Within a whisker of a Fringe: Josie Long
Josie Long is so passionately positive at times during Be Honourable! that it feels as much a call to arms as a comedy show. At the very least, it makes you want to go out there and right some wrongs in the wider world.
Which is a bit strange when you consider that Long seems to have spent an enormous amount of the past year online, seeming to do little except obsessively pour over the personal life of a man in the US who posted daily snaps of an entire year’s worth of lovingly prepared breakfasts on photo-sharing site Flickr.
As she reeled off all the information she’d found out about him, and gloried in innocuous titbits about those morning meals of his, it was hard not to think that were this a male performer enthusiastically detailing the minutiae of the life of a woman he’d never actually met, then it wouldn’t take too long to get the heebie-jeebies (or call the cops).
Fortunately Long is entirely too sweet for us to need to worry about any such stalker-ish behaviour - well, probably - and her obsession is due to lovingly staring at images of food online, after a successful diet meant she transferred her cravings over into cyberspace.
There’s been some sort of anti-whimsy campaign taking place around the Fringe this year, with even badges handed out. But frankly, any supporters of anti-whimsy can go stuff themselves if they’re not at ease with Long’s winsome meanderings, and the simple sketches she utilises for props every now and then. (Wait, isn’t that sentence also a bit anti-whimsical in nature? Oh dear.)
The glory of the Fringe’s comedy programme lies in its sheer variety, and it’d be a shame to let the cynics have their way, especially since there is a lot to cheer about, when tens of thousands of the most creative individuals in the world all descend on Scotland’s capital to try and do something special with their lives.
So although Long talks about disappointment and disillusionment - such as not having socialist singer Billy Bragg and/or famous Welsh Labour MP Aneurin Bevan as father figures, or the ickiness of an encounter with a creepy toad-like paparazzo - she always gratifyingly turns her tales into good-natured anecdotes, rather than red-faced rants. But she does get more animated at the end, as she questions the very existence of a socio-political group to belong to, and ponders the need for proper activism.
Showing her ‘graph of goodness’, and explaining the influence of the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Long talks about why ‘doing good’ is much better than just ‘being good’. Without at any point seeming patronising or condescending, the thoughts that she leaves the audience with at the end of Be Honourable! means she may well now figure up pretty high on her own chart, which is both good for her and us.
Josie Long perform Be Honourable! at Just the Tonic at The Caves at 7.40pm until August 30. (Not including 22 and 23)
