I was invited by Metal Culture and Oreet Ashery to participate in a five-day residency in Southend On Sea to explore the role of comedy in my work along with fellow live artists Scottee, Owen Parry, Caroline Smith and Mem Morrison. It was an amazing opportunity to spend some time thinking about how and when to be funny. We met with three stand-up comics, Shaista Aziz, Simon Munnery and Alex Horne, and learned about how they come up with their material, what it takes to be a comic and how their practices differed from ours. At the end of the residency we did a sort of ‘show and tell’ for staff and selected guests. I ‘hosted’ the event as if it was a special edition of The O Show and the residency had been a wellbeing retreat for stressed out artists. Scottee was my featured guest and received expert psychological advice from The O Show‘s staff psychologist, my mother Angela Fox L.C.S.W., to overcome his academiaphobia.
I wrote three blog posts for The Protagonist about my time at Metal:
Low Carbon Comedy Retreat
How to Kill (in comedic terms, of course)
The Hostess with the Mostess
