Richard Herring’s ‘Talking Cock’: The Comedy of Audacity
Warning: contains language which ought not to be considered vulgar, but is.
Audacity and offence share several commonalities and can serve, or at least seem to serve, many of the same functions: Each challenges taboos and tests our unspoken anathemas to breaking and beyond by causing shock and outrage, fury and disbelief, both can breach the social code built up in the politenesses we use to distance and deny our fearfulness around the more static cultural mores we are ingrained with as well as the affront to those self-same values which is presented by change or progress in any form. As the rather excellent Catie Wilkins will be saying a lot in August as part of her Edinburgh Fringe show (of which I saw a preview when she opened for Richard Herring at the Chapter Arts Centre) “jokes form around points of tension in society” (I may be misremembering it as “society” instead of “culture” – Honest Thom) and thus the jokes that draw their weight from such tensions can only be transgressive in content, if not form. The difference between audacity and offensiveness comes then, as is often the case, in intent.
But intent and effect cannot be untangled easily; particularly since audacity implies a level of offence being expected, if not desired, even and perhaps especially when the audacity is used to bolster an undesirable or oft-ignored truth, whereas the will to cause offence speaks to a certain impersonal and ruthless audacity. Still, in terms of the aforementioned points of tension around which the respective comedies of audacity and offence coalesce, the two take very different tacks. The comedy of audacity, when used towards its more admirable potential, can take a subject which has become either too contentious or too blindly accepted and force the audience to confront the various absurdities inherent in the prejudices which such tensions always involve when seen as a battle between extremes. Instead new sets of parameters, focused on the common ground between the various intersectionalities, are offered; the militancy and dogmatism on oppositely bigoted sides revealed as the limiting factors for progress through dissection of their inevitably self-defeating axioms.
In this field Richard Herring, along with others including his former double-act partner Stewart Lee, is an enthusiastic proponent. In his show Hitler Moustache (famously misrepresented by a single decontextualized quote in The Guardian and from which I recommend following the link to his response) he uses the language and the rhetoric of facism to demonstrate how laughably absurd such bigotry and hate really is. The following year’s Christ on a Bike rationally tears chunks out of Christianity whilst portraying Herring as petty for doing so, leading up to his conclusion that the moral weight of holy texts, taken alongside the sense to recognise the difference between absolute and relative ethical laws, provides a perfectly reasonable platform by which to lead a life regardless of how the metaphysics are observed. He even has the temerity to be hilarious while making these points. His latest offering, Talking Cock, a revival of a 2003 show, has a less-lofty but possibly even more affecting impact.
In it he discusses, exhaustively, the myths and misconceptions around the penis and its anatomy as well as making reference to an on-going survey (here for those with cocks or here for those with cunts. If you’re fortunate enough to have both then you can complete both/either or none) to normalise a discussion and an understanding of the penis absent hyperbole and exaggeration, absent shame or self-loathing or embarrassment and without judgement in what was motivated as an long-resisted answer to The Vagina Monologues which, although I enjoyed it, was far less celebratory of the cunt’s potential for pleasure nor anywhere near as sex-positive that this phallic alternative, seeming to see the cunt as much a vulnerability as something to be enjoyed. Like The Vagina Monologues there was some audience participation involved with all men exhorted to shout “we love our cocks”, all such-inclined women to shout out “we love your cocks” and all gay and bisexual men asked to shout “we love our cocks and your cocks”.
The last fell somewhat flat as only a single voice shouted a slightly pained variant; “we love our cocks and your cocksohshit…” as they realised they had no-one shouting with them. At which mine lone voice (pull-back and reveal: IT WAS THE AUTHOR HIMSELF! or; I tend to self-identify as “mostly-straight” or “picky queer”, if you’re shopping for a suitable coming-out card) was zoned-in on by every pair of eyes in the room, including those of the man standing in the spot-light and brandishing a microphone, amidst peals of laughter. But I realised, much-later and only once my mortification had subsided, that the laughs had belonged to the elision of “cocks”, “oh” and “shit”, rather than the unprecedented confession (both from me to a public sphere and from Cardiff’s audiences (or so as I was informed by a friend who had attended the previous night’s show where deathly silence followed the opportunity to speak out)); that night the idea of a cock no longer disgusted even performatively heterosexual men, of whom some two-thirds had it seemed tried to suck their own at some point.
Without the context of the show, even in this post, some might find themselves disagreeing with my opening disclaimer and might find the inclusion of the words penis, vagina, cock and cunt offensive. Nonetheless audacity, or rather the comedy of audacity, can create a space in which taboos themselves, and hence the hang-ups and neuroses and misinformation and misjudgements which accrete around everything furtive can, over time, be forgotten. The comedy of offence, on the other hand, takes these points of contention and exploits any ill-will, misunderstanding and hate that they engender and confirms the fallacies, establishing an us-and-them dialectic in which the “us” is buoyed by the mockery of the “them” (I refer you to the “Mock the Weak” pun from the second series of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle). The laughs in these cases are drawn from an apparent release of these tensions which, in fact, are only an addition to the stigma upon the “them”, a deepening of the underlying distances between people. Audacity isn’t always effective, it’s easily mistaken for offence, and nor do stand-up comedians work solely in one voice or the other, but where it falls short it can at least claim meritorious resolve.
Excellent post.