Karl Schultz: Start the Karl

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So, here's the tricky thing. Karl Schultz is very obviously a lovely chap. He's energetic, fun, whimsical. He doesn't offer up false expectations, admitting quite correctly that his act "has no calorific content". He commits as wholeheartedly as is feasible to the daftest of warm-up games (dancing like an Iranian dad at a wedding, a personal favourite). He deals very graciously with the tricky situation of a crying child on the front row, and seems genuinely mortified that he has let it phase him at all (Karl, you're fine – no put down could have stopped that one-year-old heckler). He even, in moments of lucidity, delivers some wonderful lines.

But all that does not a comedian make, and this hour of character-based comedy is, frankly, a bit painful. Played as they are, these characters are paper thin, joke light, and more than a little self-indulgent. Material this silly could almost pass off as surreal, but that would require opening the door to chaos – a very difficult ask of a performer who reads his lines from a notebook. Whichever road Schultz decides to travel, he's going to need three times as many jokes, at least a modicum of rehearsal time, and a commitment to decimate the rolls of fat from this flabby set. I hope he does: really, it couldn't happen to a nicer bloke.