Josie Long is trying to tell me what her new Fringe show is about. “I think,” she begins, “it’s about gigantic, prehistoric, extinct, charismatic megafauna, being a parent and about trying to survive and thrive in a chaotic environment of mass extinction.”
She pauses for a moment, then adds. “But also it’s about cave paintings and having a good time.”
It’s possible that if I hadn’t started with her name right at the start you still might have been able to guess whose show Now Is the Time of Monsters is from that description. Long’s ability to wrangle big ideas (admit it, you were thinking of Googling charismatic megafauna there just to be sure), contemporary politics and sweet silliness into the same show may well be unique. It is certainly what has made her stand out in the world of stand-up comedy since she made her debut as a teenager (she was just 14 when she began, just 17 when she won the BBC New Comedy award and first came to the Fringe).
To attend a Josie Long show is to enter Josieworld, a place where whimsy meets progressive politics meets a wide-eyed love of learning.
The new show is a case in point. Its origin story can be traced back to a festival appearance in Australia when she took her family with her, (“which is not,” she admits “commercially viable”).
In Melbourne, Long and her daughter visited the state museum. “They had skeletons of wombats from 10,000 years ago and they’re the size of a campervan,” Long recalls. “They’re insane. They’re huge.
“You think, ‘Woolly mammoths, sure, I know about that.’ But, actually, there were so many different species that were alongside human beings 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 years ago.”
From there she began to think about time and change and out of that came a show that looks at “things changing slowly or fast, my kids growing up and the different iterations of them, and, indeed, different iterations of me. And what it means to have to survive and have to change in big ways and small ways.
“I thought it was a good way to think about climate change.”
Or in other words, and to quote the show’s press release, how do you remain defiant when the world is on fire?
It certainly feels like that. Then again, isn’t the world always on fire? Isn’t that the story of humanity?
“I don’t disagree with that. I don’t disagree that there haven’t always been giant, existential threats. But I think the thing that is so terrifying about climate change is the scale and the pace of it is totally unprecedented. And I think we are all largely in denial about that.”
At the same time, she also wants to offer hope and optimism and even joy to audiences.
Oh, and then there’s the small matter of making people laugh. She smiles. “Yeah and that’s the hard part.”
Time and change is the theme of our conversation today. Long, who is now in her early forties, started her stand-up career in the 1990s when the ecology of comedy was very different. “When I first started there were a lot fewer comics, full stop. The comedy scene was much smaller, the industry was much smaller.
“I talked to my friend Isy Suttie about this because we came up at the same time. And most of the time we’d be the only women on the bill.
“And then just to be a woman who was gentle, strange, whimsical, coy and not aggressive felt oddly radical because there were so many blokey dressing rooms, there was so much established macho posturing cocaine vibes.”
Long would often find herself talking to journalists asking her what it was like being a woman.
“I’d be like, ‘I’m 17. I don’t know what it’s like to be a woman because I’m 17. I hadn’t really experienced that much. I’m a teen, why are you asking?’
“For the first 10 years of my career the questions would basically make you feel like either they were telling you you didn’t exist, telling you you weren’t very good or telling you you shouldn’t be there in some subtle way.”
Thankfully she met like-minded comics such as Robin Ince who helped her find her feet. And she was resilient too.
“I did my first show when I was 24 and then toured it and basically from then on I could just be in my own bubble most of my time.”
You never thought of giving up, Josie?
“I just think I’m stubborn. And I think I’m too weird to do anything else.”
Now that she lives in Glasgow, Edinburgh is just a commute away, though this year her kids are going to London for a week and she’s going over and staying in a flat with Nish Kumar and David O’Doherty for a few days. She does worry, though, that it’s getting harder and harder financially for new performers to afford Edinburgh.
And sometimes not so new.
“I’ve spoken to professional comedians and you say to them, ‘Oh, are you coming up?’ They say, ‘There’s no way I can afford it.’ It shouldn’t be this way.
“And obviously it’s down to landlordism, big venues that take vast profits at everybody else’s expense. It has to change.
“But to counter that there is still such a wellspring of talent and determination.”
It still matters, Josie? “Oh yeah, definitely. Well, it matters to me.”
Josie Long: Now is the Time of Monsters, 19.00, Pleasance Dome (Queen Dome), July 30-August 24 (except August 13)
Tickets here:
https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/josie-long-now-is-the-time-of-monsters
