"Fuck with me and you gonna get it!"

Josie Long is very sensitive to criticism. This is a particular issue on the afternoon that I meet her in the cosy bar of Pleasance One, as she has just received a dismissive, two-star review from another Fringe journalist. The offending article rather glibly proposes that the moderate professional success that Long has enjoyed over the last two years is little more than the product of wishful thinking and misguided hype. Understandably, this has somewhat got her goat.

To her credit, though, Long doesn’t seem remotely interested in taking this out on me, or on journalists in general. In fact, she is all sweetness and light, if anything more endearingly personable face-to-face than she is on stage. She throws herself wholeheartedly into a quiz that I’ve written as an icebreaker, and reacts to my suggestion that I join her in ordering a jacket potato as if we were naughty children about to embark on a secret midnight feast.

Nevertheless, Long brings the conversation back to that review, and her more negative publicity in general, often enough that one begins to doubt her claim that “it’s not like it’s eating me up inside.” I timidly resolve not to bring up my own criticisms of her latest show – which I’ve given a middling review that Long has not yet read – for as long as I can get away with.

The show in question, All The Planet’s Wonders (Shown In Detail), is in many ways a typical Long outing. It contains her trademark enthusiasm for ideas and people, delivered with the cheeky and playful wit that makes her such a refreshing alternative to the world-weary nihilism of many standups. But it’s the ideas that get the upper-hand in the new set.

“I wanted to see if I could write a show that was more based on reading and researching about certain things” Long explains. “I wanted it to be slightly less personal, but at the same time it is really personal to me because it’s about things that I’m really interested in and that I believe in. I wanted it to be perhaps more deliberately written, but I still wanted it to be silly.”

Although the reviews have been generally positive, it’s clear that she’s dwelling on the bad one, as she describes the reception to the show as “very mixed.”

“It’s quite odd to still be getting reviews that half the time are rave reviews and half the time are people saying that I’m not even a comedian,” she says. She’s bemused by the idea that she hasn’t earned the title. “I really think that I’m writing jokes and performing jokes. I don’t think I’m doing anything that different from anyone else doing an Edinburgh show.” So where does she think the criticism comes from?

“I think people perceive that there’s a lot of hype around me,” Long ponders, “so they feel like it might be a really good thing if they were the ones to say, like: ‘not only is this not good, it’s nothing, everyone’s deluded.’ You know, ‘It’s insane that anyone would want to watch it!’”
But Long thinks that the perceived hype is something of an illusion. “I’m doing a venue that’s like, 150 people. Which is good, but if you look at people who have had a massive, meteoric rise to fame in the last couple of years, I really haven’t had anything like that. I’m really small-scale, I’m nobody. So it’s very weird that people feel the need to smash me down for no reason.”

Long is more forgiving about the bad review she got from a Guardian critic last year, which she jokes about in her current show. “He came on a bad night, when the show wasn’t really ready,” she reasons. “But still, he’s gonna get it! You fuck with me, you gonna get it!”

Light-hearted bravado aside, that review encapsulated another criticism sometimes levelled at Long: that because she tries to talk about things that she likes rather than things she hates, her comedy ends up toothless. Humour, so the argument goes, has to draw blood somewhere.

“That’s bullshit,” Long says defiantly. “I don’t think that’s true, I really don’t. What I find funny in shows is surprise and delight, invention and imagination. It doesn’t have to be about being mean. If I’m telling a funny story, it’s not knocking something down, it’s just saying something with a lot of little jokes in it. Take someone like Tim Vine, I don’t think there’s any nastiness in him. He writes brilliant jokes, you know, just from wordplay.”

“Humour can be all sorts of things,” she says, warming to her theme. “Sometimes it’s like a tension release, sometimes it’s knowing you’re being naughty, sometimes it’s knowing you’re part of a group. It’s just a big, varied part of life. It’s one of the good things you have in life to temper things. I don’t know exactly what it is, to be honest. I like it though!”

The baked potatoes arrive, and Long climbs down a little from the theme of her bad publicity. “I’ve only got the one bad review so far, so it’s not the end of the world” she reasons. “But then again,” she says, looking at me questioningly, “you guys could change that because you could give me the one star. And then you could be, like ‘Bang! Take that! And I met her too! Bang!’”

It’s at this point that it would be utterly two-faced of me to remain silent, so I tell her that, although I’m something of a fan, I didn’t find the new show as strong as last year’s. She seems a bit upset, and apologises, but is relieved that it’s a three star rather than a two. She asks me what I didn’t like as much about it.

Falteringly, I explain that despite the fact that she tried to make it less personal and more academic, it actually ended up feeling more self-indulgent to me. She seems to brush this off fairly easily. “It’s really hard not to be self-indulgent, because you’re writing the show” she laughs.
But my second criticism, that I simply didn’t find the show as funny as last year’s, seems to hit her much harder. “Well that’s a shame, because I thought I’d put more jokes in it than last year,” she says, shrinking into herself defensively. I say that I thought bits of it were really funny, but there were quite long stretches where I didn’t really laugh at all. At this point Long leans into the Dictaphone and whispers: “This is where the interview takes a tragic turn and where at the end I hang myself in the woods.” Blimey. I really don’t want to be responsible for that.

Luckily, Long’s faith in the power of humour to temper things comes quickly into play. “You’ll have to go with the headline, Comedienne Hangs Self. But I will come back from the dead and scrape off the last ‘n’.”

Josie Long, then: immensely likeable, very sensitive and every inch the comedian. Just don’t get on her wrong side, or you gonna get it.