Lauren Pattison had two ambitions for 2020: get engaged, and take a comedy show on tour. By the summer, she’d lost her relationship and her career, fled London, and was working the tills at Morrison’s in her home town of Newcastle. It Is What It Is tells the story of her two-year fall and subsequent rise. Dogged, upbeat and motormouthed, it’s both an endearing tale of the 28-year-old’s resilience and a document of the damage (existential and financial) wrought on comedians by Covid.
Particularly working-class comedians: Pattison’s class status is front and centre here. There’s a choice gag about nepotism (no friend to her comedy career) getting her a cushy supermarket job, and a conspicuous emphasis on the relative poshness of her successive boyfriends. Class figures too in her matter-of-factness when justifying her new line of work mid-pandemic. “I’m not brave,” Pattison tells aghast fellow comics, “I’m unemployed.”
Just as Pattison’s background has made her feel out of sorts in the arts, so too in London – a section of the show deals with her difficulty fitting in throughout four years in the capital. One story of anti-northern prejudice follows another – but Pattison rallies, moves back home, and stays put. A new man comes into her life, his affections for Pattison assessed against those of her pet dog, and gets the thumbs up.
The “putting myself first” principles illustrated by this upwards emotional trajectory are a bit oversold. The story steamrollers forward, meanwhile, with minimal pause for audience engagement or spontaneity – partly a function of our host’s anxiety, which militates (she tells us) against eye contact with the front few rows. Fair enough – but it’s the kind of show, with its eminently relatable material, that might benefit from a degree more openness and conversational spirit.
But the story Pattison tells is always compelling: a bona fide journey through adversity with very low lows (a particularly cruel breakup included), a redemptive arc and some hard-won wisdom about the contingency of happy-ever-afters. It’s a cathartic tale, finally, of a comic bowed but not beaten by Covid (and the rest) – to which this week’s Edinburgh comedy award nomination adds another sunlit coda.
At Monkey Barrel Comedy, Edinburgh, until 28 August.
