4490/17409
It was Mother's Day, but when will it be Father’s Day? Predictably this comment filled up most of my Twitter timeline today, but I didn’t rise to it. Like Father Christmas I work for just one day a year. Unlike Father Christmas I do it on March 8th and it’s not a public holiday. But one day I hope it will be. Because of me and not because of International women. (I will consider working on November 19th too, but in a much more half-hearted fashion).
I was delighted that my wife got to enjoy her first Mother’s Day. She certainly deserves to be heralded for everything she’s been through already. Phoebe has still failed to earn any money in her first five weeks of life (so is well behind on the rent) so I had to buy some presents to be from her yesterday and add that to the bill. And she was all smiles this morning which in some ways is better than money. But in most ways not as good.
I made another Sunday roast and ate too much roasted garlic like last week, meaning Giles was going to have to put up with more pungent burps on the way to Bristol (it’s OK, I opened the window).
In all the excitement of my wife being a mum I had almost forgotten that my mum was a mum too. There are flowers on the way, but they won’t arrive until tomorrow. I hope she can forgive me. But when I spoke to her on the phone even she said she had been planning to tweet me and ask when Father’s Day was. Whenever it may be, I am going to have to go some to deserve my own celebration. If Phoebe is reading this I don’t want any handmade shit. And if possible I’d prefer cash as a gift. Plus the balance of what you owe me.
I wish everywhere in the country loved me as much as Bristol. I am doing two gigs here on the tour and they both sold out well in advance (I am now doing another gig in Clevedon on May 2nd). I suppose I am technically local, but it can’t be that as the Cheddar gig was only half full. I am glad they have taken me to their hearts here though as they are genuinely one of the best and most discerning comedy audiences going (but then I would say that). I was back at the Tobacco Factory for the first time in a couple of years and they’ve had a swanky refit. It was another playful gig. As I explained that I was no fan of dance and that any professional dancer should be ashamed of themselves a voice piped up from the darkness, “But what if one of your ushers is also a dancer?” It amused me that I was being heckled by the staff and I made a bit of play out of that before, not quite quickly enough observing, “I guess if an usher is also a dancer, then they’re probably not that good a dancer.” It got the requisite laugh and boos that it deserved, though I wished out loud that I had come up with it straight away. I amused myself with a couple of other ad-libs 9and this is all about entertaining myself, right?), and though I had expected to be fatigued I got through it all with energy to spare.
I think I have made the decision to cut the “arse” routine in the second half - you can read a shorter version of it here -
http://metro.co.uk/2013/07/12/richard-herring-i-cant-get-to-the-bottom-of-this-drunk-mans-vision-3878417/. I haven’t been doing it at all the gigs and the end of the show seems to flow better without it. There’s maybe just one too many ranting routines in the show and this one has the least connection to any of the other material, apart from it being about the sad uselessness and inertia of middle age, which subtly permeates through the piece. Again it’s something that no one else has noticed or remarked upon, but much of the material is about the battle between the child and the adult, sometimes within myself, sometimes as me being a child fighting against an adult, sometimes me being the adult being bettered by the child and in the case of International Men’s Day, me being the adult, bettering the child within other men. And ultimately there is a change in the air after having co-created a child and being forced to reconsider my place in the world and in time.
The tour show is different to the Edinburgh show, which ended with a death which I did not get up from and felt for me as being quite symbolic of where I was at professionally and certainly during the Fringe. Was my job all about trying to recreate or recaputure something from my youth? Now I had created a child was I going to have to grow up and move on? Was the clown inside me dead? And was I really dead at the end or would the King of Edinburgh rise again like the Lord of the Dance Settee and return?
I suppose the “arse” routine does fit into that version of the show. it’s about a man trying to recapture something lost through the arse of a stranger, just as I considered recapturing my youth by foolishly attempting to recreate my best ever joke. I like the wistfulness, but maybe there’s enough wistfulness elsewhere in the show.
In the Fringe version the death was perhaps permanent (for Edinburgh at least), but on tour I am not able to do the same ending and the show no longer feels like the end of something for me. I have an idea for the DVD recording where I will be able to do the full ending for an extra gag at the end of all the other cascading back references. I will probably reinstate the arse routine for that gig, but apart from that I think Bristol will be its last outing. I will put up the recording on the next Lord of the Dance Settee podcast.
Like some of the jokes it seems that all the internal meaningfulness of the show is only for myself. It’s a happy show with an undercurrent of sadness, but it seems to be getting solid laughs throughout and a great reaction. Getting laughs is the most important part of my job, but I am glad this show has room for some routines that aren’t going for that all the time. I’d say it was my most intricate and cleverest show, but maybe you need to see it 100 times before you realise this. All the reviewers say it’s just a load of unconnected stories.
They might be right, but though the Edinburgh experience was a bit depressing (though doing the actual show was always fun) this has been one of my most enjoyable tours in performance terms. Another 12 years of solo stand up and I reckon I might be quite good at it.
