EDINBURGH 2025: Joz Norris Q&A

BWW caches up with Joz Norris to chat about bringing You Wait. Time Passes. to the 2025 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Tell us a bit about You Wait. Time Passes.

You Wait. Time Passes. initially emerged as the result of a deliberate effort to make an “acoustic show” that ran counter to all my usual comedic instincts - something small and stripped-back and simple rather than my usual tendency to make shows that are big, noisy, complicated, ridiculous and, on a practical level, exhausting to perform. Of course, you can’t help but end up making the sort of thing you like making, so I have completely failed in this intention and still end up panting for breath at the end of every show, worried I may pass out. I guess the way in which I did deliver on my mission was that the game at the centre of the show is something very simple and, I think, quite relatable - what if you finally finished the thing you keep telling yourself you’ll finish doing one of these days? What would actually happen?

So it’s a show about ambition, and hopes, and dreams, and closure, and moving on. It’s also largely me indulging in my usual nonsense, but I think people have come to expect that from me now. Those who know and like my work don’t really want to watch me stand still and tell low-energy jokes for an hour. They want to see me really work for it. They want to put me through my paces.

You’ve had a few years away from the Fringe, do you think the festival will have changed at all?

I imagine it has become cheaper and less mentally taxing. Lol. Imagine. It’s nice to dream though, isn’t it? In a funny way, though, if you take it as read that the spiralling costs of taking work to the Fringe is an objectively bad thing, I’m interested to see if it might have accidentally led to some improvements too. The Fringe is now so expensive that it can no longer be the place that every comedian HAS to take work to every year just to remain visible in the industry, as it once felt like they needed to. I think a lot more people are doing what I’ve done this year - spending a year or two doing other things and figuring out what they’d most like to make, then taking it to the Fringe when they feel they’re ready to do that - and I do feel like that might result in better work, and maybe in slightly happier, more balanced comedians who feel less frazzled and burnt-out from industry pressure. Or, it’ll be so expensive that that pressure will be higher than ever. I live in hope that people can continue to forge healthier relationships with the place, though.

What was the writing process for this show?

I found a simple game in a writing workshop that helped me write a monologue about a guy who was so excited to do a specific thing that he forgot to do it. That suddenly unlocked so many things in my head - it felt like the engine not just for a short routine, but for an entire show. So I started expanding the world of this guy, and working out what this thing was, and why he was so excited about it, and how the other people in his life felt about it. Some of the other content just came from other routines I was writing at the time, but I tried to then sift all of it through the lens of this simple prompt. Miranda Holms and Jon Brittain have both been so instrumental in the writing process, helping me to refine and improve things and pay attention to where things need to be clearer and funnier. Then there’s the ending, which just arrived fully formed like a bolt from the blue, but the less said about that the better. You’ll just have to see it.

Where else might we know you from? 

Perhaps you know me as the guy who occasionally invades the stage during John Kearns’s segments on the Comedy Central gameshow Guessable, sometimes dressed as the Devil, sometimes as a pirate, sometimes as a knight? Or maybe you listened to the BBC Radio 4 sitcom The Dream Factory, set inside the office where dreams come from? You did and you loved it? Oh cool, thanks, I wrote and starred in that. Maybe you also saw the short film Dog House, which won Best Comedy Short Film at the UK Film Awards and included a scene where I do a poo in a garden? Hope you enjoyed it, because I wrote and starred in that one too. And then if none of those has done it for you, then we’re down to the odd popular podcast I’ve guested on, or an advert for a garden centre that you might have seen and thought “Why does this guy talk exactly like Matt Berry?” Answer - because they asked me to.

What would you like audiences to take away from the show?

If there is something you’re waiting to do with your life, do it. A lot of the things you tell yourself you’re going to do one day you will never do, so you may as well start thinking about which ones you really don’t want that to be the case for, and working out how to do something about it. Your life is yours.

Joz Norris: You Wait. Time Passes. 

Pleasance Dome (10Dome) at 7:10pm, 30th July - 24th August (not 13th August) 

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