Joz Norris releases Mr Fruit Salad special
The award-winning comedy show Joz Norris Is Dead. Long Live Mr Fruit Salad. is now available as a free special via YouTube.
Filmed at the Moth Club in Hackney by Go Faster Stripe, the hour-long video sees Joz Norris revisiting his breakthrough 2019 show. The show's run at the Edinburgh Festival picked up the Comedians' Choice Award for Best Show and saw Norris nominated for the Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality and a Chortle Award. It went on to become an extended Soho Theatre transfer.
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 received acclaim 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 has this to say 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."
The special, which also features Ben Target, was recorded in May 2023 at the Moth Club. The live show was directed by Alex Hardy, with Chris Evans directing and producing the filmed version.