Josh Jones’ new comedy tour is called I Haven’t Won The Lottery So Here’s Another Tour Show, but if he did win the lottery, he’d be pretty adult about it.
“I want new paving,” says the Manchester-born 32-year-old. He’s currently living in the city at his doctor boyfriend’s house, but Jones would use the money to purchase somewhere with a garden. “I’ve been de-weeding. I’m getting very boring.”
Luckily, life’s mundanities have fuelled his new show, which will focus on “observational life sh*t” such as his cohabiting set-up and his newfound affection for M&S. It’s more exciting than it sounds, Jones promises, and as he litters our Zoom call with straight-faced quips about beating up his school bullies and flopping on the recent (and final) season of ITV’s Dancing On Ice, I believe him. He’s jovial company, relaying his thoughts as you might do with a friend at the pub, and it makes sense why in recent years he’s become a ubiquitous force on the roulette wheel of British panel shows.
For 10 years now, ever since he was peer-pressured into stand-up by his friends while at Salford University, Josh Jones has won audiences over gradually with his easy, Edinburgh Award-nominated brand of hyper-camp and light self-deprecation. He’s not often one to veer into current affairs, as “people are paying for a night out, and I just want to entertain them, so I try and keep it quite light – I just want ‘em to have the best night.” He reassesses. “Not the best night, do you know what I mean, I’m not ABBA. But a pretty good night out.”
He began on what some might call the obvious route, with a lot of admittedly funny jibes about his admittedly “really gay voice”, as he’s described it. But before you dub him reductive, he’d like to get there first: “I’ve been writing gay jokes for 10 years and you do get a bit bored of it,” he says. Entering an industry that is famously recognised as a straight white man’s club, with audiences that can rival football matches on the lairy scale, meant Jones felt he had to address his effeminate voice with the crowd from the off.
“Just let me get it out the way because if I say it, you can’t say anything, do you know what I mean?” He’ll still be talking about his life as a gay man on the new tour – “I guess that it is quite gay, because I’m gay,” he says with a wry smile – but with less self-mocking.
Jones comes from a Mancunian family where “everyone’s a gobsh*te, everyone’s loud and Northern and just got buckets of confidence,” and so being picked on at school wasn’t going to fly. Kids surely tried – “I had to deal with quite a bit of cr*p” – but his cousins, “the cocks of the school,” quickly put a stop to it with their fists (as did Jones a few times, after his mother taught him how to scrap).
“I remember telling me mum that I were getting picked on, and instead of being like, ‘Right, well let me speak to their mum’ or whatever, my mum taught me how to uppercut properly,” he explains, demonstrating a swift upward whack with a cheesy grin. “She was like, ‘If you uppercut them, they lose their balance, and then whilst they’ve lost the balance, then just start hitting ‘em’. So I did that, and it worked.” While the cliche is that comedians arm themselves with their funny, Jones’ protection came by refining his iron fist with boxing lessons. “People kind of stopped picking on me because no one wants to get battered by the gay guy.”
After university, Jones performed his routines up to five times a week at working men’s clubs and rugby clubs across the north west. They’re not the first venues I’d have in mind for a comic to test out material about gay sex, but he disagrees: “I perform in them places all the time, and they’re genuinely really lovely. So it’s made me more open-minded that people are more open-minded.”
That said, homophobic heckling did occur in those early days of his career, though rarely, and the most “vile” incident occurred more recently with a man who threatened to torch the venue he was performing in. Jones usually deals with ruffian audience members while on stage, but on this occasion, he had to let staff intervene.
“I was like, ‘I’m not I’m not being paid enough to have to deal with homophobia, so you get him out, or I’m going home.’” It doesn’t get him down though; if anything, he says, it’s fortified him. He spent his late teens diffusing fights at work in a local pub. He’s used to rowdy behaviour. “You get tough skin out of it. I don’t know, it’s made me, I think, quite resilient. So I wouldn’t change it.”
Away from touring – I Haven’t Won The Lottery… is Jones’ third comedy tour – Jones’ on-screen career is blossoming. He first appeared on Jonathan Ross’ Comedy Club in 2020, and you’ve probably since seen him on 8 Out of 10 Cats, or perhaps CelebAbility, or maybe Guessable.
“When you first start doing panel shows, you really have to prove yourself,” he says. He’s performed on the same billing as the omnipresent Rob Beckett and Kathryn Ryan, and the “best [he’s] ever seen” Lee Mack, but instead of feeling competitive or succumbing to imposter syndrome, he sees the shows as a space to learn. “I like gigging with comics who are of a high calibre because it makes me really work harder.”
Last year, he appeared to make the decision that he wanted to become a TV personality, rather than just a stand-up. In October it was revealed that he was one of 11 celebrities taking on the 17th season of Dancing On Ice, a former ITV stalwart competition series, the type of which had the power to bridge the gap between niche market entertainer and national living room presence.
In actuality, he had no idea he was going to appear until it was confirmed, as his agent had signed him up. Jones admits he knew that “from the off, I was kind of the worst one” on the cast list. If these factors feel like bad omens, that’s because they were: after two episodes, he was forced to withdraw owing to an ankle injury. “I could’ve said I would’ve won, but I think everybody knew I wouldn’t.” He lets out a gloriously goofy laugh.
Dancing on Ice was a fine experience, everyone on set was “nice” and his ankle is all good now. But the biggest thing he took away from it was the realisation that he doesn’t want to do anything like it again. “It made me realise like, oh, the goal isn’t to be famous. I don’t think that’s for me,” he says. Scuttling about on ice from dawn ‘til dusk meant there wasn’t much time to crack jokes on a stage. “It’s made me kind of re-evaluate what I want, and I really just want to be known as a comedian.”
Still, his profile is growing. He co-hosts two podcasts, Hard Sell and Chatting with Cherubs, while the forthcoming comedy tour will make more than two dozen stops nationwide. There are drawbacks; he has to delete social media after he posts because “as a queer comedian you just get so much [abuse] and I don’t need that in my life,” which seems fair. In person though, people are pleasant and friendly, even if they look at him with screwed up faces as they try to work out where they know him from. A former work colleague? A distant Facebook friend?
“I get a lot of people like, ‘Oh, you’re that guy!’ But they don’t know my name. That’s lovely because I’m just like, ‘Yeah!’ and then I walk on,” he smiles. “I normally get noticed in garden centres, really. That’s where my audience are.”
Josh Jones kicks off his UK tour I Haven’t Won The Lottery So Here’s Another Tour Show from September 2025.
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