Review: Richard Herring, We’re All Going To Die! - Birmingham Glee Club
10 Mar 2014 12:20
Outrageous and thoughtful in equal measure, Richard Herring delighted his fans
****
There was no need for hecklers in the Glee Club on Sunday night as Richard Herring aimed more than enough putdowns at himself.
“Some people think it’s wrong to laugh at death,” he said wistfully during his mortality-themed show,” a lot of whom were in my audience in Wolverhampton last week...”
He also made a few pointed references to his more successful, “BAFTA-winning” ex-comedy colleague, Solihull’s Stewart Lee, while bemoaning his own luck.
But the self-deprecation was obviously an act. It didn’t really tally with the packed Glee Club crowd that roared its way through another confident and assured stand-up show that asked us to celebrate death as much as we celebrate life.
They seemed more than happy to be laughing at the grinning Reaper Herring’s take on what happens to us when we die (spoiler alert: not a lot, in his view).
He made easy sport of mocking hardline religious views of heaven and hell.
But there were also a few amusing detours, such as an exhaustively pedantic examination of the nursery rhyme ‘Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly’, and why her story just doesn’t check out.
And a leaf through one of the most inappropriate glossy magazines ever published, entitled Railways And The Holocaust, that resulted in an apoplectic and very funny rant from Herring.
For every thoughtful reflection on life (and lack of life), there were enough schoolboy sniggers to keep the most childish of audience members happy.
And that was perfectly demonstrated in the best section of the show, about the death of his beloved 102-year-old grandmother, which was by turns touching and utterly, unrepeatably crude.
