Richard Herring: We’re All Going to Die! @ The Lowry, 28 Mar

Running on stage grinning like a mad man and screaming, “We’re all going to die,” Richard Herring announces the title of his new show about the end of our lives with glee and giddiness, starting at a breathless pace and not letting up until the somewhat jarring intermission breaks up proceedings.

A tireless performer, Herring is great fun, spitting vitriol, truths and indeed his own effluence as he passionately speaks on the subject that scares us most. He has a knack for taking inspiration from one thing and mining it for everything it’s worth (a ‘bookazine’ called Railways and the Holocaust offers up some comedy gold), finding gags in nooks and crannies lesser comics wouldn’t think to explore; such is his conviction and commitment to a bit that it never goes without big laughs.

Herring has been doing this for 24 years now, and although he is clearly having fun there is a sense of bitterness about his lot in life. He inhabits a strange halfway house between fame and cult. He makes light of the fact that his former comedy partner, Stewart Lee, is the darling of the Guardian reader and that Paddy McGuinness and Miranda Hart have viable television careers while he has to play to an audience of 400 – which is no paltry amount, but still seems to sting the performer.

When his ruminations on the nature and conventions of death almost always end in a reference to bumming or masturbating, it's not hard to see why he hasn’t quite made that leap back on to television. Though this problem is addressed in his own critique of Hamlet’s soliloquy in a skit that plays like one that wouldn’t quite make it on to Fist of Fun or This Morning with Richard Not Judy. He raises the bar so often for other comedians with his material, it’s just a shame he slinks underneath it sometimes by reverting to base humour.

A great stand-up whose relentless search for comedy takes in absolutely everything around us, venturing where others dare not tread with a 9/11 routine that sheds new light on who was going to Hell on that fateful day, Herring ends with an incongruous, almost theatrical piece that is at odds with the rest of his set. It's a shame, as it detracts from what is otherwise a masterful treatise on comedy and death.