As I wrote about last week, this year I’m returning to the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time in 3 years. 3 years can be a long time in showbiz, and I’m no fool. Audiences forget. I’m haunted by a recurring dream in which I’m running up and down the Royal Mile covered in photos of my own face shouting “Don’t you remember me? I used to be the king of this town!” while surly punters shoulder-barge me until I stagger and collapse onto the mosaic of the Heart of Midlothian. A younger, funnier comedian comes up and spits on me. “Be careful!” I shout, wiping their spittle from my beard, now flecked with grey (the younger comedian’s beard shines like gold). “In trying to spit on the Heart of Midlothian mosaic, an ancient custom known to bring good luck, you have accidentally spat upon me, an acclaimed comedian with a long and prestigious track record here at the Edinburgh Fringe!” The younger comedian scoffs. “You were the thing I was aiming for,” he chuckles. “I don’t need good luck.” Then I wake up.

I know that the onus is on me to do all in my power to stop this dream from coming true. I have therefore embarked on a world-conquering promotional campaign to build up positive word-of-mouth around my new show. Stage 1 of the promotional campaign involves me guesting on every single comedy podcast known to man. So far I’ve recorded about seven, and I think there are at least four or five more to come. I’ve lost track.

I set out on this journey confident in my ability to record a dozen or so podcasts without repeating myself – the mind is a bottomless bucket, after all. Gone are the days when I would make an entire half-hour radio special about not knowing how to start a conversation without mentioning a doughnut-making course I went on for my 27th birthday. Gone are the days when I would be vox popped in the street about my opinions on an upcoming election, only to chase after the person who vox popped me and ask them to delete the footage because the thought of being seen publicly saying something I actually think had caused me to have a panic attack on the park bench where they had initially found me.

These days I was a well-respected raconteur, famed for my anecdotes and quick wit. Why, only the other day I had ignited veritable guffaws of laughter at a social occasion when I said, quite off the top of my head, “Sticky toffee pudding!” (There was some additional context to the conversation that helped this line to really land, but suffice it to say, I was a comedy hit. A laughing stock, if you will!) These days I thought nothing of attending a press night for a play and then allowing myself to film an audience reaction video afterwards in which my Adam’s apple strained to burst out of my throat while I proclaimed the play to be “Very powerful and moving.” I was a modern-day Oscar Wilde!

This confidence lasted until one of the podcasts actually came out. A couple of weekends ago, I was recording Sam Lake’s excellent podcast I’ve Had A Rosé, Let’s Talk About Feelings. I had come up to Edinburgh the night before on an overnight coach and had not slept, and was slightly delirious, but I was still able to dip into the bottomless bucket and grab big handfuls of fresh, steaming hot chat. Sam and I chatted openly about night coaches – how often do I take them? Whereabouts do I sit? Do I ever get any sleep? Foggy though I was, I was able to dredge up a few sparkling nuggets on night coach etiquette. “I can never even remember if I slept or not,” I said at one point. “I get off and I sort of immediately forget what happened. So when it comes to booking another one, I can never remember if it was a worthwhile saving or not.” This was definitely a thought I had had about night coaches before, and therefore must have been true and worth saying. The promotional campaign was going brilliantly.

Then a couple of days later my episode of Jokes With Mark Simmons came out, and I decided to listen back to it to see how it turned out. “We’re joined by Joz Norris,” Mark began, “who’s been living the comedian’s life, coming down on the coach from Nottingham this morning. Do you take coaches often?” A cold dread settled in my stomach as I started to remember this conversation from several weeks earlier. “I’m actually getting an overnight coach to Edinburgh soon,” I heard myself say. Mark and Danny Ward started asking me about night coach etiquette – how often do I take them? Whereabouts do I sit? Do I ever get any sleep? At one point, Danny Ward said “I think something funny happens when you get the night coach where as soon as you get off, you forget whether or not you slept. So the next time you book one, you can’t remember if it was worth doing or not.”

I screamed out loud and started pawing at my own face in the hope that it might rub off. It was a thought I’d had before. I’d had it before because somebody else had said it on another podcast I had recorded. I had forgotten how many of my own opinions tend to be formed by podcasts I’ve listened to, and had neglected to consider that this might also extend to podcasts I had been a part of. I wrote to Sam and asked if that particular comment could be removed from the podcast. “It turns out that isn’t actually something I think, it was something I heard someone else say,” I explained, “and I sort of absorbed it as if it were my own opinion.” Sam was very understanding.

By this stage, I had recorded about four of the seven podcasts currently in the can. Quickly, I racked my brain to try and work out if any other topics had come up multiple times, and if I needed to do any more damage control. Before long, one subject bubbled to the surface – farts (for whom bubbling to the surface is all in a day’s work). I had definitely talked about farts a lot on the podcasts I had recorded. Farts and toilets had come up three separate times on my episode of Jokes With Mark Simmons. They had come up twice in an episode of Lulu Popplewell’s Come To Bed With Me that I recorded last year. Both times the hosts had had to comment on the fact that a lot of my anecdotes were about farts and toilets.

