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Ed Gamble, The Stand review - amiable hour touching on personal issues | reviews, news & interviews

Ed Gamble, The Stand review - amiable hour touching on personal issues

Ed Gamble, The Stand review - amiable hour touching on personal issues

Opening show of 2019 Glasgow Comedy Festival

Ed Gamble's show kicked off the 2019 Glasgow Comedy Festival

Ed Gamble starts the hour by telling us why his latest show is called Blizzard; he and a bunch of comic friends we stranded in New York by bad weather and it made the news - yet, strangely, the headline wasn’t a play on his name - a gift for hacks - but on the monicker of one of his mates. Cue faux outrage.

Gamble is too nice a guy to really mind someone else getting the spotlight - in fact he namechecks the other comics on the ill-fated trip - and the excellent audience work he does attests to an easygoing style that firmly underpins his personal, observational comedy.

A large part of the show at The Stand, which opened the 2019 Glasgow Comedy Festival, was taken up with talking about his Type 1 diabetes - a first in my career as a critic - but Gamble mines some very good material here, prompted by the same article calling the stand-up, by bizarre way of identification, “the diabetic comedian”.

It’s an interesting insight into the autoimmune condition, and his take on the subject - apart from giving us some useful first aid advice as an aside - covers the annoying errors about diabetes in Hollywood movies, the dangers of injecting himself in a public place, and why a grown man always carries a bag of jelly babies.

He’s willing to laugh at himself too, and describes his failed attempts at blokishness, preferring instead to have a solid relationship with his long-term girlfriend. “I’m not a sex man,” Gamble says, a refreshing change from the pumped-up version of masculinity more generally found on the comedy circuit. 

But it’s also a clever sell for his brand of amiable comedy; neither men nor women are threatened by Gamble’s clean-cut looks and his willingness to please, not even when he strays into possible paedophilia territory with a teasing reference to his younger girlfriend.

He talks about their shared love of escape rooms, which is not a euphemism for those uninitiated with the pastime, his dislike of people who vape, a misjudged solo visit to a Dungeon theme park, and his dad’s comically weird relationship with his cat. 

Nothing to scare the horses, but Gamble delivers a solid, well constructed hour of entertainment, with some excellent callbacks.

  • Ed Gamble is touring until 23 May
Gamble mines some good material

rating

Editor Rating: 
3
Average: 3 (1 vote)

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