The Headliner: Daniel Foxx
"I love taking a ridiculous situation and then just popping myself, or the worst version of myself, in it and treating it really normally."
Daniel Foxx, Comedian
Daniel Foxx is a London-based comedian who does a bit of everything: standup, sketch, and musicals (and who knows what else!). Online, he’s the mastermind behind characters and bits like “The Supervillain’s Gay Assistant” and “POV: we’re in a zombie apocalypse” — the kinds of quippy, honest, and hilarious content that catches eyes, which is why Foxx has gone viral plenty of times.
But he’s more than his online content. On stage, he’s performed as part of the BBC New Comedy Awards and supported big-name acts like Josh Widdicombe and Sofie Hagen. As a writer and lyricist for Fat Rascal Theatre, the comedian also has a passion for musical theater, writing shows like “Unfortunate: The Untold Story of Ursula the Sea Witch,” which was named Theatre Weekly’s “Best Musical of the Fringe” in 2019 and earned the comedian a nomination for Best Musical Theatre Bookwriting at the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Awards 2020.
I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Foxx from across the pond all about his characters and sketches, his standup, and how he approaches comedy. Read it all below!
How would you describe your comedy?
I recently came to this as a descriptor: conspiratorial. It's a mix of sort of observation and storytelling. I think, on stage, I sort of go for … your gossipy friend that's come to brunch with something scandalous to tell you — here's my kind of stage, per se. … I guess [it’s] similar in the sketches, but it's a bit more like exploring different vapid facets of myself. I love taking a ridiculous situation and then just popping myself, or the worst version of myself, in it and treating it really normally.
Talk me through your comedy journey so far.
My family's always been very into—[they’re] just fans of comedy. I can remember going on long drives, … listening to tapes of, cassette tapes of, standups like Billy Connolly and people like that. So, that was always kind of in the ether of—that was a cool thing to do.
Then, at university, there was …. a talent show, I think, and I ended up doing it. And I did standup as part of that and then went and did a few open mic nights and a couple of competitions, actually. … Then, I got into writing and stopped the standup for quite a while and was just doing kind of music — I write musical theater; it's kind of the other thing I do, comedy musicals and always aiming to bring sort of standup vibes into a musical so it's like punchy comedy that people actually laugh at. … There was a point maybe … a few years ago, where I was watching one of our shows, and it was getting, you know, lots of lovely laughs. And I remember going, “I feel really jealous that the actors are stood up there getting the laughs for the jokes that I've written.” I was like, I really need to get back to doing standup again. And then, I just launched back in and started doing it, so that was about probably the beginning of 2019. I started doing standup again.
Then, lockdown happened. There was Zoom gigs then, so people started doing like—a lot of people tried to set up Zoom gigs. … At the lower levels, which is where I was at the time, Zoom open mics were like the ninth level of hell. … [I] had about a year of lockdown of going, what can I do that isn't—that I'm still actually going to be creating something? That's when I started making sketches. Then, lockdown lifted, and I'm doing both, sort of.
It sounds like your parents kind of surrounded you with comedy your whole life.
Yeah, definitely. I mean, they’re both from more kind of science-y backgrounds. … My dad's a sort of an aquatic biologist, really, … and my mom's kind of an expert in dementia. But [they were] always big fans of comedy, always watching comedy — you know, whatever was kind of the big thing at the time. … It was always a kind of a thing in the house, and jokes and laughter were kind of quite highly prized, I think. Everyone was trying to make each other laugh.
I heard you say once on a podcast that you’re really trying to focus on releasing comedy that has things in it that you find funny, rather than what you think other people find funny. What’s that process been like as someone whose digital comedy kind of relies on other people (literally) liking it?
Quite fundamentally, I think that really changed a lot for me. I think [it] weirdly happened at a point where I did the same thing in my life at the same time. So, I went from being like, “What do other people want to see of me?” to “What have I always wanted to be and make?” And that happened during lockdown, weirdly, where sort of, again towards the end, but I was just like, we've wasted so much time. Like, we've lost so much time in the space of—I went from being like 25 to 28 or something during lockdown … and just lost that chunk of time. And I think that changed a little something, I mean, where I went, “I'm done.” Why waste any more time not doing exactly what I want to be doing and what I enjoy? I started dressing a bit differently and sort of leaning more into all these things — the villains and fabulous people, the Tilda Swinton and Richard Grant style, all these sort of amazing, eccentric, flamboyant people — leaning more into that.
And part of that process was I was churning out all these TikToks that were wearing loads of wigs — I mean, I love wearing a wig — and doing all these sort of what I was seeing other people get a lot of views for and doing a kind of humor that does do well on TikTok but isn't exactly what I like. And then I have to sit down and go, well, what do I actually find funny? What would I want to watch? And that is definitely more like what I'm making now, which is, … I love seeing the slightly bad side of people. … People can be a little bit judgmental, and people can be a bit bitchy, and people can be snarky and vapid and self-centered and all these things, but that's just funny quirks in people, and that's funny. That's the stuff I like teasing out. … It definitely was a conscious process of going, “What do I like to see?” and then spending a lot more time going, okay, I need to not just be trying to please an algorithm now, or a certain crowd, and then hopefully, those people will just come. The people that I really want to connect with will find what I'm making, which they did.
Do you feel like that switch kind of happened in every part of your comedy career, or just in the characters and sketches you were posting online?
