Jos Norris Review – Strange, Disturbed, Inappropriate, and Other Indicators of an Artistic Personality | comedy

HDid you know that you are an artist? Have I made the right choices in life? Pertinent questions, especially if you’ve spent decades on the fringes of left-wing comedy (in Norris’s case), far from the trappings of fame and glory. Norris, with an “Artist”-branded headband wrapped around his forehead, addresses these concerns and more in his latest maverick confection, “You’re Waiting.” Time passes, albeit with as little self-seriousness as possible. It’s a show that explores the choice of making extremely absurd art that is itself extremely absurd.

I admired it very much, without enjoying every moment. At first, and again more recently, the film’s exhilaration feels a little overwrought, as Norris presents himself to us as the figure of a deranged, self-absorbed teacher, imparting life lessons in preparation for his big reveal, “the big reveal of my life’s work” — in a box, on a pole, upstage. There is a seat reserved for his estranged wife: this will show her! We hear of their breakup, and we piece together a picture of our host’s glaring shortcomings as a family man. We see snippets of the career (comedian, actor, magician…) that this replacement Norris has enjoyed so far, and a section about his attempt to become Google’s number one nut. The ensuing dialogue with his erratic AI girlfriend involves a lot of funny back and forth in the domination/breakdown style of a latter-day Rik Mayall.

What’s most interesting about the show is its approach to the big questions about the futility or otherwise of creative people’s lives. Are eccentric artists really eccentric, or are they trying to show us who they really are – a different way of being? This question might have more resonance if Norris’s eccentricity did not sometimes appear in itself; Watch Late “Do you want to fart in this hoover?” The sequence is not captivating. Yet even (or especially?) at its silliest, the show – its extreme vulgarity underpinned by good jokes, quirky philosophy and very energetic performances at its core – constitutes an intriguing defense of experimental art-making in a conformist, capitalist world.