Josie Long – All of the Planet’s Wonders (Shown in Detail)

Josie Long’s effervescent cheeriness and excitement at all this world has to offer turns geeky, untouched topics in comedy goldmines. After her own voice-over intro, Long’s promptly on stage and explaining the nature of the show developing, likening it to a log-flume ride. The analogy is funny, but ends up not being needed, as the hour flows organically.

She starts with a local news show from touring, in fascinating detail. She jumps to Hieronymus Bosch and the religious Dutch background of his risky art. Back to the news show, which introduces a home-made museum, under up-turned fish-tanks, unseen by anyone but the creator until then, and from there, to a diagram of Long’s “relationship with books.”

This leaps to the teachings of John Locke, and him on Deal or No Deal. She’s a woman on a mission to grasp all The Enlightenment has to offer – and to share it around. Her fact quest includes the same bar graph, this time representing restaurants, and loving hearing other people’s experiences. There’s a party fun graph, a random scatter graph, and more. She talks about school science, her dad in the Scouts, and her favourite wall-charts (normally from the Guardian.)

To the excitable Long, apple stickers hold a world of possibilities, while the plasticised exhibition of the human form is evil itself. Suddenly, it’s on to her childhood frog collection. Frog mascots lead to wrong mascot choices, to, somehow, the Pitt Rivers Museum of anthropology in Oxford, a collection formed by “stealing from the whole world.”

Another board displays her own global stealing – of promotional pens, and then we hear the disappointment that General Pitt Rivers didn’t do his own stealing. So to compete, she announces her own collection of “Edinburgh Ephemera.” The audience can send things in – their own, or stolen – as long as they meet the Pitt Rivers criteria of meticulous hand-labelling.

Long’s still excited by the mysterious stories behind the exhibits in their glass cases, and by the stars, and Galileo’s religious and scientific beliefs, and disappears on a random tangent of camping with him in Canada. She explores a mystery that happened to her, and the excitement of what’s still to learn.

With tales of the Dulwich Meteor shower, she then has audience members display constellations, which she seems to suddenly realise can’t be seen except by her, but somehow, it’s got a joyous Josie Long quality that stops that mattering.

She ends back at the frog collection, and how they’re worthless, but evocative and hold lots of stories. So she mirrors the very start, placing over it all, one fish-tank.

There’s such an exuberance and joy in Josie Long’s performance, it’s hard not to feel the same, as she finds comedy in museums, the stars, and small frog knick-knacks. With handwritten photocopied programmes as you arrive, and all the feeling of scattiness, this show could seem disorganised, even amateur, but it never does. It’s a genuine celebration of life, learning, and of All of the Planet’s Wonders.