I get the feeling that no matter what your personal beliefs are, you’ll find something in Sara Pascoe’s comedy that makes you feel like she’s speaking directly to you. That’s especially true if you’re in your 30s and finding that balance between freedom and responsibility, and super-especially true if you lean to the left politically. One of her current bits involves her plans for if she ever became Prime Minister of the UK: she’d take the defence budget and give it to nurses instead to make them instantly ‘Sultan of Brunei-rich.” Her show veers from broad political statements to deeply personal ones to pop-cultural references. The show is called Animal and there’s a general theme about humans forgetting the fact that we’re mammals, but Pascoe drifts in and out of this premise when the arc of the show dictates, veering off into human traits like morality and empathy with occasional links back to the animal world (mice get a particularly memorable mention).
Many of Pascoe’s observations have a feminist angle – the authenticity of Ru Paul’s Drag Race (where the drag queen stars of the show have more confidence than women); the way porn has subverted male sexuality in the same manner that streetlights have messed with the mating signals of glow-worms; her own awkwardness with sending sexual signals to her partner; delivered in a way that is equally relatable whether her observations and ideas fit with your personal experience or not. (Okay, a few UK-centric references might have interrupted the flow a little bit, but not as much as the sound of Hare Krishnas singing and drumming outside the venue, which cut into the performance several times but was expertly weaved into the show on the fly).
The structure of the show itself is genius, with a fun lights-down setup that draws you in, then a series of detours that take you through various corners of Pascoe’s mind, satisfying callbacks and an even more satisfying, hilarious conclusion made all the more funny by its perfectly curated Taylor Swift Shake It Off soundtrack. It’s all delivered in a casual yet confessional tone which is so familiar that you almost feel like butting in and saying, ‘Oh me too, I just never thought to put it that way before.’ At 60 minutes this show concludes neatly and with a real sense of completion, yet you’ll feel you wish it went on for another 30, in that ‘let’s order another coffee and keep chatting’ kind of way.
BY PETER HODGSON
