Fern Brady: Suffer, Fools!

Fern Brady explains that given the timeslot of her show—midday; traditional haunt of senior citizens—and the types of audiences she's drawing in, she tried to back out of performing Suffer, Fools! for the rest of the festival. It's just as well, for our sake, that she stuck in there.

The Scottish comic is on caustic form here, once again laying everything bare and inviting us to have a peek at the inner recesses of her bleak mind. She's candidly dark as ever, sharing her internal turmoil at such unfulfilled fantasies as...being able to squeeze her boyfriend's eyeballs out.

Bored by the tedium of routine minutiae, she's always on the hunt for a spark of adrenaline to spice things up. This is good news for her act, as we're treated to more of the sultry sardonicism and hugely entertaining outburts that have made her a rising star on the circuit. Her time as a writer at Fest even gets a shout-out, in an anecdote about being kicked out of the launch party. 

Her command of the comic form is subtle but undeniable; she's poised and precise, but it's disguised beneath a surface of coarse grumbling and adolescent soul-searching. It's a tale of her fight (often quite literally) against ex-boyfriends, the class system, and internal machinations. Seeing the comedic cogs of her mind turning is a privilege, and if she's suffering then at least she's allowed us a front row seat to the laughs among the melancholy.