The huge success of her memoir has turbocharged the Scottish comedian’s career, with midlife, Catholicism and marriage in her withering sights
Cynicism is now and then expressed about the phenomenon of comedians writing books. Rare is the instance of a comic finding more success on the page than at the microphone. Step forward, then, Fern Brady, whose memoir Strong Female Character, about her experience as an undiagnosed autistic woman, has met with awards and widespread acclaim – and seems to have turbocharged the Scot’s standup career too. One assumes the book’s success was a factor in securing Brady gigs at next month’s Netflix Is a Joke festival in Los Angeles, and this new special on the streamer too – whose title, Autistic Bikini Queen, invites fans of the memoir to come savour more of the same.
Is that what they’ll get? Well, they’ll certainly get a potent hit of the 37-year-old’s unsentimental personality, as Brady – filmed at a Bristol performance last year – launches into spiky riffs on marriage and relationships. There’s not much, or at least not directly, on her experience of autism. The topic is efficiently dispatched in the opening five minutes with a droll gag about the idea that her neurodiversity is “a superpower”. There’s also a joke about her undiagnosed condition revealing itself in Brady’s squeamishness about touching or hugging her mum, which sounded to this viewer less like a symptom of autism than of Scottishness.
