Review: Sara Pascoe, The Lantern

Sara Pascoe is certainly at home on a stage with a mic in her hand. She has that special ability (the gold-plated calling card of successful stand-ups) of making you feel like you’ve just swung by her place for a cuppa and she’s chatting away to you, her mate, about whatever pops into her head.

A lot does pop into her head, and by god, she can chat for England about it. Her material is intelligent, left-field and amusing, a bit ‘feminist-lite’ for 30-somethings, in the same popular vein as Caitlin Moran – or so it seems to an old first-wave fem like me. Talking about hand-jobs, blow-jobs, online porn, body hair and blokes’ wobbly bits seems almost cosy nowadays – although Sara is not out to shock in her attempt to make sense of the vagaries of the modern world, more to make her core audience think.

Her earthiness and authenticity are what make her different and special, and what allows her to talk about things that wouldn’t work if delivered with any cynicism by someone playing just for laughs. Like the sketch about the annoying bloke seeking yet another selfie with a stand-up, who scrolls through the prize cache of snaps on his phone, slipping in a couple of his erect penis for effect. She manages to make the fact that he’s wheelchair-bound almost a passing detail: “If he hadn’t been in a wheelchair, I would have put him in one.”

As with any female stand-up, the fact that Pascoe’s not a man is already unusual and seems to invite more expectation and curiosity as to how she is going to play her material and what extra risks she’s going to take. As a woman in an overwhelmingly male genre, she has to come in through the window rather than the door, with a fresh perspective.

She does all this and more, managing to surprise and disarm – and to cover real issues – in an almost genderless way. She’s not girlie, but she also doesn’t suffer from vanity on stage, though she has self-like. And because she likes herself, we find her eminently likeable too and want to be in her presence. 

New show Animal draws much of its material from her new and eponymous “autobiography of the female body” (on sale in the foyer), though her stand-up set is less about obvious feminist issues and more about philosophical self-questioning: what does it mean to be a good person, what is empathy, and how do we attempt to understand each other in such a confusing and fast-changing world?

Pascoe is not averse to putting herself on the spot in examining those questions either, particularly her younger self: there are nice stories about her relationship with her current partner (with her shaving all her body hair off in the bath and not cleaning it afterwards as a protest statement), as well as recognisable ones about being out of control and at risk on drugs and booze as a teenager.

Sara Pascoe clearly has a passion, a thoughtful angle and plenty to say: all things that have helped her to rise out of the small comedy circuit of rooms above pubs, to breaking through at Edinburgh in 2010, to TV exposure guesting on such things as Have I Got News For You, Buzzcocks, Girl Friday and a spot on Live at the Apollo.

She’s also working her socks off on this current (sell-out) tour, with dates almost every night for weeks. Stand-ups can have notoriously brief careers – but Pascoe is good, and given time, she’ll get even better. Maybe she’ll even be great.

Sara Pascoe played The Lantern on Tuesday, June 14. Her next Bristol date is on Sunday, July 3 during Bristol Comedy Garden. For more info, visit www.bristolcomedygarden.co.uk/line-up/apple-top/sunday-mid