Call it reinvention, or call it back to basics, but Sara Pascoe’s Edinburgh fringe return – after a couple of years writing and promoting her book Animal – marks a departure from the shows that made her name. Those were anthropology masquerading as comedy, and wore their erudition on their sleeve. This one, entitled LadsLadsLads, is more introspective and treads ground more familiar for standup, as it chronicles Pascoe’s efforts to be happily single after the breakup of a four-year relationship. It’s still whipsmart, though, and winningly funny, as Pascoe overthinks and overshares in the name of our entertainment.
She begins with the breakup, which reduced last Christmas to a tear-stained mess. The dumpee in question is fellow comic John Robins: the fact that his name is public knowledge makes Pascoe’s candour (their emotional and sex lives get laid pretty bare here) feel all the more edgy. From festive heartbreak, Pascoe then escapes to a yoga retreat in Costa Rica, where the emotional cracks are papered over (here at least, if not at the time) with prêt-à-porter gags about scary jungle noises and hormonal women.
Elsewhere on the fringe, the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby performs her Barry award-winning show about the limits of comedy, and the lies and omissions necessary to fashion humour from painful life experiences. At points in Pascoe’s show, I was reminded of that argument. Not because Pascoe is being dishonest: she’s always scrupulously open about the emotional significance of her material. But different shows, and different stories (about two years of unsuccessfully trying for a baby; about fancying her boyfriend more than he fancied her) keep peeping through her lighthearted narrative. It’s a jaunty show forever hinting at – then glossing over – its own subterranean turmoil.
Maybe the same mechanisms are at play that, off stage, persuaded Pascoe to keep fleeing the site of her discomfort. Here, she describes a solo trip to Paris on Valentine’s Day, where the city of love was revealed, sans lover, to be the city of nothing very exciting happening. But Pascoe is determined to defy the neurotic encouragement of friends who keep asking whether she’s met anyone yet. This is a show about embracing self-sufficiency after years of coupledom. “We’re not Twixes,” Pascoe insists, ever the anthropologist, “we’re Peperamis.”
Stylistically, it’s apparent that Pascoe is engaged in some kind of personal relaunch – not least because she’s wearing sequins and fishnets, which (as she cheerfully acknowledges) is a little off-brand. There’s material here, too, that dials down the erudition and makes a more populist pitch. One routine rails against theatre, music and art in general, which is all tedious and wilfully obscure, apparently – unlike the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin clarities of standup. In another, Pascoe describes herself as jealous of the deceased at funerals, because “I want all the attention in any room” – which rings more like a stock caricature of an egotistical comedian than a portrait of the Pascoe we’ve come to know over several nuanced standup shows.
It also jars with her on-stage mannerisms, which are all about gawkiness and anxiety rather than basking in the limelight. Even more so than usual – understandably – Pascoe’s reluctant body language suggests someone who’s had to steel herself to say this stuff in public, and is now pushing through against all her better instincts. I know some people find her Simon Amstell-ish levels of anxiety unrelaxing. But to me, there’s rich comedy to be found in this clash of awkwardness and stridency, of shooting her mouth off (her stout defence of incest, to give one example) and shrinking physicality.
There are also fine gags, and a sense of thorough thinking having led Pascoe to interesting places. I liked the line about her ex’s fear of public (and not just public) displays of affection, and there’s a choice routine about the chauvinist assumptions behind Channel 4’s programme First Dates. Another shaggy dog (in fact, cat) tale illustrates the dizzy heights to which her PMS can ascend, all in response to the criticism that her work is “too tamponny”. There’s a pleasingly bad-taste one-liner about why trying to conceive a child is just like learning a language.
Her concluding routine, about buying a deluxe vibrator that comes with its own app, ties together several of the show’s strands, and a final flurry of callbacks seeks, a bit too conspicuously, to tie up the others. It’s unnecessary: this may be a looser and less intellectual construction than Pascoe’s comedy lectures on pair bonding or Nietzschean philosophy. But it communicates a keen sense of a woman reborn, at an all-bets-are-off time of her life, luxuriating in her skills, enjoying her comedy. Tonight, she argues that standup is a craft, not an art, which not everyone will be persuaded by – not least because LadsLadsLads suggests it’s perfectly capable of being both.
- At the Pleasance Courtyard until 27 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000.
