Josie Long: Be Honourable!

After her break from the Fringe last year, Josie Long is back, telling tales about how she managed to pad out a year where the Fringe is usually her annual highlight.

With a target audience of Flickr-happy, Etsy-shopping, Facebooking and tweeting students, Long seems aware that she is vulnerable to being pigeonholed. At one point, her almost aggressively nice stance wanders into the realm of politics, and the Tories get a tongue-lashing. Commendable though her sudden passion for politics is, you can't help but suspect Long does this because being liberal is being nice, and to flex her topicality muscles, rather than the material having any natural place in her repertoire.

Long is at her best when commenting on the absurdities of everyday life, yet sometimes this feels like all her act consists of – mere yaying and booing at the world. At these times it is her good cheer alone which carries the material, papering over the lack of technical humour to her anecdotes. Not that this is necessarily bad – the effect is a bit like listening to the happy ramblings of a dotty aunt. But for those who crave a kick to their comedy, Long's chirpy demeanour will soon begin to grate.

Her message of “doing nice things” is hard to argue with, but her use of homemade props and hand-drawn booklets makes the whole thing a little bit twee. If you want the harder stuff, look elsewhere; but for the comedy equivalent of a warm bowl of porridge, look no further.