Josie Long - Now Is The Time Of Monsters

I think it's a given that we laugh longest and loudest with those that we empathise with - isn't that why the best jokes are told by our mates? Comedians that we warm to are also, not coincidentally, ones that are predisposed to find funny. Would Tim Vine's torturous puns or Joe Lycett's pranks raise so much as a smile if they didn't seem like jolly decent chaps? Conversely, am I alone in finding anti-vaxxer Lee Hurst or stalker Rory McGrath painfully unfunny, despite enjoying They Think It’s All Over back in the day?

So this is my quandary. It goes without saying that Josie Long is a lovely person - any random interview reveals that in moments - so it's always bugged me that I've never found her funny. She went so far as to tell me off once for sitting stony faced during her act, but even then delivered the message so sweetly I'd be hard pressed to complain. Long is an act that, to coin a phrase, I've longed to like for a very long time, and so determined to see her funny side, I decided to try one more time. I'm so glad I did. "Now Is The Time Of Monsters" is an odd, perhaps unique, cocktail of the personal and the political that offers up, with scattergun imprecision, her thoughts on issues as (neuro) diverse as body shaming, dentists, Gaza, time keeping and mouse piss. All of which, if you can imagine such a thing, were embraced within an overarching theme of her child's fascination with extinct mammals.

The evening started, as is so often the way these days, with a brief support slot performed by Josie herself - half an hour of material before the proper show starts. In this case, it came largely in the form of an apology/explanation that we were not going to see the show as intended. Someone had failed to deliver her set and her props. Turning adversity into material - and we Brits do love a disaster - she turned her efforts to bring us the show we'd come to see into the show. Yes, there was prepared stuff about grinding her teeth, a throwaway reference to Charlie Kirk, and a criticism of the status quo (situation, not band) but nothing compared to the comedy gold of the UPS distribution centre in Tamworth.

After the break, having settled down to the proper show and a proper test of her comedy chops, my nervousness returned. Was this going to be all right? I noticed Norwich's poet laureate, John Osborne, was sitting directly in front of me and was laughing his head off. He must know a thing or two, but you can't be sure. Thankfully, what followed was a discussion about extinction and the end of life on this planet as we know it. Without the homemade pictures of obsolete mammals - we were assured some of the best gags rested on their collective fulcrum - a slideshow was employed.

"Imagine I just showed you a rubbish picture drawn by me," was the gist, as instead we got excerpts from the Ladybird book of weird animals.

Look at what we've lost over the millennia, was the message, and compare that with the further three quarters lost in her forty-three years on this planet. On one level - a decidedly grim level - this was about the horrors of climate change and how she wrestled with protecting her children's mental welfare. But it also served as a device to illustrate how huge change is possible. If we can screw up the planet in the blink of an eye, then why not shift the political dial over the course of a term. It was a thesis buried in further digression, in turn literally buried in the silt of antiquity - did those single footprints suggest tragedy or Mum was simply persuaded to carry her child? This was all clever interlocking stuff. The occasional gear change wrong-footed her audience - Gaza was mentioned three times without eliciting performative applause - but we were surely onside nonetheless. And as for those missing props, it was only at the show's close that we really missed out. Illustrative slides of an earlier performance showed the big reveal that would have matched the big, hopeful ideas she ended on, proving that comedy doesn't just have to be about unequal partners and toasters.

I'm still puzzling over what has changed since I last saw her. She did allude to how her comedy has shifted over the years. She even recounted how an alarming fall led to her brain seeping out of her nose, and speculated whether this had changed her. So maybe she is different. Maybe, in the face of hard-right populism the shades of left-leaning thinking seem inconsequential now. I used to shout at Owen Jones when he came on the telly, yet now I wonder what our differences were. So maybe it's me. Maybe we've met each other half way.  Whatever the answer, the abiding lesson is surely to examine your preconceptions, be they in the arts or politics, and confront them. You may find you've been missing out all along.