Review of his Amazon Prime special

Ed Gamble’s certainly chosen a distinctive outfit for his first special, wearing what looks like his pyjamas. The vivid red might evoke the leather suit Eddie Murphy wore in Delirious, but in colour only, as this is decidedly more M&S than S&M.

Such a soft look befits his image as an eager, genial dolt, feigning incredulity whenever events don’t turn out quite as he planned. He’s so friendly and affable that as a youth he got kicked out of his metal band, Tethered Priest, for smiling too much. And for giving the audience a thumbs-up rather than the devil horns.

In almost every story he cheerfully reinforces his perpetual underdog status. Even when he made the BBC News for getting stranded in New York during a snowstorm, he took umbrage at their two-word description of him as a ‘diabetic comedian’.  

‘Diabetic comedy is not a thing,’ he asserts with exaggerated indignation. Although in imagining how unfeasibly niche such a genre could be, he just happens to both invent it and prove we can all laugh at the finer details of the condition. Naming the Amazon Prime special in the disease’s honour seems entirely appropriate.

Gamble’s further misadventures include being ‘conned’ by a guide dog charity, failing to fit in to a spin class and conspicuously farting during a massage. In every one he is comically outraged by his own dumb failings.

We’re shown where he gets it from, too, as he relates stories of his ‘odd but intelligent’ father, who cuts an especially comical figure when he stubbornly digs in and refuses to acknowledge a mistake. His insistence a bakery furnish him with a ‘Danish Boog’, whatever that is, is a fine tale indeed.

In a long chunk towards the end, Gamble details the email correspondence between this eccentric character and his cat’s vet, with Dad bizarrely deciding to send the messages as if from the pet himself.

That the comedian goes too far in his elaborate act-out of the situation is not news to him, as he tells the initially nonplussed audience: ‘A lot of comedians would notice the reaction and cut the routine short’. But of course he doubles down, and like his dad’s actions in the bakery, Gamble’s persistence becomes funny simply because he's so tenacious.

After this, he rounds the show off with a small theatrical flourish, calling back to an earlier self-deprecating routine. Such a payoff might be de rigueur for a comedy special, but provides a satisfying conclusion to a joyous hour of naive actions, skilfully described.

• Ed Gamble: Blood Sugar is available to Amazon Prime subscribers here.

Review date: 29 Aug 2019
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett