Josie Long: All of the Planet's Wonders (Shown in Detail)

I’ve been an admirer of Josie Long’s comedy for some time. She provides a real challenge to the laziness and negativity of much of modern stand-up, achieving humour and pathos simply by letting us share in some of her more unusual ideas, interests and quirks.

But there’s always been a danger that Long’s enthusiasm for letting audiences in on her every waking thought could become a tad self-indulgent. In this early performance of her third Edinburgh show, which strives to marry big concerns like astronomy with small ones, like ornamental plastic frogs, this danger comes very much to the fore.

In the best moments, Long manages to squeeze good belly laughs out of her unlikely subject matter. A simple sketch that sees Hieronymous Bosch describing his bizarre ideas for paintings to a horrified friend at church, hits the mark exactly. But by her own admission she hasn’t yet found punchlines for much of the more intellectual material. Her girlish charm is just enough to buoy up the audience’s goodwill during the weakest patches, but even so one begins to question her motivation for telling us some of this stuff: is it to make us laugh, or simply to prove to us that she’s clever, inquisitive and well read?

At the end of the show, Long attempts to create a spectacular finale with fairy lights held up by members of the audience, then observes that it actually only works from her own perspective. Judging by this set, she needs to be wary of her comedy going the same way.