Happy Now?

Richard Herring has finally gotten everything he spent his adult life avoiding: a wife, a baby, and a comfortable domestic routine. Naturally, this development has done absolutely nothing to quiet his over-active mind. Instead of enjoying domestic bliss, Herring spends his stage time imagining his infant daughter being skewered by a stalactite of frozen urine dropped from a commercial airliner, or trying to calculate the exact ethics of committing adultery with a future sex android.

Filmed at St David’s Hall in Cardiff, this was Herring’s twelfth solo stand-up show in twelve years. By 2016, his career had found a second life as a podcast pioneer, but his stage work remained remarkably consistent. Rather than relying on standard parenting clichés about sleepless nights, he uses fatherhood to feed his trademark self-consciousness, testing baby-pleasing noises on the crowd and analyzing a mundane welcome mat owned by his in-laws.

While the show leans heavily on dark thoughts about early parenthood, it also leaves room for a few digs at his former double-act partner Stewart Lee and some questionable remarks about Princess Anne. Reviews were warm, if slightly more reserved than for some of his highly conceptual past work, noting that while the subject matter is more traditional, his pedantic style remains intact.