Richard Herring – 21/02/09 (unedited)
Posted by jameskettle on February 21, 2009
Stewart Lee and Richard Herring used to make a lot of TV hay out of mock-deconstructing their comic partnership. It was, they said, necessary for any successful double act to make sure fake differences existed between them. So Lee adopted the role of a faintly caricatured chic intellectual, while Herring was the knockabout foil, forever lowering the tone with a stream of postmodern schoolboy innuendo. Post-split, both performers have continued to mine original and high-quality comedy out of these contrasting styles. As a stand-up, Herring‘s much more feisty and hands-on with the audience than his ever-deadpan erstwhile partner, and he’s still a master of the scholarly approach to crudity (watch out for his elegant treatise on the correct playground hand-gestures to symbolise different types of sexual activity). But he’s also always willing to push himself, often teasing his crowd by stretching out material seemingly way beyond its elastic limit. When it works, everything escalates to an irresistible climax – and when it doesn’t quite, you can find out exactly what went wrong by checking his compulsive (for reader and author) daily blog at richardherring.com.
