There was louder buzz around Lou Sanders’ Edinburgh fringe hour this year than her work has ever previously generated – Shame Pig was voted best show by her fellow comedians. Not only is it a fine show, from a comic with just the right distance from, and closeness to, all the self-mortifying stories she’s got to tell. But it also addresses her alcoholism and newfound sobriety. Her previous work was talked about in terms of its wildness and lack of focus. Shame Pig, by contrast, is efficient and on point, a neat hour broaching the burden of shame – as opposed to embarrassment – that Sanders (and, she argues, many women) find themselves carrying through youth and early adulthood.
It’s no treatise, though, just an assertion on which to hang several tales of lurid social and sexual behaviour that can hardly fail to entertain a crowd. If you’re offering to a comedy audience a story about a hot date who starts unexpectedly licking your arsehole, the quality of your jokes is neither here nor there. Happily, Sanders has the gags to back up the eyebrow-raising anecdotage – if not always the delivery to get the best out of them.
She’s terrific company, feigning high self-regard (“In case you didn’t realise, I’m quite spiritual”) while joyfully sharing our dismay at her indiscretions. But sometimes, the bustle and nervous laughter short-changes some good punchlines. Elsewhere, those punchlines are underscored by DIY musical jingles and stings, to droll effect.
What might easily slip down as a lovable, silly show about outrageous social faux pas is given heft by allusions to Sanders’ rocky early years. We hear – but only glancingly – about a handful of alarming childhood incidents, and about drunken sex without consent. Other comics (and maybe Sanders too, one day) might make this the big-hitting matter of their whole show. Here, it’s a bass note, reminding us that (pace Hannah Gadsby) just because Sanders is laughing at her routines about slut-shaming, biting people and craniosacral therapy doesn’t mean they’re only funny. But funny, they certainly are.
At Soho theatre, London, 25-28 February.
