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.
