Russell Howard asks a teacher in the front row to name her most annoying pupil. "Wasim," she replies, and Howard backs off - afraid, he jokes, of appearing racist. It is a funny moment, but also symptomatic of what frustrates me about this fast-rising stand-up and Mock the Week panellist. He is cuddly. He says nothing provocative. His risqué material is within accepted boundaries of risk - usually about bums. When he jokes about looking like a boy-band member, the resemblance is more than physical. Howard also shares with Westlife and co an absence of hard edges.
There is nothing pre-assembled about Howard, whose charisma and comic ability are not in doubt. His trick is to take conventional observational comedy and perform it at the free-wheeling, free-associating pace of Ross Noble. So the subjects can be unexceptional (tales of his foul-mouthed granddad) and the observations bland: "You know when you dunk your biscuit in your tea and think: 'I'm nearly losing the biscuit'?" But he animates them with piledriver enthusiasm, acting flair and a lively verbal intelligence.
The key section sees Howard invoke optimism about the world by articulating a three-year-old's responses to it. As a stand-up, he is a child trapped in, well, still a pretty youthful body, and he spends a lot of time bellowing into the microphone and talking about farts. I prefer when he finds other means to express his scamp's world view: miming his awkward efforts to engage in a threesome, say, or impersonating dinosaurs on a celestial catwalk. Howard is a stand-up with nothing in particular to say, but a very entertaining way of saying it.
· At King George's Hall, Blackburn (01254 582582), tonight. Then touring.
