Thurs 3 Mar
words: NOEL GARDNER
Richard Herring’s strain of standup comedy, awkward and self-examining as it is, has always made it obvious that its narrator has a puppyish desire to please. So when he tells a sold-out Glee Club that Cardiff is one of his very favourite places to perform, you may assume it a mere bit of boilerplate banter, where the town’s name is changed each night. On the other hand, as he notes, “I film most of my DVDs here” – it’s true, a local posse called Gofasterstripe do them, one as recently as November – so he might actually mean it.
What, then, do citizens of the capital get that differs from his standard Christ On A Bike show, bearing in mind that this is (a) one date on a typically lengthy tour and (b) a revisiting of a show that he debuted at Edinburgh in 2001? Well, a considerable amount of adlibbing around the show’s middle, especially notable for enviously laying into Paddy McGuinness and the “awful women who go to his shows and have sex with him.” I’m sure that Herring is well above that sort of behaviour, but either way this segment displays most of the facets that fuel his comedy: passive aggression, having one’s cake and eating it, devil’s advocacy. Which reads like a prelude to a slating, until you remember how much personality flaws can make for great standup.
Christ On A Bike lasts almost two hours and features an interval, as did his previous show at the Glee, Hitler Moustache. They share an essentially similar formula, and both spend time wondering why humans are so susceptible to dogma based on questionable logic. Hitler Moustache agonised over fascism; COAB is puzzled at religion, mainly Christianity. Herring’s churchgoing childhood, and his memories of how it all began to seem absurd to him, means he can draw on personal anecdotes, a seam he mines well. His residual guilt at upsetting his parents by rejecting their belief system is a source for laughs here, albeit the kind you could imagine being rewritten for the shrink’s settee.
It’s not, ultimately, a ‘heavy’ show. Herring’s persona is not built for sincerely dark comedy, and he is an absurdist at heart. The title comes from a long yarn about a dream where Herring and Jesus race each other on bicycles; there’s an aside about the amount of Communion wafers and wine you’d have to consume to equal the body mass of Christ (I’m compelled to point out this is a reheated joke from the mid-90s Fist Of Fun £25-on-eBay comedy cash-in book). The length of the opening sentence in the New Testament proves to Herring that it lacked an editor.
He also reads a couple of letters from the terminally outraged, warning him of the grave consequences of mocking Christianity. This straddles the line between goofy and serious, and should resonate with anyone who’d made the trip down from Aberdare for this show: Herring was due to perform there next month, but the venue deemed COAB too controversial and cancelled the date. Always a shame for a CAREFUL NOW placard to go unused, but more to the point, they missed out on a very funny and well-crafted comedy show.