Russell Howard loves playing live, he tells us, because on stage he can tell the truth. But if you're buckling up for a night of Howard uncut, you're wasting a good buckle: this standup's take on plain-speaking is just his Mock the Week persona, with added chat about cocks and bums. Since I last saw him live, Howard has graduated from arts centres to arenas. He's made the flit without difficulty: tonight's crowd loves him. But if bigger venues showcase Howard's technique, they also expose the paucity of his material.
This festive-season tour, titled Big Rooms and Belly Laughs, is a compendium of Howard's recent hits. There's nothing ambitious about it: the theme concerns "the little things that get us through the day," says Howard, such as his three-fingered friend masturbating, Christmas with the family or the joy of buying a new notepad. But not visiting Aldi, which is, in Howard's choice coinage, "less a shop, more a shelter for abused foods". All of this is animated by Howard's springy energy: he bounces around, gurns and brings various sexual scenarios to life with suggestive mime.
It's skilfully done, but the laughs are usually predictable ones. His routine about sex with the Queen is too much for telly, he tells us. But simulating lays majesté is a cheap way of appearing, rather than being, subversive. Elsewhere, we learn that Barack Obama is cool, and Gordon Brown isn't. And "we all like Boris Johnson, don't we, because he's got personality". These aren't even observations, just crippled cliches. Too often, the phraseology (Anne Robinson looks like "a fox in a wind-tunnel") and the joke construction (giving bankers bonuses after the financial crash "is like Bin Laden getting air miles for 9/11") are hoary and mechanical beneath the puppyish delivery.
The problem, contrary to his claims, is that this feels far from the truth about Howard. Yes, he tells us about recent appearances on Jonathan Ross and in Heat magazine, which hardly sets the pulse racing. But in his bloodless good cheer – he loves this, he loves that, everything is brilliant – the comic does protest too much. What does he care about? What perspectives are truly his own? Clearly a capable host, at ease with even this vast crowd, Howard ends the show by accepting a punter's arm-wrestle challenge, and makes of it a great moment of spontaneous theatre. The parcelling is neatly done, then, but this Christmas hamper is a little empty.
At Nottingham Arena (0844 412 4624), tonight, then touring.
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