Comedy / Reviews
Review: Sara Pascoe, The Lantern
A lot of people have sweeping and fairly negative views of female comedians, ranging from “they’re just not funny” to “they only do jokes about women’s issues”.
Now before you start writing Fierce E-mails in Capital Letters, consider this idea: maybe the reason so many female comedians are disappointing is not because they’re female, and not because they’re talking about periods, but simply because there are an awful lot of poor comedians out there, and some of them are bound to be women.
The fact that some female comedians tell poor jokes about ‘lady topics’ may obscure the fact that the problem is not the subject matter or the gender of the performer, but the quality of the material and the performance. Bad comedy is bad comedy: the only difference is that with a male comedian you can’t blame it on the gags about front bottoms.
The empirical evidence lies in Sara Pascoe. She is female, she does talk about periods – and lots of other ‘feminine’ topics – and she is very, very funny. Her set blends deadpan observational humour from the life of a borderline neurotic with the current trend of ‘comedy you can learn from’, meaning that the laughs are punctuated with informative yet accessible wanders through the realms of anthropology, biology and psychoanalysis. If there is anything to complain about, it is that many in the audience clearly recognise some of the material: Pascoe needs to drop the routines that she’s already done on the telly.
The Lantern – which older readers will remember as the bar of the Colston Hall before it grew its gold-encrusted extension – is a decent comedy venue, still small enough to offer the required intimacy. Sara Pascoe’s talent for intelligent stand-up and her growing profile sadly means that the next time she’s in town, she will probably have progressed to the cavernous space of the main Hall. But then success has to have its downsides.
Sara Pascoe was at The Lantern, Colston Hall on Thursday 13 November.
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