Fern Brady @ The Stand
A searingly honest show from Fern Brady
Fern Brady squeezes a lot of her colourful life into new show Suffer, Fools! Many comics would have taken the various incidents she has experienced in the last two decades and split it into multiple hours of emotional tragi-comedy, but not Brady.
In this show, she has bundled up stories of violent intrusive thoughts and working in ‘customer service’ (a term she expands to include everything from work in a strip club to work with ex-cons) into a blisteringly honest hour in which she seems to shrug off many of the elements her audience sees as extraordinary. In so doing she plays with the idea that comics these days are supposed to be sincere, and paints a very detailed picture of an eventful life which hasn’t pivoted around any one event.
Brady has an easy rapport with the crowd, and is acutely aware of how we react to the myriad stories she tells. From dealing with the contents of her own head to the contents of ours, she is never a wallflower, always active in the stories she recounts, and doesn’t omit any gory details.