Jarlath Regan: Not So Common Sense
Live Review

If Jarlath Regan were a primary school teacher, he'd inspire devotion from the under-tens. If he were a priest, he'd have the most popular stall at the church fete. If he were your ex, he'd be the one your mum wishes you'd never broken up with. He's very nice.

But as any girl knows, there's nothing exciting about nice. We want to be swept off our feet and left giddy, or at least to get a bit carried away and fall off a chair. Instead this sweet-natured Irish comic gives us a cuddle and drops us home before bedtime.

There's nothing Regan can do about it – this is a man who genuinely believes ‘magic happens at comedy shows!’ – but it does make for the sort of stand-up that can only be described, at best, as 'pleasant'.

It's a shame really, because there's some decent material buried in here, as you might expect from someone who, as he proudly points out, has supported Hollywood star Rob Schneider and once made Chris Rock laugh. His musings on marriage are predictable but well played out. He takes his wife's assertion that cheating is the worst thing a husband could do to its amusing, if obvious, conclusion and when he expounds with brilliant physicality on one of the key lessons he's learned in his relationship – not to eat crisps while being told an important piece of news – I broke into an actual laugh.

The recounting of an exchange with a Dublin taxi driver in which Regan takes the cabbie's ridiculous complaints about the recently deregulated Irish taxi market and runs with them is also worth waking up for. I could have done without the twee greetings card cartoons and the Chris Rock 'anecdote', which wears its name-dropping disguise very unconvincingly, but they were inoffensive enough. And that's the show in a nutshell really - inoffensive, like a cheese sandwich; not exactly thrilling but, you know, nice.