It's weird to me how someone genuinely funny like Jack Whitehall could produce such a boring hour of standup comedy. He's much funnier in British game shows without a script than he is in his own special.
"Settle Down" was the one standup I was waiting for tonstart February well, but it failed to deliver. Jack Whitehall seems to be embracing some kind of a persona instead of being himself and it's not working well. I haven't laughed even one time out loud, all I got was a smirk, and it was actually based on an old Jimmy Carr joke. I'd call that joke straling but hey, they seem to be friends with Jimmy, maybe he got the permission.
Jack is kind of going for a "silly soy boy" persona and it doesn't suit him at all. His energy doesn't match his jokes and that's the reason he gets more applause breaks than laughs from the audience.
Look, I knew from the trailer than if this is the hook part (the one with the little dog), then something should be very wrong with this special. And there IS something very wrong with it. It's in this new style of "feel good comedy" that's not really comedy and it doesn't really make me feel good. The act is clean (I think?) but that doesn't help anyone. If anything, it makes Jack look more like an entertainer at a kids party than a standup comedian.
The material was predictable and I can only guess that even a novice comedy fan would know the punchline 4 seconds before the end lf every joke. And again - there weren't many jokes, because they were in the form of long, realistic stories, that Jack Whitehall somehow made not believable with his tone. Seriously, when a good comedian is telling a story, you can believe it even of it's obviously a lie. The good comedian paints a picture with his masterful use of words. Jack Whitehall did the opposite - he told stories that could very well be true, but he told them so badly, you could barely believe him.
