‘Give me a shout if you’re here on a girls’ night out!” There’s no point pretending I’m the target audience for “comedimum” Sophie McCartney’s standup – although I went along (and cowered behind) a chaperone squarely in that bracket. McCartney has made a big splash, online and on stage, charting the millennial woman’s journey from mindless nights on Mad Dog 2020 to motherhood and beyond. There may be something ruthless about her zeroing in on the generic at the expense of anything remotely particular. But there’s a skill even to this brand of crowd-tickling observational comedy, and the Liverpudlian has it in spades.
We’re firmly in the familiar standup territory of (in McCartney’s words) “too old to be young, too young to be old”. It’s all nostalgia for her generation’s wild youth, and alarm at the inadequacy of their successors. (“We wouldn’t have gone out in trainers in the noughties, would we?!”) McCartney presents herself as a superficial twentysomething trapped in a mum’s body, dispensing reckless sex education to her 12-year-old son, and embarrassing herself on a middle-aged “girls’ trip” to Magaluf.
Little in that latter anecdote is convincing; rare is the ring of specific truth. I’m inclined to agree when at one point McCartney says, “I feel like I should have something profound to say” about her stage in life. But if profundity is in short supply, at least, in this celebration of received thinking about randy husbands and women regretting their wrinkles, she makes the familiar shine. One routine about squirting during orgasms (“like a highly pressurised Calpol syringe” – nice) devolves into a gossip with audience members deftly orchestrated by our host for maximum mirth. Another witheringly dismantles the idea that a kick in the testicles is as painful as childbirth. If youarehere on a girls night out, you won’t be disappointed.
At Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury, tonight; then touring