FRESH off a sellout Edinburgh Fringe run, Josie Long, one of Britain’s best-known comedians and the first woman to be nominated three times for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival Comedy Awards, is taking her tour, Now is the Time of Monsters across the country. Having seen Long’s show this year, I was impressed by the wide range of topics and tones she brought to the performance.

“I’ve been doing stand-up quite a long time now,” she says, “and I think it's a case of you want to be able to approach it with every part of who you are, and everything that's important to you. When I'm doing a show, I want it to represent things that are personal, silly, intellectual, imaginative as well, and the dream for it is to try and kind of bring in all those things and balance them with one another.”

It’s an expansive show, that somehow manages to take in eons of human history while feeling very down to earth.

“I just knew I wanted to write something about prehistoric extinct charismatic megafauna; giant mammals, strange, big animals that lived often alongside human beings like us. And then in the process of writing this, it became a way to kind of talk about all kinds of aspects of the dread and the chaos of living in this current moment. But it’s also about parenting, and thinking about what world am I showing my children, building for them, and what world are they going to inherit.”

Long herself was a child when she started stand-up at the age of 14 and has seen the comedy scene change over the years.

“It’s been horrible to see that there are right-wing grifter comedians now, and far-right sexists and transphobes. But at the same time it’s great when I see many younger comedians coming on stage, and the baseline of their ethos is that there should be no billionaires, or that capitalism is despicable. If someone had said to me 15 years ago, we’d have so many comedians like that I wouldn’t have believed them.”

This sense of a heightened tension between creeping fascism and growing resistance forms an atmospheric backdrop to Long’s new show, which is based on the famous Antonio Gramsci quote “Now is the Time of Monsters.” But there’s also a deep sense of hope in Long’s performances.

“That sense of revolutionary optimism, even if it’s done out of spite, even if it’s done just projecting a beam into the darkness. It's so incredibly important.”

Long recounts her friendship with Glaswegian communist poet Henry Bell: “Whenever I go to him with a pessimism of ‘I don't know how it's gonna work,’ he’ll be like: ‘We're gonna win, comrade’.”

So what is the role of comedy in revolution? For Long, comedy is a “strange, diffuse” thing, something whose effects we might not realise until far into the future. But there’s also a sense of community, of letting people know that others might feel the same as them, and of “what I genuinely can do that will have positive effects for people in the crowd.”

But despite her thoughtful takes on modern politics and socialist revolution, Long’s shows are at heart places for laughter and the places it takes us.

“Comedy is a wonderful, joyful, silly thing. And I suppose that’s revolutionary as well, to have these collective experiences that are just about the soul, and just mucking around. Comedy feels like playtime for me, pure playtime.”

Josie Long: Now Is The Time Of Monsters is on tour throughout Britain and Ireland until December 13. For more information see josielong.com.