I resolved to make sure I didn’t bring up farts or toilets on any more of the podcasts I was going to record. First up was Holly Burn’s Dream House, which she records in her house. To my horror, I noticed shortly before we started recording that Holly’s toilet has a funny and unusual feature which I would not be possible to avoid bringing up. Lo and behold, it was one of the first things we talked about. Later on, we found ourselves talking about an inflatable sofa that I would have in the living room of my dream house and I was asked how I would go about inflating it. As I heard myself say “I would have a robot butler who would fart into it,” I began to feel profoundly depressed. Maybe the bucket DID have a bottom, and the bottom resembled a human bottom. Maybe I was going to be pawing ineffectually at the bucket’s buttocks for the rest of this promotional campaign, squeezing them to see if anything would come out of them besides farts. I joylessly, desperately tried to expand on the character of this robot butler, ineffectually trying to steer the focus away from the fact that he does a lot of farts towards other things I could invent about him on the spot – he has a big tongue that I could use as a towel, for instance. But it was too late. The damage was done. I had promised myself not to bring them up, and I had failed.

The next podcast scheduled was Comedy Club 4 Kids. I’ve guested frequently on this show, in which comedians answer the questions of real child listeners, and I know that farts come up in almost every episode. I would therefore usually be the perfect guest, but I was determined not to lower the tone this time. As expected, the question we had to answer was “Why are stinky hippos so stinky?”, a question that begs for farts to be discussed, but I would not stoop to it. I instead insisted that stinky hippos are stinky because of their bad breath, and focused on what sort of diet would cause a hippo’s breath to become stinky. It may not be what that audience wants, but it was a necessary clean break. I had to take radical action to ensure that all my subsequent podcast appearances didn’t slide into the gutter, and having a child sit heartbroken at the breakfast table, crying into their cereal because they’re having to listen to someone talk about halitosis when they just wanted to hear about farts, is a small price to pay. Hopefully now I had done it, it would only be high-minded intellectual chat from here on.

The next, and most recent, podcast on the schedule was Andy Field and Kieran Murphy’s Great Podcast, Congratulations! As with Comedy Club 4 Kids, I was determined not to bring up farts or toilets. Sadly, I didn’t need to – shortly after making me read out a letter that simply consisted of the word “Poo” fifty times, Andy asked me what the biggest poo I’d ever done was, and that was that. There was no point trying to maintain the high-ground any more. The entire episode slid inevitably into the sewer.

As I said, I believe I still have four or so more podcasts to record on this promotional campaign, as well as some possible others that haven’t been confirmed yet. To those few (and it will only be a few, but they deserve the apology) who will be following along closely enough to listen to every podcast I guest on, I would like to apologise for the prevalence of toilet humour. I can only hope that it decreases as time goes by.

As for those who quite rightly have far too much other stuff to be doing to listen to so many comedy chat podcasts, a word of advice – if you ever want to find out who you really are, I cannot recommend guesting on seven podcasts in quick succession highly enough. You might find out exactly how your neural pathways are configured in a way that can then be plotted onto a diagram, and it’s not always what you’d hope to see:

Anything To Plug? – Why yes, as it happens. In just over 2 weeks You Wait. Time Passes. is coming to Machynlleth, the nicest festival in the comedy calendar. You can book tickets here, and there’s only a handful left! Also, for people who aren’t going to Machynlleth but do live in London, I’m doing a WIP double bill with the amazing Johnny White Really Really at Aces & Eights on the 12th of May, and you can book tickets here.

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – Machynlleth is the next big comedy thing on the horizon, and if you’re going it’s worth booking ahead for things now because things are close to selling out. There’s too much good stuff to recommend, but some of the things I’m most excited about shows from Lachlan Werner, Siblings, Desiree Burch, Luke McQueen, Rosalie Minnitt, Joe Kent-Walters, Lucy Pearman, Mikey Bligh-Smith, Kathy Maniura, Sooz Kempner, John-Luke Roberts, Sean Morley and Lorna Rose Treen. And that’s the tip of the iceberg.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – Andy Field blind ranking vegetables based on how easily he could put them up his arse.

Book Of The Week – I’ve just finished Miranda July’s All Fours, which I already talked about last week, but I’ve not started the next book yet, so I will just reiterate that All Fours is easily my book of the year so far. Can’t recommend it highly enough.

Album Of The Week – SABLE, fABLE by Bon Iver. It doesn’t how many times Bon Iver inserts random symbols or capitalisations into his song and album titles, he will always have a place in my heart. This new album is supposedly the final part of the Bon Iver project, and it’s probably the most uplifting and lovely of the lot, which is saying something.

Film Of The Week – One To One: John & Yoko, a documentary about John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s years living in Greenwich Village and getting involved with the American countercultural movement. It’s genuinely brilliant – it’s essentially a collage of footage of projects John and Yoko were working on at the time alongside contemporaneous historical footage to put them in the wider context of what they were fighting against. I really enjoyed it, and I don’t even like John Lennon very much.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you think, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d really appreciate it! Take care of yourselves until next time, and all the best,

Joz xx

PS If you value the Therapy Tapes and enjoy what they do, and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing and creating, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated.

PPS I was so proud to see the BAFTA screening of Horrible Science, which has turned out a wonderful show and which will be my first ever broadcast TV writing credit! Huge congrats to the whole team for making such a great thing.

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