Comedy review: Richard Herring
Published by Edinburgh Festivals
24 Aug 2013
Edinburgh Fringe Scotsman review: Richard Herring – We’re All Going to Die! at Pleasance Courtyard (Venue 33), reviewed by Jay Richardson
Death
is the only thing more certain than taxes and Richard Herring putting
together a compelling, big-theme Fringe hour. Although he contemplates
Hamlet’s famous soliloquy and inevitably, finds it lacking, the
undiscovered country is not up for speculation: there’s nothing once we
pass over he avers.
His
atheist viewpoint established, he exploits death for all it’s worth,
drawing wicked comparison between the lives of Ben Elton and John Keats
and suggesting the only reason he got married is because he knows there
is sweet release on the horizon.
The
problem of explaining death to kids prompts a damning character
assassination of God and witty evocation of a Heaven with a permeable
admissions policy, before a typical bit of Herring having his cake and
eating it – he won’t respond to fundamentalists who think anyone who
jumped from the burning Twin Towers committed suicide and are thus going
to Hell.
But
if he did respond, he would say it like this… We’re all egotists who
struggle to imagine life continuing without us, he maintains, but
overlooking Herring’s now customary masturbation material, he becomes
agitated imagining his obituary on the Chortle website, gleefully
rattling through a series of headline puns that will probably be
guaranteed at least one usage when he finally shuffles off his mortal
coil.
Although
he doesn’t linger on the recent passing of his grandmother, there is
poignancy in the experiences of death he once shared with comedy writer
Peter Baynham, reflecting that there’s absolutely nothing comedians
won’t joke about in each other’s company.
A
couple of set-pieces, focused on a scarcely credible magazine that
tries to make the Holocaust seem as mundane as train-spotting, and the
childhood nursery rhyme, There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly, feel
really tangential. Only the first is worthwhile; the latter’s
predictable, and rather interminably drags out the end of the show. But
that’s a minor quibble and as Herring concludes his tenth solo hour at
the Fringe, you’re forced to reflect that there is plenty of life in the
old dog yet.
