Richard The Fish

Herring feels the tide turn

In poker, suckers are known as 'fish'. They don’t know the odds, don’t grasp the dynamics, and push in their chips on bluffs that make no sense.  But they’re valuable to the table because they keep the money flowing. The longer they stay in, the bigger the other stacks grow. Poker players don't make their living off each other; they make their living off the fish.

A fan who attended comedian Richard Herring’s recent Northampton show sent me a letter that, I have to say, cheered me up no end. Herring, a fellow poker player and once a friend, walked on stage thinking he was playing a home game—familiar faces, predictable hands, no real risk. But when he made what he thought was a fairly standard bet on sex being a spectrum, and men being women if they say so, the room went cold. My friend’s description of the evening is familiar to anyone who's watched a once-loved performer lose the room, not because they took a risk—Herring doesn’t take risks—but because they fell into lockstep with suddenly outdated dogma.

Herring had the audience with him for the first half-hour. Then, apropos of nothing, he launched into his lecture on gender. He told the crowd that sex is a spectrum, that some people are born with two penises, or both sets of genitals, and that what made him a man was how he felt in his head. This was met with a sudden, venue-sized silence.

Then, he rolled out one of his regular jokes, which compares me to Hitler. I guess it must have once killed for it to still turn up in his act, because I heard about the joke a couple of years ago. In it, I feature in a list of evil “one-balled men” in which he includes his own name for cover. Aside from “a few scattered whoops”, the audience fell silent and waited for the moment to pass. But it never did. The mood had shifted.

“Inevitably, I thought of the perfect heckle about 5 minutes after I could have used it” my informer told me. “When he said that being a man was in his head, I should have shouted 'bollocks' into the silence. So annoyed with myself.”

For years now, Richard Herring has been the perfect fish for gender ideologues. They’ve let him think he’s one of the clever ones—an insider, party to the holy scriptures which seem to be perfectly understood only by careerist midwits (see also: Jon Ronson, Adam Buxton, Russell T Davies). He’s been encouraged to sneer at people like me from the safety of the stage, flicking out the occasional insult to show his loyalty to the mob.

On this particular evening, Richard The Fish was feeling the tide turn in real time. In a frantic bid to deflect from the gender lecture, he joked about Dara Ó Briain being “this generation’s Jimmy Savile.” Again, the crowd went quiet. “Not even an isolated gasp,  just confusion.” Another bluff caught by his normally cheerful fans. 

At the show's end, Herring told the crowd that if they didn’t enjoy the evening, he didn’t care—it was only 90 minutes of their lives. It's hard to imagine a clearer admission of failure. Not just failure to entertain, but failure to read the room, and failure to grasp what the room had just told him.

What’s most pathetic isn’t that Herring said these things. It’s that he's convinced even himself that he believes them. He believes that sex is a social construct, that stating otherwise is bigotry, and that anyone who questions fashionable middle-class manners deserves ridicule. He's not alone, of course. Stewart Lee, Aisling Bea, Bill Bailey, Sara Pascoe, Bridget Christie, Josie Long... a generation of comedians fell for one of the most destructive hoaxes of our time. And worse, they used their platforms to promote it.

The hoax, of course, is gender ideology: the belief that sex is not binary, that male and female are feelings, that the most basic truths about human biology are hateful. It’s a belief system without internal logic or external evidence, sustained only by intimidation and the illusion of consensus.

It’s done immense damage. To free speech. To comedy. To journalism. But most tragically, to children—especially autistic children, nascent gay children, children struggling with trauma, or discomfort, or ordinary adolescence. These children have been told that they were born in the wrong body. That a lifetime of hormones and surgeries will bring them peace. That those trying to protect them are evil. That suicide awaits if they don't get exactly what they want.

And this memetic virus spread in plain sight, carried by charities, influencers, celebrities, NGOs, and comedians like Herring. But the lawsuits are beginning. The victims are speaking out. The room, slowly, is starting to turn, and Herring is destined to become a warning of how bright minds can be dimmed by ideology and fear.

He still thinks he’s bluffing his way through a friendly game, unaware that the stakes have changed, the buy-ins are real, and the chips on the table are women and children’s lives. He can still fold. He can still apologise. He can still say: I got this one wrong. I believed the wrong people. I ignored the experts. I failed to ask the most basic questions. He can still do the right thing.

But every hand he plays without doing so makes the final apology all the more difficult to reach. And soon, all that will remain is the silence of his audience, the damage he and others wrought, and the slow understanding that all the time he thought he was playing the game, he was really just the fish.

(Thanks to Spiked for publishing this first!)