Daniel Tizon’s The SMALL Stuff is a comedy work-in-progress coming to Bread & Roses Theatre on 8th and 20th April. Taking a forensic look at life’s daily agonies from awkward small talk to the quiet chaos of overthinking everything we caught up with him to talk pedantry, process, and finding comedy in the details most people try to ignore.
What can audiences expect from The SMALL Stuff?
Audiences can expect a forensic analysis of life’s daily agonies, which I personally find extremely difficult. Big things I can do without giving them much thought. An important meeting, run a 10k, a big gig, I just go into automaton mode. But having to step outside of the building when a neighbour might be out there and SMALL talk is likely required to navigate that moment, things like that have always been a massive problem for me. Give me goal-orientated high stakes over social unpredictability with no clear objective any day.
What can audiences expect from The SMALL Stuff?
Audiences can expect a forensic analysis of life’s daily agonies, which I personally find extremely difficult. Big things I can do without giving them much thought. An important meeting, run a 10k, a big gig, I just go into automaton mode. But having to step outside of the building when a neighbour might be out there and SMALL talk is likely required to navigate that moment, things like that have always been a massive problem for me. Give me goal-orientated high stakes over social unpredictability with no clear objective any day.
What inspired the show, and how did it come about?
I am someone excessively concerned with minor details, following in the footsteps of my dad who himself was a pedant. I don’t know how far the line goes back but I suspect there is a strain of pedantry running through the paternal side of the family. As the last of that family line, thankfully for society, it is a line that ends with me.
In an earlier life I was a TV and film writer but I think I really found my authentic voice in radio and podcasting. I did the odd piece for Radio 4’s old show ‘Home Truths’ and then, as an early generation podcaster, I wrote and presented a podcast that run for over 500 episodes, and for some time within its decade long-run, it operated as a weekly late-night live show on Resonance FM. And it was through this that I honed in on my obsessiveness with what to most people are small things, but also community.
I’m from south London, growing up in Clapham when it was a very different place. My work focused too on these changes and the impact of gentrification on the area and its people. I have worked from the same South Lambeth Portuguese café for over 25 years and I would chronicle life from within that café every week, coming to realise that it was possible to get to know a community and its people just by sitting in the same place day in, day out. Those people, the diversity of cultures and languages, the cranes knocking down the old, sometimes historical, buildings and the emergence of the towers that now dominate our skyline, they changed me as a writer. Watching the menus in the café alter over the last few years to cater for the young professionals now dominating this part of London, it’s been an interesting thing. Sometimes I feel the only link to my past is that I’m still washing my hands fifty times a day.
Your work focuses on the “minutiae of daily life” - why does that interest you as a comedian?
I think pedantry in real life can be crippling, both for the pedant and particularly for the people around you. But creatively, I think it’s a massive strength and can be very funny. I believe it’s always set my work apart from the norm. I think this obsessiveness with the trivial, this inability to let go of things that probably appear inconsequential to most, has been there since I was a kid. The work, particularly on stage now, has enabled me to see this more clearly. I can see that thread going back to my earliest years and on stage I’m happy to give myself over to that pedant.
Socially, like many comics to be fair, I have always struggled. I am comfortable at a funeral where my severely limited range of facial expressions come into their own and it’s not a day for the upbeat raconteurs. But weddings, Christenings, anything celebratory that requires you to dress up and be Mr Blue Sky and engage with people, it’s always been a massive problem for me, one that was only resolved by deciding some years ago ‘I’m simply not doing these things anymore.’ The social outliers, rather than the more popular people, are of greater interest to me and the same applies on stage. I am drawn to the more awkward, introspective acts rather than the big crowd pleasers.
Do you see this show as more observational, personal, or something else?
I think it’s working towards a more personal work in the future. I had a very unusual upbringing for a person of my generation. People were no longer living the way my family were when I came along, without their own bathroom, just in a single bedroom, and it was even more unusual in that it bled over into early adulthood as we never moved out of there. And I can see now through touching on it in this show, albeit not completely, its impact on me and how it has shaped every major relationship I’ve had. Also, it’s steered my writing in a certain direction.
