Richard Herring: Hitler Moustache

By Sarah Walters

Richard Herring: Hitler Moustache

Frog and Bucket

March 7, 2010

All of Richard Herring’s best shows start with an outrageous mission, but even his attempts to re-enact the 12 Labours of Hercules cannot steal the silly crown from his latest decision to grow a moustache like Adolf Hitler’s.

Seven months into life as the UK’s only owner of a toothbrush moustache, Herring’s attempts to reclaim it from the Nazis for its first wearer, Charlie Chaplin, have resulted in a studious polemic on racism – one that this modern history graduate and veteran of the comedy circuit didn’t really anticipate himself.

It’s controversial enough that he sports this ‘nasal welcome mat’ at all, but far from shying away from its implications, Herring plays devil’s advocate with our own prejudices.

The moustache is supported by an equally eyebrow-raising script – the kind that only a liberal comic like Herring could really get away with – that argues its way through a number of twisted truths.

Racists, he muses in the show’s biggest conceit, are less racist than liberals who claim everyone is equal but then insist on categorising us into 196 distinct nations (“For some racists, there’s only white and black,” he says. “You’re all 194 steps away from that utopia.”).

Hilarious

But it’s Herring’s skill at asides that make the show hilarious: his musings that Chaplin’s bowler hat might have ‘offset the evil’ of the toothbrush moustache, that Nick Griffin would be a good case study for the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? genealogy programme, and that the BNP’s use of a Polish spitfire in their campaign literature proves they ‘can’t even be racist properly’.

“We are a nation of immigrants,” he says. “All modern human life started 17,000 years ago back in Africa. In which case I think the BNP should **** off back where they came from.”

By far the most compelling part of the show, though, is when Herring convincingly turns his laughter platform into a soapbox, remonstrating with voters who dress their apathy up as protest but whose absence from the polling stations let the BNP into the European Parliament through the back door.

It’s an utterly stirring moment – one reminiscent of Chaplin’s own empowering appeal in his first talkie, The Great Dictator, a movie credited with galvanising the American war effort.

And perhaps that moustache really is nothing more than proof that Herring will do anything for a laugh. But the eye-opening exploration it provokes is well worth seven months of public ridicule.

Reviewed: Mon, 08 March, 2010