HOW do you define success? Is it being able to make so much money that your tax bill alone runs to £5m?

Is success in fact a measure of how you manage to keep your job once it’s been revealed you forgot to pay that same tax bill? Or is success being able to find a minister or a priest to marry you if you happen to be gay?

Or being able to go wild swimming and managing to stop yourself from telling the world about how it’s made you a wonderful human being?

For her show Success Story, comedian Sara Pascoe has been asking herself what success involves. “What I want to explore is how do we define success and when do we define it,” the Essex-born performer explains. “Does it change with age, do we only want things we can’t have?”

She adds: “And when we attain our goals, do we move the goal posts and become unsatisfied with what we’ve got and want something else instead?”

Isn’t that the way of things, Sara? Isn’t success an unachievable aim, because we tend to want more, or something different each time?

Pascoe smiles as she admits our notions of success can alter faster than a costume maker at Halloween.

“I’m 40 now and it’s a reflective time; it feels like a very adult age. Looking back on my life to when I was 14, I really wanted to be on television. That’s where I work now but is it what I imagined it to be?”

The comedian will tell us the answer to that question on the night, although we can guess the answer will be yes, given Pascoe works continually in the medium, in the likes of the Great British Sewing Bee. But the show will also take us deeper into the Pascoe psyche. She will talk about her lack of success in being able to conceive a child.

“I was having years of infertility and when we were going through IVF, the word ‘success’ was used a lot about the process.

“My worry was: my life is really great now, but I don’t want to regret not being a mum when I’m 50. It was like making a hypothetical decision based on a sadness I hadn’t felt yet. The way society ties women’s success to marriage and babies weighed heavily on me; I think women are complicit in reinforcing it.”

Sara Pascoe is often described on television as being a “feminist vegan comedian”. But she doesn’t see herself at the vanguard of the feminist movement.

“I hate being asked about being a woman. But it’s more because I don’t have a funny or interesting answer any more. I think the discussion has really evolved. As a middle-class, white woman, who’s well paid at the level I am, actually I’m not qualified to talk about being a woman in comedy any more.”

She adds, grinning: “I don’t have any jokes about those things because they’re not things that I necessarily joke about. “Whereas if they just said, ‘She’s a ditsy Essex girl’, I would feel safe that we’re in a realm of stuff we joke about.”

Sara Pascoe: Success Story The Pavilion Theatre Glasgow, February 3

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Don’t Miss: Kenny Dalglish Live, February 9 the King’s Theatre Glasgow. No, this title is not a misnomer. The football legend, despite decades of television appearances suggesting he’s in total accord with the old song lyrics ‘Words. Don’t come easy. To Me.’ Will be speaking. In conversation. Amazing.

Frankie Boyle: Lap of Shame

Frankie Boyle returns to the stage to remind us how daring and provocative he can be. The Glasgow-born comedian also challenges us to ask questions of ourselves.

Are we supposed to laugh about necrophilia? Can we giggle over jokes about having sex with Nazis? And are we so boring and conformist that we can’t run alongside Boyle in a three-legged race determined to test our sense of comic balance?

His show, Lap of Shame is described as “largely about politics, satirising whichever new leaders emerge from the irradiated rubble. The show will then embark on a tour of Re-education Camps, Robot Barracks, and Colosseums built from old shipping containers”.

But that’s not to say many Boyle gags won’t draw deep breaths. Thank goodness. It’s fair to say Boyle has been cancelled more often than the milk at the Glasgow Fair time, but you can’t deny that he sees things before others even catch an outline.

We need to hear Frankie Boyle. We need to hear how he dissects rapist policemen, Irish folk songs, Keir Starmer (“If he ran at a pigeon, it wouldn’t move”) and the feelings other serial killers harbour for Harold Shipman.

How could we not wish to run alongside the creator of lines such as “People who think there’s no good way to die have obviously never heard the phrase ‘Drug-fuelled-sex-heart-attack’.” Or: “Does anyone find it ironic how a programme aimed at old people is called Countdown?”

Even when he’s not being brilliant, Boyle can’t help but elicit a wide grin.

Frankie Boyle: Lap of Shame, The King’s Theatre, Glasgow, February 13-16 and March 15