Original Review:

Show Rating:

Blessed with a boyish, expressive face and light, engaging manner, he’s also surprisingly physical – one of his best jokes, about his mum and his vision of hell, is purely visual. He chats about the weather in Edinburgh, tells a few stories and is generally smiley company for an hour.

He deals with embarrassment – both his own, resulting from his own actions, as well as embarrassment on behalf of other people, such as tai chi practitioners. There’s no cruelty, nobody gets humiliated, everything’s quite gentle. The biggest laughs come from his acting out anecdotes – blocking his bedroom door with a bean bag, being squeamish at the birth of his son, avoiding his mother’s kiss…

This adds up to more than the sum of its parts. If you’ve seen Stan at a club gig before you’ll recognise some of the material, but it really doesn’t matter. He does a quick resume of the high points of his show to music at the end, which is eccentric, in an endearing way.

Pleasant enough. Not a destination show perhaps, but nice little stop off on the way somewhere.

Reviewed by: Julian Chambers