Like a fine wine, Herring improves with age

By Bruce Dessau, Evening Standard 15.08.07

More reviews by Bruce Dessau

Bruce Dessau

Richard Herring has been coming to Edinburgh for 20 years, but this is his best show yet

Richard Herring

****

Richard Herring has been coming to Edinburgh for two decades, doing sketches, plays and cod-lectures, but his latest stand-up show, Oh F*ck, I'm 40, is his most successful yet.

It's not remotely cerebral, just a heartfelt assessment of what it is like to have a middle-aged body and puerile mind.

The scruffy commitment-phobe crams his set with a dense mix of pungent one-liners and extended examples of his kidult antics. He still feels 20 - "except when I'm walking upstairs" - but knows that time's winged chariot is about to mow him down.

So who can blame him for wanting to cling on by taking up skateboarding and wearing paunch-revealing T-shirts?

There is room for a seize-the-day moral, too. Though not before our hero has confessed to brawling badly in a Liverpool street with an academic, had an exquisitely sarcastic dig at Ricky Gervais and slotted in a topical stab at Chris Langham, which prompted gasps but mostly guffaws. Herring may be past it as a man, but as a comedian he is at his peak.