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Sydney Morning Herald

‘You're kind of squabbling': The work-life balance when mum and dad are comedians

They're a busy pair. Raskopoulos – who stars in the Australian version of The Office – has built a huge cult following with his award-winning solo stage work as well as improvised Bear Pack shows with Thank God You're Here regular Carlo Ritchie, which they are performing as part of the Sydney Comedy Festival. Meanwhile, Pascoe is an author, a regular on TV and radio panel shows in the UK, has also starred in and written sitcoms and can be seen in Prime's recently released Last One Laughing UK. How do they juggle it all? 'The diary is the most precious thing in the world, and you're kind of squabbling over time, and whoever gets there first – doesn't matter what the thing pays or how big it is, you know – they have first dibs,' Pascoe says. 'We both have suffered a couple of times with disappointment, but you just have to sort of take a big deep breath and go, 'This is what every single parent in the world is doing'.' Pascoe had no plans for marriage before crossing paths with Raskopoulos. She was on a post-break-up dating hiatus when they met at the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2015, although they did not get together until he moved to London a few years later. Then came their 2020 wedding and IVF – amid the turbulence of the COVID pandemic – that produced two children. Little wonder Pascoe's show I Am a Strange Gloop, at the Enmore Theatre on Saturday, reflects on her life journey over the past few years. 'When I was having to think of a title for the show, I was thinking a lot about where 'myself' was because I had just been completely destroyed by three years of sleeplessness and other people's bodily fluids,' Pascoe says. It is also riffing on US cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop, which examines the sense of self. Her interest in sex and evolutionary biology formed during high school psychology classes, then fully blossomed when she gave up her day job to try comedy almost 20 years ago and realised she had a lot of time on her hands. 'And I remember thinking, number one, use your time well, and number two, have interesting things to talk about on stage. It's very easy with stand-up to slip into those two-dimensional views of things … researching into evolution and things, I just felt like it kept me interested and interested a lot of my audience as well,' Pascoe says. Loading That interest spawned two books about those subjects: Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body (2016) and Sex Power Money (2019). Her 2023 novel Weirdo and 2020 sitcom Out of Her Mind, which she wrote and starred in, canvassed similar issues, but she may be a little bit ahead of her audience with the title of her new show – nobody gets the Hofstadter reference. 'Now I'm gonna have to start putting out reading lists before I tour,' she says.