I can just withdraw from the discourse: Why Josie Long ditched social media

Josie Long’s stand-up career began at the age of 14 after her mother spotted her love of TV comedy and enrolled her in a class for grown-ups. Soon after, she was holding her own alongside veteran comics in the Big Smoke.

“I had a lot of freedom, so I’d go to London at the weekends as a teenager and do gigs. That was quite a cool, rare sort of experience, and I felt a bit like a spy when I would do a gig and be back at 1am and then be at school.”

She wasn’t yet 18 when she visited the Edinburgh Fringe for the first time, where she won the BBC new comedy award, joining a roster of alumni that includes The Mighty Boosh’s Julian Barratt, ventriloquist Nina Conti and seasoned oddball Paul Foot.

You might think that being a teen in the sticky carpet world of club gigs and late night festivals would be a daunting experience, but Long found it the opposite. “It was not, weirdly, because people were very sweet to me, and it was quite a small scene, and I just wasn’t aware what I was getting into. At the time I was less nervous than I am now. I was just so full of bravado at that point.”

You don’t grow up in the Greater London area without developing a bit of a thick hide, after all. “And also, me and my friends were sort of reprobates really, and we’d be going out to nightclubs and things like that too, so actually stand-up was very tame. It was just a gig. Not like trying to buy speed or anything.”

London has long been home to a flourishing comedy scene. Perhaps it’s because laughter thrives in grey, sunless climates. Proof: the world’s biggest comedy festivals are in Edinburgh (average temperature 9 degrees), Montreal (snowed in from November to March) and cold, dark Melbourne.

“You can’t say Melbourne is cold and dark, when it’s freezing over here,” Long protests. “That’s, like, rude. You have some of the best swimming pools on this entire earth, you know?”

But though Long has spent most of her life braving the hustle and grind of the UK capital, five years ago, she upped stumps and relocated to Glasgow. What, the south of England wasn’t wet and miserable enough?

“The weather is not great, but that’s what keeps Glasgow good. If the weather was good here, you wouldn’t be able to live here – it’d be too expensive.”

She’s loved the Scottish city for a long time, but it took forever to realise she wanted to take the relationship to the next level. “I’ve been making films here for about 15 years. Every time I came up, I’d be like, ‘What have these guys got that we haven’t? When I go to London, I feel really sad. I don’t know what that means.’ And I was like, ‘Maybe it means you wanna be here?’”

Long is truly, madly, deeply in love with her adopted city – “pathetic and fawning over this place” is how she puts it. “Glasgow’s got a beautiful sense of f---ing-about built into it. People are just very much on the wind-up. People are very friendly, and they’re also very funny, and it’s a cool culture for that. I really, really like it.”

She’s also a huge fan of Melbourne. While the UK “always feels like it’s in terminal decline”, she says, there’s a sense of wonder and growth down under. It was at the Melbourne Museum that the seed for her latest show first sprouted. “When I was in Australia in 2023 we saw the giant wombat skeleton in the museum, and it genuinely did blow my mind,” she says.

That encounter set Long and her two kids on an investigation into megafauna. “I didn’t even know about megafauna. I used to know about dinosaurs. But did I know about all of the shit after that? How much of it there was and how weird it was? And how the Australians were the kings of f---ing weird prehistoric animals? Even now, your animals are f---ing weird – and they’re the normal ones.”

It typically takes Long about six months to write a new show, but she gave herself a year and a half to craft this latest one. It’s appropriate, given that this early fascination with ancient creatures has expanded to become a broader exploration of time: “It’s about very long things and very short things. I’m using that as a way to talk about climate change and mass extinction, to talk about ageing and my own life, and to talk about how fast can feel and how slow can feel, and my children rapidly changing size and stuff.

“I had the idea that I wanted to write a show about these things more significantly. I want to talk about good things and small things and mundane things and massive things.”

Long-time fans of Long will be in familiar territory here. Her shows can be many things at once: childlike and starry-eyed, politically biting, silly and off-the-wall, direct and earnest. “Every time I write a new show, I think, ‘this is going to really change things. This one’s going to be nothing like any of the others. This one’s really going to be totally different’. Then you make it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s me again. Shit.’”

Me again is what Long’s followers are there for. The establishment is always up for more Josie Long, too: she’s been nominated for best show at Edinburgh three times, for a start. If there’s one through-line that connects all the work she has done since those early teen years, it’s a sense of unshakeable optimism when it comes to the human race and its potential for good. Her first solo show was titled Kindness & Exuberance, which pretty much sums up her mission statement.

And while her homeland might seem in terminal decline, pretty soon our interview takes a five-minute digression to discuss the surprise win of a Green candidate in Greater Manchester that day. “All the lefties like me have just spent the day celebrating, but we can’t believe it. This is the thing that I’ve always said: if people are given a positive offer, they want to accept it, you know?” she says.

Long is also pushing her own work into new areas. She’s now filming a show that messes with the format of comedy specials. “I’m filming it with no crowds. It’s in loads of different locations like a feature film. It’s like a comedy festival show, but it’s sort of really, really intimately to camera.”

Her recent focus on the long and the short of time’s passage has perhaps contributed to the decision to switch off the buzz of social media. “I’m 43, I don’t have time to waste. I want things slower and better and with more depth. I was quite online politically through Twitter or whatever, and you think: what of it has lasted? What of it is important?”

She thinks it’s healthy to be a bit of a “hermit of the mind” in that way, she says. “I can just withdraw from the discourse. You don’t need to know what the weather is to know what season it is. You don’t need to go out in the storm every day to know that it’s raining.”

Now Is the Time of Monsters is at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival from March 26. The Age is a festival partner.