Fern Brady: Autistic Bikini Queen (Netflix, 2024)
Fern Brady is an irreverent (and sometimes just plain rude) Scottish comedian, whose first Netflix special Autistic Bikini Queen is very funny and therefore eminently watchable.
Hailing from Bathgate in West-Scotland, Brady started out as a journalist some fifteen years ago before becoming a comedian as part of an experimental journalistic assignment.
She entered competitions like the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and became pretty popular pretty quickly, through shows like Male Comedienne (2017) and Power and Chaos (2021). She was also a regular candidate on Season 14 of Taskmaster.
In one of her YouTube clips that went viral she talks about looking at the sleeping face of her boyfriend and then wondering what it would be like to push her thumbs in his eyelids, like, hard!
Her boyfriend is Irish, which makes sense, cause even though Brady worries about giving Scottish people a bad name, a genetic test showed she is actually 98.3 percent Irish.
Another interesting thing I learned from watching YouTube: Fern doesn’t like couples where one partner is a lot taller than the other, so again it’s only logical that she is a lot taller than her wee lad.
Released today, Autistic Bikini Queen is a recording of her 2022 show, filmed in Bristol and directed by Phoebe Bourke.
Brady started writing it when she was doing body building, so she would look fit in a bikini, but also right after she learned she was autistic - something she had suspected for at least twenty years was finally confirmed
She initially thought she would write a lot of jokes about autism, but in the end it is more that the show is told from the perspective of someone who is neurodivergent.
Either way, Fern Brady has a lot on her mind, so when she goes out at night after a gig for a stress relieving walk, she ends up thinking about death and the idea that she could get murdered.
It doesn’t help that when she calls her father while on one of these walks has a habit of shouting uplifting things in her ear like ‘don’t get murdered!’ Gee, thanx, dad!
Brady is one opinionated lady and she very good at cracking jokes on subjects like marriage, monogamy, Catholicism, her dad’s second marriage to Julie, wedding vows, shagging, her boyfried, shagging her boyfriend, death and decline, the time she worked as a stripper, stag parties and drunk Scottish men in general.
Sporting a heavy Scottish accent - undiluted by living for over ten years in London - Fern Brady has a very natural and uncomplicated stage presence. She reminds me of the kind of female friend who has a potty mouth and just can’t stop herself hurtling insults at everyone.
She’s also quite good at howling and hollering, it has to be said.
In one of the best bits she talks about the house she bought with her boyfriend and the idea that as a dog-lover she could finally get one. But because boyfriend told her she would be away on tour too much to have a dog she got a cat instead. And when someone told her the cat looked a little lonely she got her cat a pet-cat. And now she loves them both to bits. This shows you just how much people can grow, because as we all know (I’ve said this often enough, so say it with me now): cats are the f—king best!!
So thank you Fern for Being Fern Brady!
Four stars!
Note: Fern Brady is currently on tour with her new show I Gave You Milk To Drink (2024).