Hal Sparks review

I'm fed up, as an audience member, of being blamed for a quiet reception. Sometimes blame is integral to the show.

There are some good moments in American Hal Spark's show - the occasional neat observation, but for the most part it is a jumble of material about over-familiar topics. You can forgive a comedian for covering well-established subjects for comedy as long as they have something new to say. Unfortunately for the most part Sparks doesn't. So what we're left with is a rather weak deconstruction of the Bible, something about nature documentaries, the differences between America and Britain, along with a few other bits all blended together into a rather weak and unsatisfying smoothie.

With almost all Edinburgh shows a bit of structure is required, or at least a bit of a thread between subjects, to maintain the hour. Sparks attempts to do this early on with Evolution, but you can barely remember it by the end of this hour. For the most part chunks of unrelated material appear to be bolted together like a badly built Meccano model.

Confidence is not something that Sparks lacks. He clearly enjoys being on stage, and I'm very pleased it makes him happy. He bounds around the stage like an excited meerkat... but the big problem is that Sparks is distinctively unlikeable. Clearly egotistical, his comments about his body - made with supposed irony - are correctly taken by everyone at face value. He has an infuriating habit of speaking down to the audience and tears down any possibility of appearing likable with his patronising attitude and arrogance. These traits would be fine with an outsider comic who doesn't want the audience to like them, but it is clear Sparks is desperate for the audience to love him.

There are a few moments of genuine humour, but for the most part things smelt far too much of Dane Cook. Unlikeable and not very funny.

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Hal Sparks - Evolution Overdrive listing