Cara Comedian: Josie Long on her new show Cara Josephine
She comes and goes. Embarking on her sixth nationwide tour Cara Josephine, Josie Long talks to us about growing up standing up
It’s a cliché to say that comedians are just big kids; that being a comedian is less a career and more a means of extending one’s adolescence. Like most clichés it operates on a fuzzy, relativistic truth, with examples both for and against it. Many comedians have young families, mortgages and drive sickeningly sensible cars – other comedians are like Josie Long. As a performer, she’s unapologetically silly and boundlessly enthusiastic, and she brings more than a little of this off stage with her with both its benefits and its burdens.
She started in comedy younger than most, at the age of 14, and by the age of 17 she’d scooped the BBC New Comedy Award. Despite appearances on most of the Polyfilla panel shows used to plug the gaps between Top Gear episodes on Dave, she’s broadly shunned the limelight of broadcasters' big tentpole comedy shows, instead working for the last decade to cultivate a small but loyal following both at the Fringe – her shows sell out too quickly for the tardy punter – and all around the country. On her current tour of latest show Cara Josephine, she's playing venues that, while not box rooms, are a far cry from the LOLosseums played by some of her contemporaries: “I love a small gig, and obviously that’s the essence of what stand-ups do really," she says. "I just like the fact that you’re in a place where you can kind of have that intimate, exciting connection with a room full of strangers. For me the crappest, ugliest thing is massive stadium gigs. I just think, ‘Why would you ever want to see comedy in that environment?’” At the Glasgow International Comedy Festival, she’s taking herself to The Stand on Woodlands Road, the high water mark for dedicated, intimate comedy venues, beloved by performers and hardcore comedyheads alike. “It’s the same with bands," she adds. "I’d much prefer to see a band in a smaller venue. It’s more exciting, it’s more like a real experience.” Bands, at least, can fall back on big choruses to fill an echoey void, but, as Long says, “You can’t sing along to comedy. You can’t even really dance.”
"My character is a bit like me, but a bit more of a mess" – Josie Long
Long has made her name in a style of whimsy that flits between the literary and the daft: long routines about Charles Darwin are interspersed with stupid gags and non-sequiturs. Her childlike wonder permeates her shows, right down to the hand-drawn programmes that accompany them. A large part of her enduring appeal is down to her ability to delicately balance these two conflicting pulls, taking audiences from the academy to the ballpool.
Aside from this, a flowering political conscience has changed the tone of her work in the past few years. She’s begun producing shows still packed with optimism, but now with an activist slant. This has translated offstage into a number of projects, including arts-funding organisation Arts Emergency, which she co-founded in 2012. More recently, she’s been running stand-up investigative journalism shows with reporter Martin Williams: “It’s kind of a way to do political shows but make them more interesting and unusual, because they’re Martin’s investigations – it’s not, ‘I read this news article and I wrote some jokes,’ it’s like we did this investigation together and this is what it was.” It’s an interesting approach, where tough subjects can be tackled in a friendly, lawyer-free environment. “We’ve done one so far, which is about extreme fundamentalist Christian private schools – of which there are hundreds. In particular, ones that teach a particular type of curriculum called ‘Accelerated Christian Education,’ which is fucked up, basically. It’s terrible, terrible tuition – it doesn’t teach children to think for themselves.”
The Cara Josephine show is arguably more personal than some of her previous offerings, documenting the aftermath of a messy break-up. “It’s about how in 2013 I found myself in this place where I was really heartbroken and I’d just been in a relationship that’d ended, and I wanted to write about love and to use writing as a way to make sense of it all – try and move on a little bit.”
Relationship breakdowns are common fodder for comics wanting to stretch themselves to an hour-long show – it’s a universally-binding human experience, an easy mine for self-deprecation and when it’s not funny, you can always scrape a pity laugh – but this isn’t Long punching for the arena crowd. She doesn't linger on the relationship itself, but instead uses the experience to look at the weightier concepts of love and her own feelings – “I just wanted to write something talking about love and how I felt. I try not to worry too much about what people are doing because if you do that, it’s the road to ruin – once you start worrying, you never stop.” It could be self-indulgent stuff in more deadpan hands, but as she says, “There’s quite a lot of tangents about sport and poetry and nonsense and politics.” This is a show that aims to put the sense of fun back into crippling heartbreak.
It’s a step away from her more polemical work (although she makes exceptions, Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg both receiving deserved kickings). “In the past, I’ve performed shows about politics where it’s like you either agree or you don’t, or it kind of stirs something up in you or it doesn’t,” she says. “Whereas with this, people have really identified with it, and it’s been such a wonderful experience to get to have that connection with the crowd.”
The blindly romantic character she portrays on stage is, like most good comic personas, an exaggeration of herself. She’s used the character for a number of other projects including a Radio 4 sitcom, Romance and Adventure (named after her 2012 live show: “I just thought it was a cracking title, so I thought ‘Fuck it, I’ll get my money’s worth’”), currently in development with director Doug King. “My character is a bit like me, but a bit more of a mess I suppose. And then there’s Doug’s character, who’s called Darren, who’s a bit more level-headed. Yeah, it’s been really exciting, I’m really chuffed that we’re going to make [a] series, because I want to see where we can take it.” One of the places she’s taking it is the big screen, with an independent feature film slated for the summer: “It’s about this woman who thinks she’s got everything sorted, but she wants to be more involved with politics and stuff like that. Her sister moves away and she kind of has this crisis, and it’s a bit about belonging and a bit about how you kind of feel you’re rooted in you and where you live. But more fun than that.”
Writing as a 32-year-old with a Peter Pan complex, she is perhaps better equipped to handle the topic of a break-up more than most: a bad break-up does, after all, expose our basest, pettiest and most childlike qualities. But if the cliché holds, and comedians are overgrown teens granted licence to show off in front of the class, do they respond to something like a dumping in the same way a teen would? Do they sit in a room writing sub-Morrissey prose, or ride their motorcycle off a cliff like a 50s hearthrob? Of course not: pain becomes puns as the tears of the clown dry from the big, exhaling guffaws of a rapturous crowd.
"Being a comedian is such a playful thing. You have to engage with play and muck around" – Josie Long
“Being a comedian, in general, is such a playful thing,” she says. “You have to engage with play and muck around and think in creative ways, that for whatever reason a lot of people can’t.” A certain childishness can break up the mundane rhythms of life – rhythms that stifle the kind of creative thought needed to make good, original comedy.
It’s apt, then, that her show is very much a coming-of-age tale 15 years too late. Long celebrated the birth of her niece – Josephine – last year. “I wanted to give her something,” she says, “but I’m not really a great adult role model for her; I can’t drive and there is something really adolescent about me.” So: she's given her a comedy show. “There’s lots of different meanings of her name like love and friendship, and I was like, ‘This show is about love and friendship.’ I thought it was really something that meant a lot to me and it was something that I could give her, you know? Regardless of whether I may not be a very conventional adult.”
Arguably, she’s a much better role model than she lets on: one that says it's okay to hold on to your playful side well into adulthood. Long's career proves that the self-confidently adult world of professional comedy with its sharp suits and Formica smiles isn’t the only route to finding an audience, extracting laughs and gaining the respect of your peers.