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

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

• The Glasgow Comedy Festival continues until 31 March

• Read more comedy reviews on theartsdesk