Full review here https://www.thereviewshub.com/richard-herring-can-i-have-my-ball-back-the-stand-glasgow/#google_vignette
Six years on from Richard Herring’s last tour and plenty has changed.
Covid temporarily checked a bit of a Taskmaster-led career resurgence
for him. And his young kids have developed wildly different attitudes
towards their father. His son hero-worships his dad. But his daughter is
dismissive of her progenitor, scribbling sketches in which he perishes
in unimaginable pain.
Most memorably, after enduring testicular
cancer, Herring has joined the ranks of the monoballed, a select club
that he wryly acknowledges contains some of the worst people in history.
With
testicular cancer having a 99% survival rate however, much grimness is
drained from the story early. Still, less than optimum communication
during his diagnosis and treatment meant that he temporarily spiralled
into fear about dying, his children growing up and not recalling him
properly and another man replacing him in is wife’s bed while raiding
his liquor cabinet.
Meanwhile, alongside his upbeat but insistent
message that any men who spot something untoward on their genitals get
themselves quickly checked by their GP, he refers to a late friend with a
similarly young family who wasn’t so lucky.
In many respects though, Can I Have My Ball Back? is familiar territory for Herring. His 2002 show, Talking Cock,
was an enthusiastic celebration and exploration of the penis. And he
has equal fun contriving puns for the less glamorous bits of men’s
intimate anatomy. Before he was even properly diagnosed he’d begun
conceiving this show and the accompanying book.
In short, Herring
is well practised in delivering an irreverent 90 minutes on the
destabilising realisation that his “murderous gonad” was trying to kill
him, while affording all due emotional attention to the impact that it
could have had upon his wife and children.
A long-established,
impish satirist of masculine swagger and the whine of touchily
defensive, male bleating espoused by fellow monoballer Nigel Farage, he
repeatedly mocks the idea that the scrotum is anything for men to take
excessive pride in, or that he is in any way compromised by misplacing a
bollock.
Scores of men have reportedly fainted hearing Herring’s
account of the actual operation to remove his rogue knacker. Yet in
essence, and given that it took place during the testing times of Covid
and with the occasional bump in the road, his story seeks to reassure
others who might undergo this bleak journey and entertainingly succeeds.
Illustrated
with sparing slides, video and a closing set-piece that showcases
Herring’s recently acquired, doubtful skill as a ventriloquist (in a
satisfying extension of the notion of family legacy and what we pass on
to our loved ones), Can I Have My Ball Back? is a frequently
silly, consistently funny and highly personal account of a difficult
experience, cheerfully rendered with warmth, wit and a really grotesque
puppet.
