Happy Now?
Go Faster Stripe · 2016 · 1 h 42 min
A neurotic comic tries to survive his new domestic bliss.
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.
The set list
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Catastrophic parental anxieties, including a baby being impaled by falling airplane waste.
Examines why the human brain forces parents to imagine worst-case disasters, such as an infant being skewered by a stalactite of frozen urine dropped from a plane.
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Childbirth and Eve's punishment.
Contemplates the excruciating pain of labor and questions why, if childbirth pain was meant to punish Eve for eating the apple, Herring's wife has to endure it as well.
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Meeting people in the manner of childbirth.
Draws comedy from his newborn daughter emerging screaming from his wife's vagina and compares the scene to meeting an adult stranger at a party in the exact same manner.
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The ethics of infidelity with sex robots.
Investigates the philosophical line of cheating by comparing sex with a blow-up doll versus a humanoid robot resembling Gemma Chan from the TV series Humans.
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Deconstructing the 'Five Little Monkeys' nursery rhyme.
Applies pedantic logic to the rhyme, picturing a doctor repeatedly returning to investigate recurring monkey head injuries and parental negligence.
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Happy the dwarf.
Ruminates on the relentless pressure placed on the Snow White dwarf named Happy to continuously live up to his moniker.
How it plays
- Tone
- Playful, thought-provoking, dark, and analytical.
- On stage
- Traditionally disgruntled demeanor clashing with newfound happiness, blending serial childishness with dark comic riffs and obsessive pedantry.
- Pace
- Rapid-fire delivery that rarely dropped below 100mph.
- About
- the nature and fleeting value of happiness, fatherhood and domesticity, parental anxieties and morbid intrusive thoughts, technological and philosophical aspects of infidelity
What the critics said
Praised by multiple reviewers for avoiding hack parenting tropes, delivering thought-provoking philosophical inquiries into happiness, and retaining a dark comedic edge; one regional review found parts of the live tour relying on mundane observations.
In the room: Superb, energetic response from a packed room marking the biggest live crowd of his career.
Backstory
Herring's life shifted towards domesticity after getting married and becoming a father for the first time in 2015, prompting an existential examination of whether contentment dulls a comic's edge.
Details
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