Gluttony is hilarious, right? If you agree, Jeff Garlin's standup is for you. If not, the Curb Your Enthusiasm star – he plays Larry David's "fat fuck" manager Jeff Green – won't sate your comic appetite. Garlin claims to have worked hard preparing this debut UK show, whereas he usually ad libs his performances. Tonight's set is part extemporised, too – and amusingly enough to render 90 minutes in Garlin's company passably enjoyable. But it's low on momentum, and Garlin's endless anecdotes about overeating tend to peter out once the 31st donut has been consumed.
The most entertaining moments are the improvised ones, be that Garlin disciplining a heckler, or getting lost in transatlantic confusion when, asked for a British equivalent to US motivational guru Tony Robbins, someone volunteers "Baldrick". Garlin's readiness to embrace the unexpected is an appealing quality. But there's no fluid interweaving of improvised and scripted material a la Eddie Izzard or Ross Noble. Garlin's lumbering between one and the other dissipates energy – dynamism is hard to generate when you stop before each routine to consult a crib sheet.
The prompts he finds are for various tales of binge-eating, which are all much of a muchness, and rely on us finding overindulgence inherently funny. He asks us to shout out famous scenes from Curb, then tells us what he was eating while filming them. The subject is fat; the material is thin. The laughs are in the detail – a droll impersonation of Neil Diamond, a finicky insistence that five donuts are healthier than half a dozen – and in Garlin's infectious amusement at his own absurdity. My enthusiasm would be harder to curb, though, if he used fewer paunch lines, and more punchlines.
