Gerry Howell: Seriousnessmus

A bad room is a huge challenge for even the most robust of shows. But when we're talking about Gerry Howell's surreal, almost indifferent meanderings, it's an out-and-out death sentence.

Comedy like his needs the most delicately tailored environment and a hand-picked crowd to flourish, but that's far from what he gets in this Free Fringe nook. Instead, Howell is forced to contend with the rhubarb and clink of one side of the room still ordering drinks as he ambles into his opening. As such, he's denied the chance to set out any groundwork for a form of standup that's seems both alien and alienating to most of the casual viewers in tonight.

For the most part, this is a free-association ramble that brushes ever so lightly off theology, evolution and ontology on its way to precisely nowhere. Just when each musing threatens to contain a little substance, Howell wanders off into oblique reasoning, alternative-reality tangents and blasé non-sequiturs.

It's not without its charms as Easter and the nativity story get anachronistic treatments, or as Howell half-heartedly breaks off for some amusingly pointless games of "guess the animal." And towards the close, he shows himself to be capable of some pretty solid standalone gags – a succession of brainy leftfield puns, one of which he rightly judges as "more of a tweet." But in the end, Howell's most admirable trait is detached composure in the face of a totally nonplussed crowd. His set amounts to little more than an hour-long shrug.