Sascha LO started performing stand-up when she was 16. Now 22, the award-nominated comedian speaks to Kate Bowie about her journey.
Even before I can ask Sascha LO my first question, she says she’s comedy-obsessed. “I’ve got a thousand voice notes of me performing, to listen back to and torture myself. It helps me know what went well and what went terribly,” she explains.
Her interest in the form began nearly a decade ago when she watched an appearance of comedian Daniel Sloss on YouTube. “He was 17 or 18 at the time, and I thought that was insane,” Sascha adds.
Inspired, she began going for shows at the Angel Comedy Club in Islington. When she learned Sloss was performing in London, she desperately wanted to go for the live show, but there was one problem. “I was 13, and the age limit for his show was 16, so I dressed like a 45-year-old mum so we could get in,” she says. “And then my friend wore a Snoopy T-shirt and I was like ‘You’ve f***ed us! We’re never going to get in.”
Luckily for them, the bouncers didn’t seem to notice.
After three years of sneaking into shows with the help of a fake ID purchased by her mum, Sascha had a realisation which catapulted her to performing comedy instead of just watching it. “Until then, I thought [comedians] were all improvising the entire time. I’d watch [BBC’s] Mock the Week and try and come up with the answers, not realising that they were also written way in advance.”
After she got over the initial disappointment of learning that comedians were scripting their jokes, instead of being funny in real life, she figured that she could give it a go too.
Sascha performed her first stand-up show when she was 16. She tells Islington Now about the “bringer gig” – shows which are unique to the stand-up scene in London where comedians are required to bring one audience member to be allowed to perform.
So, she dragged her mum and sister to the gig. “It was in this terrible basement, with about eight people in the audience. My mum had two glasses of wine so she was dead asleep in the front row. The guy before me brought a massive dildo with him, and his set was ‘10 things you didn’t know you could do with a massive dildo’,” she continues.
“The last list item was: “You can throw it and it’ll stick to on a wall”. And he threw it at a window and the window cracked and everyone was silent, including his Chihuahua that he’d brought along,” Sascha says.
Her gigs have seen a bit of an upgrade since then. Last summer, she performed 80 across her summer at Edinburgh Fringe, including 25 shows in Angel Comedy Club’s showcase – an experience she describes as “the most intense month of my life”.
She’s been nominated for awards such as the BBC New Comedy Awards and, at 22, she was a finalist in Chortle Student Comedy Awards. Most recently, a short film that she wrote, directed and edited – called Model of Life – got picked up by the British Film Institute’s Futures Film Festival.
However, the gig that Sascha’s 13-year-old self might be the most chuffed about is her regular weekend spot at Angel Comedy club – where her love affair with comedy began.
“I help out with a lot of their shows. It’s crazy because I had one of my first gigs and it’s the place where I learned to love comedy and now I do their weekend shows. It’s just bizarre,” she concludes