My parents did not survive the experience and the surprise for me is that we now have a housing crisis that I could was there as far back as the late nineties. Society was way too slow in addressing this. Today’s generation, housing wise, some of them are living uncomfortably close to the way my family did, sleeping within sight of their white goods, dealing with unscrupulous landlords in cold, damp, mould-ridden flats. It’s strange and unsettling for me to see that because you can’t build a proper life when you don’t have stability in your housing. A place that you’re happy to live in and for creators, happy to work from. We’ve kind of gone back to the past in terms of how so many people are having to live now and I do think that is changing the work creators are turning out. A decade or fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have heard a middle class comic talking about their dire living situation. Housing was the preserve of the fewer working class acts that were out there. But now housing is impacting on the better off and you can see that reflected on stage.
The SMALL Stuff is a funny show, obviously I’m going to say that. It’s observational and personal but building towards something even more personal that will hone in more on what happened to my family as a result of the way we lived. For now, it’s looking at how I got here. How I might have become the loner I did become and the things I’m trying to do to address that, such as signing up for a ridiculous amount of evening classes in order to beef up what right now is shaping up to be a pretty low funeral attendance.
I am someone excessively concerned with minor details, following in the footsteps of my dad who himself was a pedant. I don’t know how far the line goes back but I suspect there is a strain of pedantry running through the paternal side of the family. As the last of that family line, thankfully for society, it is a line that ends with me.
In an earlier life I was a TV and film writer but I think I really found my authentic voice in radio and podcasting. I did the odd piece for Radio 4’s old show ‘Home Truths’ and then, as an early generation podcaster, I wrote and presented a podcast that run for over 500 episodes, and for some time within its decade long-run, it operated as a weekly late-night live show on Resonance FM. And it was through this that I honed in on my obsessiveness with what to most people are small things, but also community.
I’m from south London, growing up in Clapham when it was a very different place. My work focused too on these changes and the impact of gentrification on the area and its people. I have worked from the same South Lambeth Portuguese café for over 25 years and I would chronicle life from within that café every week, coming to realise that it was possible to get to know a community and its people just by sitting in the same place day in, day out. Those people, the diversity of cultures and languages, the cranes knocking down the old, sometimes historical, buildings and the emergence of the towers that now dominate our skyline, they changed me as a writer. Watching the menus in the café alter over the last few years to cater for the young professionals now dominating this part of London, it’s been an interesting thing. Sometimes I feel the only link to my past is that I’m still washing my hands fifty times a day.
Your work focuses on the “minutiae of daily life” - why does that interest you as a comedian?
I think pedantry in real life can be crippling, both for the pedant and particularly for the people around you. But creatively, I think it’s a massive strength and can be very funny. I believe it’s always set my work apart from the norm. I think this obsessiveness with the trivial, this inability to let go of things that probably appear inconsequential to most, has been there since I was a kid. The work, particularly on stage now, has enabled me to see this more clearly. I can see that thread going back to my earliest years and on stage I’m happy to give myself over to that pedant.
Socially, like many comics to be fair, I have always struggled. I am comfortable at a funeral where my severely limited range of facial expressions come into their own and it’s not a day for the upbeat raconteurs. But weddings, Christenings, anything celebratory that requires you to dress up and be Mr Blue Sky and engage with people, it’s always been a massive problem for me, one that was only resolved by deciding some years ago ‘I’m simply not doing these things anymore.’ The social outliers, rather than the more popular people, are of greater interest to me and the same applies on stage. I am drawn to the more awkward, introspective acts rather than the big crowd pleasers.
Do you see this show as more observational, personal, or something else?
I think it’s working towards a more personal work in the future. I had a very unusual upbringing for a person of my generation. People were no longer living the way my family were when I came along, without their own bathroom, just in a single bedroom, and it was even more unusual in that it bled over into early adulthood as we never moved out of there. And I can see now through touching on it in this show, albeit not completely, its impact on me and how it has shaped every major relationship I’ve had. Also, it’s steered my writing in a certain direction.
My parents did not survive the experience and the surprise for me is that we now have a housing crisis that I could was there as far back as the late nineties. Society was way too slow in addressing this. Today’s generation, housing wise, some of them are living uncomfortably close to the way my family did, sleeping within sight of their white goods, dealing with unscrupulous landlords in cold, damp, mould-ridden flats. It’s strange and unsettling for me to see that because you can’t build a proper life when you don’t have stability in your housing. A place that you’re happy to live in and for creators, happy to work from. We’ve kind of gone back to the past in terms of how so many people are having to live now and I do think that is changing the work creators are turning out. A decade or fifteen years ago, you wouldn’t have heard a middle class comic talking about their dire living situation. Housing was the preserve of the fewer working class acts that were out there. But now housing is impacting on the better off and you can see that reflected on stage.
