Press

Scotland on Sunday review of WAGTD

It is shaping up to be a vintage Fringe with a terrific spectrum of comics from the newly minted to the veterans. Like Richard Herring. Richard is thinking about death, and talking about it in an unfailingly entertaining show. He worries that he will go in a manner open to comedic interpretation by those that are left to report his death – Steve Bennett of the comedy website Chortle in particular.

Herring obsessively gallops us through the punny possibilities of his obituary. Very funny. But of course he is still very much in the swim, and looking good, sporting long greying hair – not so much a silver fox as a silver darling.

It is a brave comic who incorporates the whole of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy into his show but Herring just about gets away with it. Death becomes him and he rips into his subject like a lion on a tethered goat. We get Keats and serial killers, 9/11 and Paddy McGuinness and we really don’t stop laughing. And his deconstruction of The Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly will keep him in my mind for a long time.