It’s easy to see why Ruby and Luisa are friends. They are constantly joking and finishing each other’s sentences. “I like writing in general, and we just really enjoy making each other laugh,” Ruby concludes. Luisa nods. “I think that’s the thing, because we’re good friends anyway then we make each other laugh in normal life, so –”

“ – it spills over into the stage”, Ruby finishes. They go back and forth as they discuss whether they can call their show a sketch show. “I mean, there are sketches in there,” Ruby assures me. “It’s sort of like two-person stand-up. It’s really laid back.” I ask if any elements of the show will take the audience back. “There’s one sketch that people could completely hate,” Ruby immediately asserts. “I don’t think they will!” Luisa interjects. There’s a pause. “Well, they might...What can we say? It involves a chicken factory. It sounds bad when you say it like that.” “And maybe it is! We’ll see next week,” Ruby laughs. Although they are seasoned stand-up comics, they’ve never put on a full show before, and with no filter on what they’ve put into the show, they aren’t sure how the audience will react.

“I mean, Ken (our director) seems to like it. But there is that voice at the back of our head saying ‘What if only we find it funny?’ and it’s just us on stage laughing at our own jokes. Hopefully Ken would – he’d tell us if it was shit. Unless he’s just been trolling us the whole time, I wouldn’t put it past him.” We discuss how audiences vary across different venues, and Luisa says: “Last night was the all-female smoker at Pembroke, and those nights are always really good because they know what to expect, so everything goes down really well.”

Her comment leads us onto the issue of gender. After all, their show is advertised as the only all-female sketch show in Cambridge. “When we write, we don’t think ‘We’re women, let’s write a show’, we just write a show and we are women. Anyone can read the script and it would still make sense. The default setting is that there aren’t enough women in comedy, and it becomes a novelty thing. Hopefully one day the novelty will wear off, and anyone can just do comedy without being questioned. But I think it’s a good thing that we’re women doing a show, it works to change that.”

“Hopefully it won’t do any harm to women’s reputation anyway!” Luisa jokes. “It’s difficult because we can’t compare it to anything because obviously we don’t know what it’s like to be a man. We’re doing a smoker tonight where we’re the only women, and we did a smoker last term where we were the only women, so you do kind of feel out of place.”

“I mean, no one’s been hostile to us or anything,” Ruby adds. “But it’s so ingrained, it’s internalised misogyny. Even when I see a female comedian I say: ‘I hope she’s good’. At the beginning of our act when we are in a male smoker we now say: ‘Prepare yourselves, there will now be four ovaries and two vaginas on the stage!’ and that warms people up to the fact that we are women.”

Luisa surmises: “If we immediately acknowledge that we are women and no one else in the show is a woman then people tend to relax a bit more. We’re both feminists, but we don’t bring it into our comedy. We’re a break from the world, we don’t want people to think too hard about stuff!”

Mavericks will be performing at Pembroke New Cellars from Monday 15th – Wednesday 17th Feb 2016 at 9:30pm.