RICHARD HERRING - TALKING COCK

Kate Copstick - The Scotsman

HAS anyone else noticed how much dick there is around at this year’s Fringe? Or is it just me? I have to admit I am delighted, because men do the whole sex thing so much better than women. And, this year, some of them are doing it very well.

Talking Cock, says Richard "Dick" Herring, is "like a male version of the Vagina Monologues". Well, no, it isn’t. It is not at all like the Vagina Monologues, I am delighted to say. Talking Cock grinds no axe and attributes no blame, it is not sexist or judgmental or remotely smug. Despite Herring’s early endeavours to incite the boys "into an outburst of misogyny", his Cock is as funny and fascinating for women as it is for men. I loved it. I only wished it could have been longer. But more of the size question later.

The show runs on parallel lines to Eve Ensler’s famous Beatification of the Bearded Clam. We get "Cock Facts", where she gave "Vagina Facts". But while the sisterhood cheered and chanted the rubric that the clitoris has more than three times the number of nerve endings than there are in the penis; we learned that 65 per cent of men admit to trying to suck their own penises but only 16 per cent manage it; we heard that the reason most women give for wishing they had a penis is the ability to urinate standing up; that 35 per cent of men have faked orgasm, and that 23 per cent of women say they would end a relationship if a man’s penis was too small.

Herring put a questionnaire on the internet and uses the anonymous answers - there were more than 1,500 of them - as the main "meat" of his piece. But they do say it is not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it and what Herring does is entertain and engage. And he keeps it up for an hour.

My only disappointment of the night was discovering that the average penis is only 6.81ins erect.

Source - Scotsman Online