Before Christmas, Sara Pascoe had never played ‘Articulate’, so she was thrown when her sister tried to describe Stonehenge as “loads of weetabix piled on top of each other”. Despite her (justifiable) confusion at her sister’s thought process, she says this is the best thing about the game; "it’s very expanding in terms of what goes on in people’s minds"; what seems like a whimsical weetabix-based description is actually a window into her sister’s soul. This enthusiastic curiosity into the surreal workings of others’ minds carries over from board game tactics into her comedic style. Pascoe challenges things with casual efficacy, balancing insight with self-deprecation and a goofy composure. She is not an embittered comic, raging at the world, but a playful partaker affectionately deconstructing its flaws.

Where her previous shows have tackled animal rights, women in the media, and Nietzschean subjectivity, Sara Pascoe Vs History offers a more personal tone. The show challenges the idea that monogamy is a natural state for humans and that female sexuality is passive. The central theme of relationships is explored through the varied lenses of sperm competition theory, her own relationship with fellow comedian John Robbins, and various tangential musings. Performing the show at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe (“exam time for comedians”), Pascoe enjoyed a wildly successful run and earned her first nomination for the Fosters Edinburgh Comedy Award. The key to her success is not easily explained, “there are certain rules” she says, “but when they’re broken, that’s when the funniest things happen”. This interaction conjures up a specific image for her: “if you want to break comedy down to anything, I’d say it’s rhythm, it’s music”. Her sonorous and cadenced form of comedy entails “setting ingredients up at the beginning – there are then notes and riffs that come back concurrently in different patterns, and it’s that [rhythm] that’s satisfying”.

Alongside the success of her live shows, Pascoe has become a popular guest on panel shows like Mock the Week and Never Mind the Buzzcocks. She says that her aim when appearing on these shows was to break the mould of victimisation and sardonic lampooning which they have become known for. While she is aware of the old adage, ‘All comedy has a victim’, that victim needn’t be another person. It could be group, a presumption or a convention. Then there’s always self-deprecation. According to the Pascoe rulebook, comedians should always be hoisting themselves with their own petards, “you can make really joyful things talking about your own failures”, juxtaposing your critical grand narratives with more honest personal shortcomings. To best convey this sentiment she quotes Robin Williams, who spoke of “the comedian who recognizes hypocrisy everywhere, but most of all in himself”.

I ask how this relates to another favourite quote of hers, Kurt Vonnegut’s “the function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before”. This could almost be her mantra – if she can’t make the world a better place, at least she can improve the panel shows. Fulfilling this aim, she stresses, is not a case of avoiding dark topics, in fact “something can be dark and entertaining – really dark actually – but still not make the world a worse place… the feeling afterwards can be energizing, or cathartic”. It’s also important to note that Vonnegut’s idea does not imply that artists must change the world – they should make people appreciate and engage with it. While Pascoe praises fellow comedians Josie Long and Bridget Christie for their ability to inspire political engagement by finding comedy in such macabre topics as female genital mutilation and rape-blame, she is keen to specify that “comedy is reflective of social change rather than instigating it”. Long and Christie’s sets are hilarious, but rather than changing the way society works, they are challenging, deconstructing and reflecting on it.

It is important to remember this, she notes, because if we mistake comedy as an active force for change it can become a lubricant to stasis. Since laughter is cathartic, comedy “doesn’t agitate people to do anything or change anything”. People laugh, and they forget. Every joke ends with a punchline, which creates and then releases tension, for us to be jolted into doing something, that tension needs to remain in us. In this sense, comedy can be deployed like a sedative. Pascoe points to the satire boom under Thatcher – a celebrated era of politically charged comedy – as an example of polemic comedy becoming an inert substitute for actual change; a kind of entertainment-opiate that fosters social inertia. Pascoe argues that the satirists of the late 20th Century failed to shame society into improvement. Satire for them was a quick fix of victimising the state, followed by laughter and applause, and (contentiously) money. As Pascoe points out, “The people who had the mouthpieces, who did the most satirising, were people who were being rewarded by the system”.

Yet that is not to say Pascoe believes comedians have a political obligation. Asked about the contentious notion that female comedians have a ‘responsibility’ to feminism, Pascoe responds, “I don’t think comedians have any responsibility”. It’s very important that “comedy has no censorship”, and responsibility is a step towards censorship. As soon as you start outlining what you can’t say and what you must say, you are limiting yourself by obligation, and being inauthentic. With regards to Pascoe’s own feminism, she explains that it comes from a very natural place. Because she’s explicitly feminist as a person, and standup is very authored, it naturally follows that her material becomes implicitly feminist.

One could say that feminist comedy has become vogue to the point of ‘hack’, as Pascoe observes, “everyone in Edinburgh has got a feminist bit”, but as she suggests, feminist comedy is simply reflective of a wider feminist zeitgeist. For most comics, the feminist movement in comedy didn’t necessarily start with an agenda to explore the politics of gender, but more with the highly ridiculous, absurd, and therefore comic nature of many events concerning feminism of late. “What happened with Kim Kardashian’s bottom a couple of moths ago was really funny” she laughs, “the fact that page 3 exists, is so funny”. As Pascoe points out, it is bizarre that Britain is the only country that publishes pictures of naked ladies in its newspapers. Its absurdity has become widely recognised, perhaps as a result of a paradigm shift towards a more feminist society, which in turn is being reflected in the comic material that society generates. Pascoe suggests "when there’s an ideas shift, it suddenly seems more ridiculous… page 3 didn’t seem ridiculous in the 70s, it just seems ridiculous now."

I ask whether being a female comedian is inherently feminist – you have a voice, the ability to personally influence the portrayal of female stereotypes in the media, and the ability to inspire women to connect with their own sense of humour (undoing years of cultural conditioning). Pascoe agrees that this is very astute (I thank her). People are hyperaware of gender in the comedy world: "I felt like I was a person before I did comedy, I didn’t feel entirely connected to my gender… there is something odd in that every time you go to work someone reminds you that you’re a woman." On stage, Pascoe identifies as a comic first, and a woman second. Part of the trick of being a female comedian is not to acknowledge it, to keep it implicit. She learnt very early on, "don’t say you’re a woman" – as soon as you tell your first joke, you’re fine. You shouldn’t feel that you have to play off the audience’s prejudice – just be funny.

Unfortunately, regardless of how female comedians present themselves, a problem persists in the way many male comedians present women, as victims of jokes; “If a man has been talking about how funny vaginas are for 20 minutes, and then you go on, there’s an embarrassment”. Luckily this doesn’t translate into Pascoe’s performance; she is always confident and self-assured, it seems as though any embarrassment is left in the wings. Pascoe does believe that problems of this type are slowly declining in comedy. We are exposed to comics from various backgrounds, and audiences are increasingly responsive to marginalized groups. Comics no longer have to come on and say “this is my race, this is my sexuality”, they can just talk about their experience, as a person, and that is cathartic.