"Stay idealistic, be earnest, be silly, don't give up!" Emma McAlpine reviews Josie Long's endearing new show.
Josie Long is in an incredibly playful mood this festival and I'm loving it. It's not that other performers I've seen haven't been playful or silly, but Long brings a particularly infectious amount of energy and enthusiasm to her shows that is impossible not to get swept along with. Tonight she seems in an especially jovial mood, hollering her new favourite catchphrases and doing an unexpectedly entertaining turn as an aggressive beauty technician-turned Nasa representative.
The main thread of the show revolves round what happened when she missed last year’s Edinburgh Fringe and found herself at a loss for what to do. Frustrated with a miserable diet she turns to online food porn and comes across a man called Walter Ezell who takes pictures of his breakfast every day for a year. She becomes obsessed with him and absorbs all the details in the photographs to try and understand what sort of man he is. Inspired by his work, she decides to talk to a stranger every day to try and bring people together but comes to realise that it’s not enough to just be nice to people, she has to do good as well.
Her dissection of Ezell’s breakfasts is particularly delightful, with a childlike exuberance for two of her favourite things, breakfasts and people, accompanied by some very funny observations. The political section towards the end seems less focused and out of kilter with the rest of the show. After some lovely whimsical sections on why she’d like Nye Bevan and Billy Bragg to adopt her, complete with homemade artwork and silly accents; hearing about what a cunt David Cameron is, felt like a bit of an anti-climax. Perhaps I’m just election-fevered out.
All is forgotten when she closes with an inspirational quote by Kurt Vonnegut, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century and the wisest of owls. Like Vonnegut, Long is idealistic and loves human beings. She likes observing people and can extract comedy from the smallest of instances; from a photograph or a conversation or a bad joke, that might have passed you by if you'd seen or heard it yourself. She's not afraid to play the clown or send herself up and she's not afraid to talk about trying to make the world a better place, even if her ideas are contentious. You can't ask much more from a comedian than that.
Josie Long: Be Honourable is at Just the Tonic at The Caves from 11th-29th August at 7:40pm
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