Comedy Festival 2018: Fern Brady spills all on her rollercoaster love life in Suffer, Fools! ★★★½

WICKED Scottish comic Fern Brady takes the audience into her confidence and spills the beans on her life and loves in an always entertaining show.

YOUNG Scot Fern Brady has already packed plenty into her 31 years. She’s cooked breakfasts for hardened criminals at a halfway house. Worked as “the UK’s worst stripper”. Studied for an Islamic history degree at uni. And been nearly murdered by a former boyfriend.

Her tales of work and relationships, peppered with political asides, power a solid hour of wicked, biting comedy.

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A show about a “trilogy of boyfriends”, Brady calls it. There’s the current “tiny Irish boyfriend”, who Brady dreamily imagines doing harm to while he sleeps (her thumbs plunged into his eye sockets, if you want to know).

Fern Brady tells of her trilogy of boyfriends in Suffer, Fools!

There’s the posh boyfriend Brady dated at university who ended up cheating on her (“that’s why I got into comedy,” she says. “Nothing could top the humiliation.”).

And then there’s the handsome Scottish artist/model who violently tried to smother Brady with a pillow. Before, a moment later, proposing marriage.

Brady deftly weaves this trio of paramours into other aspects of her backstory, segueing as smoothly as silk from one great bit to the next.

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There are smart observations on the #metoo movement, Brexit and briefly, Trump. And, as you might expect, plenty of juicy comic material from Brady’s former days as a stripper. A bit on being visited by an evangelical Christian is a killer, too.

Boyfriend three — the abusive relationship — almost ends the show.

Contemplating what could have been an untimely end, Brady stages a mock funeral for herself as a finale. It’s the only duff spot of the evening,

feeling unnecessarily tacked on and rushed.

Across an hour though, Brady is a charming performer with a wicked gleam in her eye who’ll win you from her opening jokes until the lights come up.

Fern Brady, Suffer, Fools!

ACMI, Fed Square until April 22.

comedyfestival.com.au