Comedy Review - Fern Brady: Autistic Bikini Queen

Images courtesy of the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

Bikinis were not the dress code at this event, but the queen was on full display for the whole hour during this subdued take on self-acceptance. 

In the beginning the audience was told that the title of the show was irrelevant, that it was spur of the moment and Fern only came to regret using such an outlandish title. Well, let me tell you one thing, I sure as hell wouldn’t have gone to this show if it hadn’t had an awesome title like Autistic Bikini Queen, so at least it sold one ticket. 

I did feel like the name suited the show perfectly, with Fern’s grandiose sense of self, stories of her stripping days, her disclosure of autism and her candid discussion of the pros and cons of having it. ‘You don’t look like someone who has autism,’ she recalled people telling her. ‘That’s because there aren’t enough hot people open about it,’ she announced. I like the cut of this girl’s jib.

This impulsive, confrontational attitude led the show through mainly highs, but also a couple of notable lows. With great risk comes greater reward, so when Fern heard someone talking to their friend after a somewhat scandalous joke, it was thrilling to see Fern make dominant eye contact with this patron before  shouting “what was that?!” See, as you can tell this is really a joke that can come off either way, an obnoxious comedian losing the crowd, OR someone demanding the respect they deserve at their own show. The audience member replied with a very sarcastic, dry “ha” and the show rolled on. Another moment of risk was when politics came into play, of course… Fern says something about Scomo seeming a little bogan, another member of the audience gets antsy and defends the man. 

“He went to a private school, you know.” 

In Fern’s defence, I think this is just the crowd she pulls. Having spent a lot of punchlines of ‘Gen Z-ers’, it’s no wonder the audience at this show was one of the more age-induced I’d seen at the festival thus far. Now I know that conservatives are more likely to be in this age bracket, but surely even Fern didn’t expect one of them to shout out and defend ol’ Scomo from a light-hearted jab. Alas, it veered the show into awkward education-centric talking points regarding the man that nobody wants to talk about. 

Maybe if this runaway bit didn’t draw the ire of the man sitting in row three, Fern might’ve gotten around to the man that everyone performing this year did want to talk about. Unfortunately, there were no Will Smith jokes in this set, to the great disappointment of me alone. Fortunately, there was a Louis CK joke just in case the late-2010’s passed you by too quick…

Autistic Bikini Queen is showing at the 2022 Melbourne International Comedy Festival between the 31st of March and the 18th of April. For tickets and more info, click here.