With victory in last week’s So You Think You’re Funny? prize for the Glaswegian act Alana Jackson, we may soon be welcoming another Scottish comic to standup’s top table. In the meantime, Larry Dean remains his country’s most stellar recent fringe performer, thrice nominated for Edinburgh comedy awards. His skills are amply on display in Dodger, which parallels the story of his recent autism diagnosis with the tale of his grandmother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. Nothing would be more off-brand for Dean than to deliver a hand-wringing hour of trauma-comedy, mind you. The 34-year-old is as sunny as standup gets, and in this latest set his tender tale is accompanied by gag after crowd-pleasing, club-comedy gag.
That might fray the patience a little of comedy initiates. For me, Dean is over-reliant here on stereotypes of prim Englishness and (particularly) dour Scottishness, with one joke after another imagining the blunt Scottish version of something Americans do much more glamorously. They’re funny enough to crank a laugh from his crowd, because the Glaswegian is a convivial and cartoonishly animated onstage presence. But they’re not true. For truth, we must look elsewhere – to Dean’s discovery of his neurodivergence, flanked by his anxious mum; and to his relationship with his gran, whose dementia reveries Dean lovingly plays along with, when he visits her with his Brummie boyfriend in tow.
These strands come together in a sentimental ending that Dean doesn’t quite pull off – because it resolves a crisis of confidence (triggered by his autism diagnosis) that he’s told us about but not really shown, or made us feel. But his love for his granny shines through, as does the potency of the picture he paints, of a woman who once validated his childhood imagination, and to whom he now returns the favour. There are entertaining routines too addressing Dean’s trip to the States to chase his Elvis dreams, and of appearing on a Pride float in an outfit that takes shame to whole new levels. It’s another bouncy and likable boy-next-door standup show, from an act who won’t be dislodged from his fringe preeminence any time soon.
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