Richard Herring

UK Comedian

From an 3-Apr-2002 profile [1] in the Australian The Age titled 'In a Road to comic Calvary' by Stephanie Bunbury:

Herring's pere is the starting point for [his show] 'Christ on a Bike'. As he tells it on stage, he has spent many an evening haranguing his dad about how self-evidently bogus Christianity is, how the stories in the Bible simply do not hang together - "what happened to that gold, frankincense and myrrh?" he demands. "Isn't that a rollover lottery win? It's such obvious bollocks! I have to show its stupidity, that he's wasted his life."

Whereupon his mother's voice pops up from a laptop on stage saying something to the effect that "if it's such rubbish, why are you obsessed with it?"

It's a fair point. "I was fairly confident in my atheism from an early age," he says, "but I did spend a lot of time reading the Bible. There was a phase when I read a bit each night."

So he starts off by asking how many believers there are in the audience; there is a tiny sprinkle of hands in New Milton, including the man in front of me who is, quite obviously, a vicar; he laughs helplessly at everything. "People of religious feeling generally like it," Herring says afterwards.