Fern Brady


Fern Brady is a Scottish comedian and writer. She reached the finals of "So You Think You're Funny" at the 2011 Edinburgh Fringe, where she was placed joint third, the finals of the Piccadilly Comedy Club new act competition in 2012 and the Hackney Empire New Act of the Year in 2013. She has appeared on 8 Out Of 10 Cats, Seann Walsh's Late Night Comedy Spectacular, The Alternative Comedy Experience, BBC Radio 4's The News Quiz, series 3 of Live from the BBC, series 14 of Live at the Apollo and on series 3 of Frankie Boyle's New World Order. She has written for The Guardian.
Brady was born in Bathgate, West Lothian, where she grew up. She is of Irish descent. Her father worked at a truck company and her mother worked at Tesco. Her parents have since divorced.
While at university, Brady was editor of The Student, a weekly newspaper produced by students at the University of Edinburgh. To finance her university studies, she worked as a stripper. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Arabic and Islamic History. Following university, Brady originally trained to become a journalist, although she had been secretly thinking about becoming a stand-up comedian since 2006. In 2009, she was an intern at Fest Magazine, a free magazine covering the Edinburgh Festival. One of her assignments there was to write an article about a comedy critic trying stand-up. Brady describes the experience as "the push I needed to realise it was what I wanted to do". Her first professional gig was in May 2010.
Brady is openly bisexual.