Comedian Sara Pascoe got emotional while answering a question from a young audience member this week. Photo / File
Comedian Sara Pascoe got emotional while answering a question from a young audience member this week. Photo / File
British comedian Sara Pascoe was left in tears after a fan asked her a question during a Q+A event at Hay Festival this week, and the clip of the moment has gone viral since being uploaded to social media.
During the festival, a young audience member asked the comedian and writer what advice she would give her 14-year-old self if she could go back in time.
“If you would tell 14-year-old you what you have achieved, what would you tell her and why?” the fan asked.
As she wiped away tears, the comedy icon explained why she was getting emotional: “It’s because you asked about me being a mum and now you’ve asked me about being 14″.
“You literally had to destroy me in a Q+A,” she added before continuing her response.
“The really s**t thing about being young is that you haven’t been through stuff yet. The first time it happens is the worst.
“I’ll give you an example of heartbreak. When you get your heart broken for the first time, you’ve got no defences because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know how it feels, and you trust.”
Pascoe fought back tears for the entire length of her answer.
“The horrible thing about older people, maybe your parents or other people who care about you, is that when they say, ‘You’re going to be okay, and this will make you stronger,’ and, ‘You were so brave to love in the first place,’ all this feels so unhelpful,” she continued.
“When you get your heart broken a second time it might be just as bad, but it’s painful in the knowledge that you recover from this. That life went wrong. That life went on. That you laughed again and enjoyed music again, and that’s the difficulty with context.”
“When I was 14, I hated school, I wasn’t popular. Everything now that I’ve made a career out of I thought was a negative. I hate to think of people unhappy being teenagers. But I also know it’s part of being happier later.
“Also, knowing nothing about your life, not changing. Because you’re not wrong.”
Pascoe wiped her tears as the audience applauded her candour.
The comedian cried as she answered the question from the young audience member. Photo / Hay Festival
After the Hay Festival shared the clip online, it immediately went viral as it resonated with so many who watched it.
“Such a brilliant, honest response to a great question. It resonated with me because of its essential truthfulness,” one Twitter user (I refuse to call that cursed site X) said.
“Very powerful and very true. A response that will have impact and be remembered by that young person forever,” someone else commented.
Parents said that they were going to share the clip with their teens and admitted that hearing Pascoe say it had helped them.
“As a parent of a 14-year-old you have helped myself and others immensely with this response. Thank you,” one social media user said.
Some of the social media responses to the clip are enough to make you want to reach for the tissues themselves, like what this one person wrote on Instagram: “The reason she cried…and why I cried watching it..and I’m now 72…is because that 14-year-old is still there, inside you, just below the surface.”
Anyway, social media is an awful hellhole of everything that’s wrong with the world but it’s also a wonderful place that allows you to share clips like this one, that might make someone feel slightly less awful about themselves.
Pascoe was at the Hay Festival to promote her latest book, titled Weirdo, which I’m off to buy now.
