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The Stage review of OFIF

Richard Herring - Oh F*ck, IÂ’m 40!

Underbelly, Edinburgh
Richard Herring - Oh F*ck, I'm 40! at the Underbelly, Edinburgh

Funnily enough, Richard Herring doesnÂ’t tell us when exactly he turned forty.Very coy.

However, he doesnÂ’t spare any details about the effect that the big 4-O is having on his hormones. HeÂ’s rather rampant on the subject in fact.

Suddenly he feels he wants sex with (almost) every woman he sees, and confesses to the odd gerontophile leanings. Still, that doesnÂ’t stop him from looking back and ruminating on how he had expected to be married with kids at this stage. Somehow that gets him sidetracked into denying that his thoughts about teenagers are perverted which somehow turns unexpectedly into a wonderful lampoon of another comicÂ’s recent defence against paedophilia charges.

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Aside from sex, more subtle motifs run through the set such as wordplay and pedantry. All three come together in his possibly true tale of a woman in his hotel room who takes pedantic umbrage at his ill-judged attempt to talk dirty to her mid-fellatio by overestimating the size of his tumescence. It’s a self-indulgent story and shouldn’t work at all but he had the whole house roaring with laughter over his fumbling attempts to get her definition of “average”.

Midway he meanders somewhat as he gets into American gun control and then expands the metaphor of being over the hill but soon gets back on track with a lengthy riff on taking T-shirt slogans literally and hey presto, heÂ’s back into sex again, of the backdoor kind, and has the audience roaring once more. And yet the more Herring ups the ante, the more thoughtful you realise he becomes.