Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

A reveal partway through Larry Dean’s show goes a long way to explaining his enthusiasm for pulling expressive, contorted faces, his often monstrous physicality and preoccupation with perceptions of creepiness.

But a bigger one than his favourite comic-horror movie is that the Glaswegian has finally got himself tested and joined the ranks of openly autistic comedians, after successive partners urged him to get a diagnosis. He might have been masking his social unease the whole time but he’s highly practised at it. He greets everyone at the door before the show, maintaining ‘it gets you used to my face’.

His neurodiversity doesn’t come as a tremendous surprise though, given that his indelicate grandmother long used a series of euphemisms for describing his oddness. Dodger’s second significant narrative strand is the comic’s relationship with the 98-year-old, who passed away in December.

His beloved ‘nanny’ was afflicted by dementia but the condition isn’t simply forgetfulness, he explains. Rather, it often expressed itself as a temporal jumping back and forth in her mind, so that she would believe herself much younger, unaware that she had a grandchild and having to confusedly accept him as a cousin or somesuch. When Dean seeks to introduce his boyfriend to her, he’s tickled that her inappropriate behaviour indicates they have similar taste in men.

Nevertheless, he’s at pains to stress that irrespective of her deterioration, the woman was always a ‘daftie’, his loving memory of her pranking the five-year-old him like something out of a slasher movie.

By the by, this horror tone is a recurring feature. Dean’s toxic ex-boyfriends are afforded a spooky quality, while Scottish miserabilism and lack of ambitious horizons are likened to the grim, recurring image of crabs dragging each other back into a bucket whenever one looks set to escape. This is something Dean feels is quintessentially British, his efforts at performing self-deprecating stand-up in the US prompting bafflement and open concern for his welfare.

All the while, when he really wants to display the rabid inner workings of his mind, he fully gives vent to his Mr Hyde side, locking eyes and grotesquely gurning and growling at a specific individual in the front rows.

He feels his nationality strongly, contrasting the implication of smiles from Scots, English, Americans and Australians in a brilliantly executed bit of physical observation. His Catholicism and class are also factors in his personality that can’t be ignored either, with his parents differing social origins perhaps reflected in another superbly contained routine about why you want a posh pilot on a flight, and the lip service that one pays to God for the plane not crashing.

Elsewhere, he shares his childhood love of Elvis, unquestionably an inspiration for his loose-limbed movements and a reason for him being closer to his late grandmothers than to his contemporaries at school. Even if he’s now worldly wise enough to appreciate The King’s creepier side.

 Dean’s grandmothers really had to step up in raising him. His mother has previously featured in his comedy as a posh Englishwoman, her voice in his mouth a haunted whale. Yet here the comic shares more, disclosing her mental health problems and the strained relationship they had during his adolescence. Autism may be en vogue but its symptoms can often manifest like trauma.

Also expanding upon his Brummie boyfriend, Mikey, a deflating balloon of a man in Dean's cartoonish representation, Dodger proves an open, revealing family portrait, a deceptively heavy show packaged as a light-footed gambol thanks to Dean’s poised balance of physical and anecdotal storytelling.

Review date: 24 Aug 2024
Reviewed by: Jay Richardson
Reviewed at: Monkey Barrel Comedy Club