Joz Norris on the best and the worst of the Edinburgh Fringe

Joz Norris is back at the Edinburg Fringe with his show You Wait. Time Passes. Here he shares what he can't get enough of at the festival, his most embarrassing Edinburgh experience and the worst thing about the Fringe. Apart from the cost of accommodation, obviously…

Fringe Binge

 The thing I’d like to do more of is watch brilliant weird stuff outside of my comfort zone. I always challenge myself to watch things I wouldn’t normally see beyond of my usual preference for general alternative comedy, and it’s usually there that I find the stuff I think about most. 

Performance art like The Object Lesson, conceptual theatre like work.txt, that kind of thing. I’m a silly billy at heart and watching other silly billies be stupid is always something I love, but it’s when I step out of my comfort zone that I find the stuff that really wows me. 

Also the Fringe is the only place where I allow myself the luxury of a daily visit to a steam room, so I’m looking forward to that, but I don’t think it’s something I should do more of, because if I spend any more of my time in there I will evaporate.

Fringe cringe 

 In 2022, I mostly had a really good run, except for one show where literally everything went wrong. 

The audience were completely silent for the first 15 minutes, until one point midway through a routine where a woman shouted, ‘Shut up!’ at me, which is a really good heckle. 

Later, someone tried to turn off the air con because the noise of the fan was making it hard for the audience to hear me. This tripped the fuses and all the tech shut off. I had to stop the show for ten minutes while the venue techs tried to get it working again (it was a very tech-heavy show, so I literally had to just stop performing it and chat to them for a bit, which could’ve been funny if it didn’t feel like the audience already hated me).

 One woman in the front row was enjoying it throughout and she was my lifeline, but near the end of the show I get attacked by a big zombie rabbit and at that point she had a panic attack and ran out of the venue in tears – we later learned she had a Watershed Down-related trauma from childhood. 

My best friend had been in, and afterwards, seeing how down I was about it, tried to cheer me up by going, ‘I thought it went OK – it seemed just like all your other shows to me!’ I have never experienced a moment that made me question all my life decisions so hard.

Fringe whinge

One of the worst things is the way the whole culture of the place encourages people to identify so strongly with their egos that they lose all semblance of humanity.

I remember years ago, me and another comedian bumped into a friend of ours on a street corner who was having a hard time. Nobody was coming to her show, press weren’t interested, the whole experience was making her doubt every decision she’d made, she was finding it really tough. 

She said she was trying not to get too upset about it because it is what it is, but it was hard because after all the effort it takes to take a show there, you just want it to go well.

 I said something vague and unhelpful like ‘I’m really sorry, that’s shit’. Then there was a pause and then the other comedian I was with said: ‘I had the Guardian in today. The press can’t get enough of me.’

I was utterly astonished by it. If you wrote the whole conversation as a scene in a script an editor would come back and say: ‘This is too on-the-nose, nobody is that obliviously self-involved,’ but they are and the Fringe makes them that way. 

(Happy ending to this story - the comedian who was having a hard time now has a very successful career in TV, so everything works out if you look at the big picture!)

• Joz Norris: You Wait. Time Passes. is on at Pleasance Dome at 7.10pm during the Edinburgh Fringe

Published: 22 Jul 2025