It definitely happened in my standup a bit more. I think it was already in my writing. Weirdly, it was already there, because, I think, I was writing other people. Like, you're writing other characters. So, in my standup, the best bits of my standup were already that. So then I sort of went, oh, those are the bits I enjoy doing the most. … I mean, It's like finding your voice, right? It's a lot of that sort of kind of thing, and it was just a process of really sitting down and going like, what do I like? Who do I admire? What are the things that make me sit up when I see it in a show? … Well, then, let's bring that in.
You have these hilarious characters that you post on social media, and you also do standup. I’ve seen some of it, but I haven’t seen any of those internet characters in your sets. Do you tend to keep them completely separate?
Yeah, it is separate. I do the bedtime stories for privileged children on stage, which I find really fun. That’s sort of a halfway house, I guess, because I sort of go into a character voice to read it to the audience, but it's still me. But I am reading out a script, essentially. But I don't do character comedy on stage. I'd be really interested in doing it as part of a wider show, almost like doing a sketch show on stage, but for whatever reason, it doesn't—I don't want to mix the two. I just, I quite love doing standup, and I love making characters, and it's quite nice for me to keep those two things as two things.
Is that separation something you do purposely? Or do you just do so many things that they naturally separate into different sections of your life?
I definitely have done it deliberately. I've thought about it. And other people have said before, “Oh, why don't you do characters on stage?” Like, “That character, you could do it on stage,” but I just am not interested in doing it. I think it's more that I love standup as its own art form, and I love sketch and writing down, you know, comedy fiction. I sort of enjoy focusing in on those things one at a time, rather than making a hybrid. There are some amazing comics that do character stuff on stage, … but for me—I guess because I have this outlet where it's like: Here, I can write scripts; here, I can do my own mini little sketches and characters; and here, I can really delve into and enjoy just standup. It's quite nice for me to keep them all kind of separate, just because then I can almost savor each individual form. I think that's so wonky, but I think that's why.
Do you see a difference between TikTok and Instagram, as a creator who posts on both?
TikTok took off sort of just at the end of lockdown for me. So, there was a sort of a community there, and that is lovely. And there are people now that come back, and I see them commenting , … and sometimes, after a gig, I would get someone being like, “Oh, my God, I love your TikToks!” or something, which would always be lovely. … But Instagram, weirdly, just all piled in for me over the last two months. I think, at the beginning of August, I had something like 3000 followers, and then, now, it's, like, 140 thousand or something. I don't know what happened. … I love Tik Tok, and I think when people turn their noses up at it, they're stupid. Because I think people go, “Oh, no, TikTok; it's just for kids.” And they log into Instagram, and just watch TikToks on Instagram. You're consuming, but there's something more personal about Instagram. Just the way it's set up, I think, and the way stories work, and that really has translated to being able to connect with people more.
Speaking of you doing multiple things, you’re a big comedic musical playwright! What exactly is it about musicals — instead of, say, straight plays — that interests you?
I think music generally has a great ability in theater to move things quickly. And, you can say something in song that is not as cringe as if you said it out loud. In a musical, you can move through time, or move a scene along so much in a song that, if you played that as a scene, would take like seven scenes to satisfyingly get there. But in a musical, you accept that. It's, like, we've seen a montage, and now we're here. Oh, now she's a trained warrior, and now she's Mulan — it all just happens. And I think, somehow, I think that lends itself really nicely to comedy. … Traditionally, it's like very sincere — musicals. And if you can be actually funny, in a modern way, within a musical, I think that feels really fresh.
I’d love to hear about the relationship between your playwriting and your standup. What are the biggest differences to you?
Musicals are a massive process to make, even a small one is generally going to be—For me [and] my co-writer, Robyn Grant, who is one of my best friends and a very, very good lyricist, writer, director, actor, we will write, and then we work with, a composer. Usually, that will be a guy called Tim Galvin, who's an amazing composer. Or, yeah, we've worked with a few. And then, you're going to need a producer, and you're going to need quite a lot of investment, because it's scenes, and all the different people involved, and setting, and all of that stuff. And then, either it's going to need a live band, and a choreographer, and a musical director, and all of these things, and it takes at least a year.
Standup, you can write it that day, go out, and perform it that night; it's immediate. No one is there to give you notes, no one needs to fund it. You could come up with something right now and run out to an open mic and just do it within an hour and then go home and work on it and do it again the next night. And I find that very exciting and very refreshing to have both going on: … having something that is completely mine alongside something I really enjoy working [on] with other people.
What’s a joke you love to tell or a character you love to do that never lands or never gets the reaction you expect?
I tried a no-nonsense therapist character called “Trudy the Unlicensed Therapist” a couple of times. She’s [the woman who will] listen to your problems, puff on her cigarette, and advise you to “buy something from Balmain” or “ditch your ugly son.” She’s probably my all-time favorite character, but if I’m honest I was probably just trying to manifest my own ideal fairy godmother. She never got much from the general population of TikTok, but a small, discerning group of Trudy fans still message me about her every now and again.
Check out more of Foxx’s character studies on his TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter. If you happen to be UK-based, you can catch Foxx in his show Daniel Foxx: Villain (Work in Progress) on December 12th at 2Northdown, January 28th at Pleasance Islington, and March 23rd at Caroline of Brunswick. You can also sign up for his newsletter to keep up with live dates and info about Foxx’s show at the 2023 Edinburgh Fringe Festival on his website.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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