It isn't every comedy evening I attend that has the headline C-list act devoting a portion of his performance to quasi-sexual harassment-style "jokes" aimed directly at my girlfriend, but I assure you I haven't allowed the incident to affect the tone of the following review. Much.

Back in my "student daze" I thought Lee and Herring were so great that I bragged to my similarly besotted nerd pals that I'd seen them live, which was completely untrue.

Yeah, I liked them a lot, but then I liked a bunch of stuff in 1994 I don't really dig so much now - red jeans, Pop Tarts, Tony Blair. Times change. Richard Herring, apparently, does not.

The relentless post-modernism, the school-yard infantilism crashing up against clever-clever deconstructionism (the 'Do you see what I did there' school of comedy)...there is nothing here Fist Of Fun fans wouldn't recognise. The applying to be the new pope joke is in fact a very minimally reworked sketch from that very show. The post-September 11 era is not one which values irony, and Herring's set remains drenched in it. Gen X are stranded in a world where the very things they mocked - nave concepts like political conviction, caring about stuff, etc - are now highly prized.

Herring was frequently very funny, but the performance lacked anything approaching soul. Anti-comedy comedy is an inherently dead end methodology, and I have the unfortunate sense that the dead end has now been reached. Do you see what I did there?

Updated: 11:32 Tuesday, May 31, 2005