Press

Guardian Review of THS

Edinburgh festival: Richard Herring
White Belly, Underbelly, Edinburgh
3 out of 5

* Brian Logan
* guardian.co.uk,
* Friday August 15 2008

"I'm an arsehole," says Richard Herring. We just have to take that on trust. The purpose of Herring's show is to ask why? Some people are lucky, says the stand-up: they have abusive childhoods to blame. But Herring was cursed with a happy youth. His only hardship was being the headmaster's son, whose dual-role dad forever had to "prove how fair he was by treating me incredibly unfairly".

Herring is one of the Fringe's reliable comic pleasures. He mines a rich seam of midlife comedy, worrying at the unravelling fabric of his fortysomething singleton's life. This year, he takes the self-analysis a little too far. "We're always looking for someone to blame for the way we've turned out," he says. Which begs the response: are we? Herring clearly is, and as long as that inspires uproarious, self-lacerating comedy, he prospers. But this set dips at the end as Herring foregrounds the therapy-speak and forgets to make us laugh.

Up to that point though, this is a crack comedy set, which hits the ground running as prepubescent Herring attends an Easter service at school. He lets out a thunderous burp - and it falls to headmaster/dad to mete out punishment.

From here, Herring roams across his childhood, revealing the seeds of the "sex-obsessed comedian", the loser with a winning line in off-colour comedy, that he became. The excerpts from his teenage diary provoke cheap but deep hilarity. A recent meeting with his childhood sweetheart yields a thinner comic return. But the climactic chat between Herring now and Herring then brings to poignant life a dialogue we have all conducted in our heads - although few of us will end up, as Herring does, asking our younger self to wank us off.

Undercutting the heartfelt with the puerile wouldn't impress the headmaster. But it spells fine comedy for the rest of us.