The SMALL Stuff is a funny show, obviously I’m going to say that. It’s observational and personal but building towards something even more personal that will hone in more on what happened to my family as a result of the way we lived. For now, it’s looking at how I got here. How I might have become the loner I did become and the things I’m trying to do to address that, such as signing up for a ridiculous amount of evening classes in order to beef up what right now is shaping up to be a pretty low funeral attendance.
Is there a particular moment or theme in the show that feels especially important to you?
There are moments in the show that touch on the above, the unusual way we lived. I know no other friend or family that lived in such a way for so long. And over the last year I have been introducing this theme into my comedy and the reception has been positive. Some people haven’t believed that I did live like that, but I think if a creator was going to make something up, this is a very strange and specific thing to alight on. So those moments at the start and towards the end of this show are important for me because they have defined me in real life and I think it’s taken a few years to start to grasp how I can work those into a stand up show while making them funny.
How does this show compare to your previous work?
A lot of my old radio and podcast listeners will recognise the themes in this show. What was great about that old show was it was done back in the days when Twitter was such a great platform, so easy to use and interact with, and there were so many listeners out there who found the minutiae relatable and would regularly contact the show with their own obsessive issues. During the live half hour show, they would be engaging with me on Twitter. Without that earlier work, this show doesn’t happen because presenting a show for so long taught me how to use that voice and was a significant stepping stone into finding the courage to eventually go on stage which was never something I’d had a deep desire to do.
Some of my other work zeroed in on the home life and what that did to my family and again, I approached those works in what I felt was an unconventional way, making them funny but also poignant. The latter doesn’t necessarily work in stand up and that’s why at this stage, I’ve just introduced elements of that into the live show.
There are moments in the show that touch on the above, the unusual way we lived. I know no other friend or family that lived in such a way for so long. And over the last year I have been introducing this theme into my comedy and the reception has been positive. Some people haven’t believed that I did live like that, but I think if a creator was going to make something up, this is a very strange and specific thing to alight on. So those moments at the start and towards the end of this show are important for me because they have defined me in real life and I think it’s taken a few years to start to grasp how I can work those into a stand up show while making them funny.
How does this show compare to your previous work?
A lot of my old radio and podcast listeners will recognise the themes in this show. What was great about that old show was it was done back in the days when Twitter was such a great platform, so easy to use and interact with, and there were so many listeners out there who found the minutiae relatable and would regularly contact the show with their own obsessive issues. During the live half hour show, they would be engaging with me on Twitter. Without that earlier work, this show doesn’t happen because presenting a show for so long taught me how to use that voice and was a significant stepping stone into finding the courage to eventually go on stage which was never something I’d had a deep desire to do.
Some of my other work zeroed in on the home life and what that did to my family and again, I approached those works in what I felt was an unconventional way, making them funny but also poignant. The latter doesn’t necessarily work in stand up and that’s why at this stage, I’ve just introduced elements of that into the live show.
What’s your approach to developing material as a writer-comedian?
It’s often a little incident, a minor detail, and it just develops from there. Just last week, for instance, expecting some packages from that online leviathan we’re all guilty of using, when those packages were inevitably dumped outside, I took them up, assumed they were all for me because the email with the proof of delivery photo had been sent to me, and without my glasses, I tore into the first smaller parcel only to find what looked like some small transparent bulb. Thrown by this, I put my glasses on and was horrified to see it was a wearable pump insert. Now one of my neighbours had just had a baby the previous week. Obviously, I’d wrecked the parcel. There was no way I could put this outside the neighbour’s door in that state, or reseal it and repost it, or leave it in the letterbox, because that would’ve been very suspicious. Who would believe I had mistakenly opened it when it was such a personal item?
In the end, I left the parcel half in the communal letterbox in the front door so that it would convey the impression the reason it was torn was it had been caught in the letterbox. A tricky moment in real life, but as a writer-performer, gold with plenty of potential to use in my work.
Have you learned anything surprising about yourself while making this show?
It has confirmed admin is very stressful and that it is very difficult to sell most comedy shows now unless you are very big name. I have seen many quality acts struggling to shift tickets and it’s a shame. I think I have learned I should have been doing this years ago. I’ve always regarded myself as a writer and I still do. It’s my big love. But I learnt to perform and I am very good at what I do (I’m not good at much but equally I will acknowledge when I am good at something), but I think the biggest thing this has taught me is I really should’ve started doing this when I was young, first and foremost because I think it would’ve spared me having to do some terrible jobs in-between writing commissions just to support myself.
