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Josie Long’s eager, youthful enthusiasm greets you loud and clear when you enter her comedy festival offering. Mingling with the audience, she pops up excitedly to personally hand out hand-drawn programs, what she calls “the official magazine that goes with the show.” She’s honestly excited at the large size of her crowd and jumps around like a school girl who has had too much red cordial.

There is something endearing about both this and the title of her show, Trying Is Good. She describes it as a show about effort - people making the effort to get beyond their physical weaknesses and turn them into personal strengths. She relates this to her own struggles with her weight, her parents’ divorce and her nerdish enthusiasm for things like fancy dress, puzzles and gags. With not an ounce of make up, and in jeans and a t-shirt, the flashiest thing about her is the colourful scene of an island and mermaid that she has drawn in magic markers on her wobbly belly. She shows it off with much pride and, via slides, shares different artworks done on the same fleshy canvas.  It’s a brave and slightly strange thing to do, but aptly sums up the ethos of Long.

If anything, the show is homage to the oddball and the eccentricities of the common person. Long revels in people’s bizarre tendencies and the effort and love they put into their beliefs. She admires the reclusive man at her gym that dresses straight out of the Soviet 1960s and rarely does any actual exercise but fancies himself an elite athlete and the woman who keeps alive her dead husband’s wheat-free bread bakery in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. She dishes out long-winded stories and some slides to recreate these individuals for us…and there is indeed something fascinating about their unrelenting desire to just do their own thing.

In a sea of comedy, much of which tows a fairly mainstream and not particularly enlightening line, Long is a breath of fresh air. Some may find her manic nature a tad contrived, but, personally, I loved her down-to-earth presentation and her celebration of the geek in all of us.


Melbourne International Comedy Festival presents
Trying Is Good
Josie Long

Venue: Melbourne Town Hall | Cnr Swanston & Collins Sts, Melbourne
Dates: 20th Mar - 13th Apr
Times: Tue-Sat 8.30pm, Sun 7.30pm
Duration: 60 minutes
Tickets: Full Wed, Thu & Sun $25.50, Conc $22 (N/A Sat), Tightarse Tuesday $22, Full Fri & Sat $27
Bookings: Ticketmaster 1300 660 013 & at the door