Karl Spain: Life Is Sweet

It is a truth universally acknowledged that other people's health problems make for diabolically boring conversation. Whether granny's arthritis has been giving her “trouble,” or one of your colleagues has “come down with the flu,” nothing makes us scurry away quicker from a chat than the prospect of listening to them whine.

So it is with a heavy heart that one sits through the lumbering 60 minutes of Karl Spain's show, which revolves around his recent battle with diabetes. The sweating, the boils, the purple infected penis – the affable comic gleefully relates all the gruesome side effects, but fails to raise more than a few sympathetic grimaces. The extended anecdote contains so many unnecessary—and unfunny—details that Spain's show seems more a chronological account of his condition than anything else.

His sluggish material appears to have bypassed even the most rudimentary edit, and Spain twitters on like a chatty neighbour you'd try to avoid, relating blood tests, bowel movements, and battles against cake. Though his brand of confessional comedy makes the chubby comic an endearing character, his rambling script is simply not up to scratch.

It's a shame, because his delivery is often spot on and his wide grin is amazingly infectious. His wonderfully relaxed demeanour puts the audience immediately at ease, and his early banter with two elderly women in the front row is disarmingly natural. “Obviously you didn't know about the crowd surfing bit at the end,” he jokes, glancing down at his sizable belly.

Let's hope he finds himself a patient editor before next year's Fringe.