How do you know that you’re an artist? Have you made the right choices in life? Pertinent questions, these, especially if you’ve spent decades on the fringes of (in Joz Norris’s case) leftfield comedy, far from the trappings of fame and glory. Norris, with a sweatband marked “Artist” wrapped around his brow, addresses these concerns and more in his latest maverick confection You Wait. Time Passes, albeit with as little self-seriousness as it’s possible to muster. It’s a show exploring the choice to make extravagantly silly art that is itself extravagantly silly.
I admired it immensely, without enjoying every single moment. To begin with, and again latterly, its zaniness felt a bit strenuous, as Norris presents himself to us in sort-of character as an unhinged, self-absorbed guru figure, imparting life lessons in the buildup to his Big Reveal, “the grand unveiling of my life’s work” – in a box, on a pillar, upstage. There is a seat reserved for his estranged wife: this’ll show her! We hear about their breakup, and piece together a picture of our host’s glaring inadequacies as a family man. We see snippets of the career (comedian, actor, magician…) this alt-Norris has enjoyed until now, and a section on his bid to become Google’s number one Joz. A later dialogue with his erratic AI girlfriend includes lots of funny back-and-forth in the controlling/collapsing manner of a latter-day Rik Mayall.
Where the show is most interesting is in its approach to big questions about the futility, or otherwise, of the niche creative’s life. Are weird artists really weird, or are they trying to show us who they really are – a different way of being? That question might resonate more if Norris’s weirdness didn’t sometimes feel a bit for-its-own-sake; see a late “Do you want to fart into this Hoover?” sequence that does not enthral. And yet, even (or especially?) at its most offputtingly wacky, the show – its extreme dottiness backed up by good jokes, twisty philosophy and a highly energetic performance at its core – constitutes a curiously rousing defence of experimental art-making in a conformist, capitalist world.
