Josie Long: ‘Everyone expects me to talk about politics’

'This is definitely the most personal show I've written," says Josie Long. She's known as a comedian, activist, cartoonist and film-maker, given to wittily dissecting the world of politics. But when she got her heart broken, she wrote a stand-up show all about it, Cara Josephine, in which for she talks frankly about relationships and family and sex.

“Everyone expects me to talk about politics,” she says, then pauses. “Okay, not everyone. It’s more like three people. Three people are expecting me to talk about politics. I thought, I’ll show them by not talking about it,” she says, laughing. “What I feel I want to talk about has opened up. As I got older and that bit more confident with my voice, I felt I had more things to say.”

Long, who is now 32, began her stand-up career at 14, but she dates her comedic creativity to an earlier point. “When I was about 12 or 13, me and my friends made fanzines for bands but then really went towards making funny, silly comedy things and collages and stuff like that.”

She has always been a fan of punk- influenced DIY culture, she says. She is hugely influenced by self-sufficient, independent folk musicians such as Jeffrey Lewis. "One of the things that's so inspiring about what Jeffrey Lewis does is that, whenever he goes to a place, he loves meeting the people who are creative in that place. It just seems to be a way to have a wonderful, interesting life."

I tell her that when I was a musician I toured with Lewis, and he asked from a stage in Galway if anyone could put us up for the night. “That’s awesome,” she says. “I love that he does that. He’s definitely influenced my way of touring.”

Long's comedy influences include Lee and Herring, the Mary Whitehouse Experience and Monty Python. "I was lucky because I did feel there was this big range [of what comedy] could be and it could be really fun and stupid or really serious and political. I was just so obsessive. I ate up whatever I could find."

‘A boring, blokish, clubby thing’

She always identified with the alternative margins of comedy, she says. “It felt really rebellious, like we were striking out on a limb. It really did feel like we were carving a niche against this really boring, blokish, clubby thing.”

She says that politics was always there in some fashion. “I would have felt that all the shows that I was writing were political. For me, DIY culture is political. Talking about lifelong learning and creativity, I saw that as political, because it’s about living your life in a more creative and challenging way. Any sort of creative addition to your life: I see that as quite rebellious and quite defiant in a lot of ways.”

And then the 2010 British general election came along. “I’d done this gig where I was talking about how I didn’t want the Conservatives getting in,” she says. “It was really crap. It was me saying, ‘Voting Conservative is for old people and c***s’, or something and loads of people were like [she feigns a posh accent], ‘Oooh, I just think you need to give them a chance’. I thought it was this radical arty neighbourhood and they looked arty to me, and for me a basic tenet of being artistic is being political and anti-conservative and stuff like that. It really sort of f***ed with my head. It meant I wanted to be more expressive politically and set my stall out more.”

She had been fooling herself, she says. “I thought I was this brilliant socialist in my head and actually I was super complacent.”

She spoke out more in her set, became involved with anti-cutbacks organisation UK Uncut and established the charity Arts Emergency with Neil Griffiths. This is an organisation that supports and mentors marginalised young people who want to pursue careers in the arts. Its alternative old boys network includes Neil Gaiman and Jake and Dinos Chapman.

“It’s about giving privilege to people without privilege and encouraging people who don’t have support . . . to pursue the life they really, really want,” says Long. “It’s about [helping them to] do what they love as opposed to compromising before they begin because they don’t have any connections or they’re frightened or they have to put financial considerations above everything else.”

She believes these kids need to be told, “You’re incredibly talented and intelligent and you deserve to have a good life just as much as your privileged counterpart. In fact, to be honest, you probably deserve it more than they do.”

Did she have that support herself? “It’s kind of a really interesting situation, because my mum in particular has always been so, so supportive and encouraging of me doing creative things, but in a lot of ways my background was quite difficult. It’s really hard to discuss but I would say I had . . .” She pauses. “Quite an unconventional background.”

‘I wouldn’t want to be rude’

She doesn’t want to go into too much detail about people she loves in case she hurts anyone’s feelings. This must be difficult when it comes to dealing with her personal life in the show. “Yes,” she says. “It’s hard to talk about things that have upset me and had a really big impact on my life but are inter-related with other people who have a different perspective on it. I wouldn’t want to get up on stage and be rude about people who tried their best to be loving and kind to me. What’s funny is that I find it easier to talk on stage than to talk to the people involved. It’s pretty f***ed-up.”

So why did she choose such personal material this time around? “You want to kind of tell your side of a story,” she says, “but you don’t ever want to upset somebody you love. Even with my ex-boyfriend, I want to talk about how upset I was and how bad a relationship it was, but I hate the idea he’d think I was slagging him off. Though it would be quite funny if he came, because we could talk about it while I was onstage.”

She has branched into film-making with the director Doug King, and she enthuses about the new possibilities for comedy afforded by podcasts and a proliferation of interesting indie clubs. As we speak, for example, she’s preparing a bunch of jokes based on the investigative journalism of Martin Williams for a comedy night called Investigations. “[Stand-up comedy] does feel a lot more pluralistic and interesting now,” she says. “It feels more and more diverse every single year in terms of what people are doing with the genre. The genre is so new. You couldn’t argue that it’s more than 60 years old, so who knows where it’s going to go?”

How have audiences responded to her new, more personal material? “People do respond kindly,” she says. “With political stuff it’s much more likely I’d annoy people.” Then she laughs. “On the flipside, if people don’t like this show it’s much more painful because it’s like, ‘What are you talking about? This is my heart.’ ”

Josie Long is at the Workman’s Club, Dublin, on February 13th