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.”
