Richard Herring - The Best
It’s a testament to Richard Herring that he can sell out two nights at Norwich’s premier home of comedy with a show entirely made up of highlights from previous tours. He is not looking to knock Michael McIntyre off the TV or Wembley shows, but is a hard working funny man with a strong pedigree and a clever twist on observational humour.
After the customary “announce your own triumphant arrival” over the tannoy, Richard bounded out to a generous and warm reception. Norwich clearly loves Herring, and the feeling is mutual by the sounds of it, as he found time in a packed set delivered at sometimes breakneck speed to big up the Fine City and namecheck the library in the Forum amongst other landmarks. I had taken a risk and invited my 14 year old daughter to see the show with me, a decision that took me close to the limits of where entertainment meets outrageous awkwardness.
Riffing on how children can’t possibly love their parents due to kids having no empathy and only being out for themselves swiftly led to describing all sorts of objects and entities being loveable to a mother provided they fall unbidden from her front bum. Spangles, for instance, and few bridge the chasm between nostalgia and avant garde street philosophy as the much championed boiled sweets of yesteryear. My daughter loved it though, and hasn’t fallen into moral decay as Mary Whitehouse may have predicted.
At the first jump from one routine to the next, he headed us up with a snappy line about grinding the gears, allowing all the future transitions to occur with the knowledge that we knew how it was going to roll.
The brilliant section on the mathematical nightmare of buying his girlfriend Ferrero Rocher squared on Valentine's Day was delivered hilariously and had the whole crowd roaring, despite the certainty that most in the Playhouse had heard him do the same section in his Meaning Of Life show from 2014. And this was the one of the issues with the show for me - we’d only be seeing routines we already knew, so with the delight of fresh wit eliminated, we relied on his skilful performance and stagecraft. Another thing was the amount of time required to allow for audience rapport and delivery of gags ensured that his words were blurring as they emerged, machine gunning out of his mouth. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, with a professional writer and performer like RH, the show has a linked arc, where little gags dropped in the beginning and middle all become coherent by the end as the point becomes clear. His Hitler Moustache and Christ On A Bike shows were huge critical hits and engaged on socially important points as well as making you howl. The point here was to do a show, sell tickets and keep the name fresh but I felt it was less than the sum of its parts, however naturally funny he is and how great the individual highlights were.
If Richard returns with a new production I will be there like a shot, his passion for the work and natural gift with delivering humour remain. I doubt anyone left the show without wiping away some tears of laughter, so in many ways job done, but a sense of spontaneity and anarchy was missing for me.
