★★★★★
The first thing that strikes you about Larry Dean is that he’s nice. That’s a bit of a breath of fresh air in comedy—especially in Scotland—where there seems to be some sort of pre-requisite on the job description to be a wee bit of an arse. But Dean enthusiastically greets his audience at the door on their way into the absolutely stifling hot Monkey Barrel.
As soon as he bounds on to the stage, he launches into his now signature routine about his face and how he’s giving the audience a chance to get used to it. It’s the distinctly Scottish, self-deprecating humour that goes down the best with the audience.
“Nobody has ever asked me to look after their stuff on public transport,” he said, with eyes as wide as saucers. He’d been told he looked like he should “own a crow”. Then he launches into his routine of accents and how American, English and Australian accents are “smiley” but if you smile in a Scottish accent “someone is getting stabbed”.
When we move away from the warm-up jokes about different accents, we’re treated to some new material about his grandmother he affectionately calls “nanny” and his recent diagnosis with autism.
This love letter to his grandmother, who sadly died last year, is the highlight of the show and provokes an emotional response among the audience. He tells us about her “timehopping” due to dementia and a hilarious anecdote about how she thought she was staying the night in her boss’s flat.
Some of Dean’s callbacks were a little forced and he appeared to be nervous about crowd work. But it is refreshing that Dean values his audience and respects them enough not to use them as part of his routine. Later he went on to explain that he had a bad experience with someone in the audience the previous evening.
But this didn’t affect his rip-roaring, gag a minute set. Dean is an effortless storyteller. There is something disruptive about him on the Scottish comedy scene – there aren’t many other gay, autistic comedians in Scotland who are just… nice. He’s definitely the type of guy you’d want to take home to meet your own granny. As long as he doesn’t take her to the bad seats at a music concert, as his own Nanny accused him of, he’s sure to have her in stitches like he did with the rest of us.
Larry Dean: Dodger is on at Monkey Barrel 3 at 20.30 from Aug 14-25 as part of Edinburgh Fringe 2024.
Words by Lauren Gilmour
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