My favourite Sara Pascoe joke is her imaginary riposte to people asking if she’s going to have kids. They mean well, these prying parents – they just don’t want her to miss out on a life-enhancing experience. The thing is, the comedian has had some life-enhancing experiences of her own. “But I have never, ever said to anybody: ‘Oh, have you been on QI? Ahhh, you should go on QI!’” she insists, settling into her archly patronising pep talk. “No I didn’t think I wanted to be on QI until I was on QI, and then it was like I looked back and my entire life had been leading up to me being on QI. Yes it’s very tiring being on QI, but it’s so worth it. I just wouldn’t want you to leave it too late and they’ll have stopped making it!”
As a skewering of smug, insensitive acquaintances foisting their own ideas of fulfilment on a child-free woman in her 30s, it’s a gratifyingly clever joke. In reality, however, Pascoe wasn’t laughing. During the period she was doing that routine on stage, she was actually “quite sad about not being able to have children”, she says over coffee in a north London cafe near her home. She’d long suspected she had fertility issues after unsuccessfully trying for a baby with an ex-boyfriend.