I did not belong in the 9 to 5 world, I never did, and those experiences were damaging. On stage, it’s as close as I get to feeling right. Yes, like so many comics, I probably am a misfit, but the stage is the natural place for the misfit. Everything on there feels right. I’m not really one to regret much but I think just through putting this show together, this is something I’ve come to realise and I even said this to my oldest friend just the other way. Growing up in a working class community and never really moving away from that, I did not encounter many people that did these things. I knew I could be a writer, and I wanted to be from the age of six, but performers, I never met any until I was an adult. I was in a bubble.
It’s often a little incident, a minor detail, and it just develops from there. Just last week, for instance, expecting some packages from that online leviathan we’re all guilty of using, when those packages were inevitably dumped outside, I took them up, assumed they were all for me because the email with the proof of delivery photo had been sent to me, and without my glasses, I tore into the first smaller parcel only to find what looked like some small transparent bulb. Thrown by this, I put my glasses on and was horrified to see it was a wearable pump insert. Now one of my neighbours had just had a baby the previous week. Obviously, I’d wrecked the parcel. There was no way I could put this outside the neighbour’s door in that state, or reseal it and repost it, or leave it in the letterbox, because that would’ve been very suspicious. Who would believe I had mistakenly opened it when it was such a personal item?
In the end, I left the parcel half in the communal letterbox in the front door so that it would convey the impression the reason it was torn was it had been caught in the letterbox. A tricky moment in real life, but as a writer-performer, gold with plenty of potential to use in my work.
Have you learned anything surprising about yourself while making this show?
It has confirmed admin is very stressful and that it is very difficult to sell most comedy shows now unless you are very big name. I have seen many quality acts struggling to shift tickets and it’s a shame. I think I have learned I should have been doing this years ago. I’ve always regarded myself as a writer and I still do. It’s my big love. But I learnt to perform and I am very good at what I do (I’m not good at much but equally I will acknowledge when I am good at something), but I think the biggest thing this has taught me is I really should’ve started doing this when I was young, first and foremost because I think it would’ve spared me having to do some terrible jobs in-between writing commissions just to support myself.
I did not belong in the 9 to 5 world, I never did, and those experiences were damaging. On stage, it’s as close as I get to feeling right. Yes, like so many comics, I probably am a misfit, but the stage is the natural place for the misfit. Everything on there feels right. I’m not really one to regret much but I think just through putting this show together, this is something I’ve come to realise and I even said this to my oldest friend just the other way. Growing up in a working class community and never really moving away from that, I did not encounter many people that did these things. I knew I could be a writer, and I wanted to be from the age of six, but performers, I never met any until I was an adult. I was in a bubble.
What kind of audience do you think will connect most with the piece?
People who are open to seeing something different will enjoy it. Doing an hour-long show allows your work the time to breathe. I’m not one of these guys who, to use a music analogy, turns out hit singles. I don’t do the easy stuff. I’m am albums guy. If you like your albums, if you like the longer form work, something unconventional, then I believe the show will resonate with those audiences.
Why should people come and see The SMALL Stuff at the Bread & Roses Theatre?
I don’t think there’s much like it out there. The SMALL Stuff is the voice in your head that should really stay in your head. It’s an exploration of life’s daily agonies, exploring the friction between a low-key existence and an extroverted world navigated by a middle-aged man life has rendered on their own because their unchecked pedantry and the ghosts of an unusual upbringing has rendered them impossible to live with.
The SMALL Stuff runs on 8th and 20th April 2026, find out more and book here.
People who are open to seeing something different will enjoy it. Doing an hour-long show allows your work the time to breathe. I’m not one of these guys who, to use a music analogy, turns out hit singles. I don’t do the easy stuff. I’m am albums guy. If you like your albums, if you like the longer form work, something unconventional, then I believe the show will resonate with those audiences.
Why should people come and see The SMALL Stuff at the Bread & Roses Theatre?
I don’t think there’s much like it out there. The SMALL Stuff is the voice in your head that should really stay in your head. It’s an exploration of life’s daily agonies, exploring the friction between a low-key existence and an extroverted world navigated by a middle-aged man life has rendered on their own because their unchecked pedantry and the ghosts of an unusual upbringing has rendered them impossible to live with.
The SMALL Stuff runs on 8th and 20th April 2026, find out more and book here.
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