe Wohlfeld, and that’s just to get you started!

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – At the emotional climax of the second Jackman/Phantom WIP at Soho last week, someone in the audience said something they thought was helpful and encouraging that really threw off the emotional tone of the final minute in the wildest way, and I absolutely loved it.

Book Of The Week – Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout. This might be my book of the year so far. It’s such a sad, kind, bittersweet book about a teacher navigating his life after realising maybe he doesn’t want to die after all, and it absolutely floored me. It’s got such a lot to say about the current political moment we all find ourselves in, and how we might be able to bear it if we try to be kind.

Album Of The Week – The Roaring Waves by Steve Hackett & Steve Rothery. Two of the guitar giants of prog rock unite for an album that is ok, I guess. If you like instrumental guitar-based prog, you will quite enjoy this. If you don’t, keep the hell away. I guess it’s my own fault for getting my hopes up too high.

Film Of The Week – Coyote vs Acme, obvs. I also saw Spa Weekend and The End Of Oak Street, but I won’t be recommending either of those any time soon lol.

That’s all for this week! Feel free to send this newsletter to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, and 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!

PS I love this awesome photo Miranda took of the Jackman/Phantom Soho WIPs last week:

Click here to go back