The award-winning show Joz Norris Is Dead. Long Live Mr Fruit Salad. is being released as a comedy special by indie production label and online comedy store Go Faster Stripe on Monday the 19th of February. Filmed at the iconic Moth Club in Hackney, Joz Norris is revisiting his breakthrough 2019 show for the first time since it sold out its Fringe run, transferred to a Soho Theatre run extended due to popular demand, won the Comedians’ Choice Award for Best Show and was nominated for the Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality and the Chortle Award for Best Music & Variety Act.
In Long Live Mr Fruit Salad, Norris himself is declared missing, presumed sad - performing in his stead is Mr Fruit Salad, a fictional chimaera who is two parts paper-thin- cartoon-character-and-spirit-of-mischief to one part physical-manifestation-of-existential- dread. Here to perform his debut stand-up special (a George Carlin-esque slice of pure, balls-to-the-wall stand-up about burritos), Mr Fruit Salad just needs to work through a few things first, channelling the spirit of nonsense and the ghosts of all his mistakes as he dances, capers and teleports his way through life.
One of the hit shows of the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe, Joz Norris Is Dead... was long-listed for the Edinburgh Comedy Award and acclaimed by publications including the Guardian, the Observer and the Evening Standard for its exploration of grief, anxiety and the human condition via joyful silliness and nonsense. Five years on, Norris said this about the release of the special:
“Mr Fruit Salad is probably the thing I did that had the biggest impact, and it happened just before the world curled up into a ball and went to sleep. I always felt a little sad that I never got to make good on all the big plans I had for it just before Covid - there was talk of a TV show where he went on a murder spree in a funfair. This isn’t that, but I am so proud to revisit this show that meant something to a lot of people and create some kind of record of it that can hopefully stand the test of time. I was so honoured to team up with Chris Evans (not that one) at Go Faster Stripe for it, and I’m so proud that this show might find a new batch of fans who didn’t get to see it first time around. I really hope those who saw it in 2019 enjoy revisiting it, and those who didn’t enjoy discovering the strange world that Mr Fruit Salad came from.”
Joz Norris Is Dead. Long Live Mr Fruit Salad. is co-performed by Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee Ben Target (creator of the smash hit theatre show Lorenzo), who also served as a creative consultant on the show, and was directed by Funny Women Award-winning writer and director Alex Hardy. The lighting and sound design for the Go Faster Stripe recording was by Robert Wells, and the special was produced and directed by Chris Evans for Go Faster Stripe.
Since creating Mr Fruit Salad, Norris has gone on to create several original shows for BBC Radio 4, most notably the multiple critics’ choice sitcom The Dream Factory in 2022, co-written by Miranda Holms and co-starring Stevie Martin, Desiree Burch and Kiell Smith-Bynoe. He also created and performed the acclaimed Radio 4 stand-up/sketch show hybrid special A Small Talk On Small Talk. His sitcom collaboration with Ed Aczel, Ed & Joz’s Heist Movie, was produced as a non-broadcast pilot by Tiger Aspect, and his sitcom script The Happiness Chain was long-listed for the David Nobbs Memorial Trust New Comedy Writing Award and the Shortcom Sitcom Competition. He has written for Radio 4’s The Skewer and performed on The Now Show, is a regular on hit podcasts NonCensored and The Gargle, and has made appearance on others including RHLSTP, Nobody Panic, Pappy’s Flatshare Slamdown and The Comedian’s Comedian.
His most recent show, the theatrical anti-magic spectacular Blink, was another acclaimed hit at the Fringe in 2022, being named one of the Evening Standard’s Top 20 Comedy Shows of the Year, and is also being released as a special by Go Faster Stripe later this year.
Joz Norris Is Dead. Long Live Mr Fruit Salad is available to watch on Norris’s YouTube channel from February 19. Click below.
