I have enjoyed the comedy of Richard Herring for many years. He used to do surreal TV shows with Stewart Lee and these days is a prolific podcaster. His Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (aka RHLSTP) has had him interviewing loads of comedians and other interesting people. I have been to see one of his touring shows.
A couple of years back he learnt he had testicular cancer and his book, Can I Have My Ball Back, tells that story.
You might expect this to be a grim read, but it is pretty funny. There are serious parts though as he was worried about how survival this would be, especially as he has quite young children who might forget him. He is about my age, but married late. His daughter could have a future in comedy based on some of the lines she comes out with.
Each chapter ends with some facts about testicles in history and culture. There have been some strange beliefs about them. He does like to bring humour into everything and it seems he did wonder if he could get some material from his experience. Luckily he is okay now, so he could. I enjoyed the book and it gave some nice background to a guy I have listed to a lot. I know he sometimes runs one of the local parkrun events, so maybe I will bump into him and can thank him.
Part of my recent viewing was The Menu that we watched on Disney+ at the weekend.
We went in knowing little about it and had not even seen the trailer. I find that can be a good thing as they can give too much away. A load of different, but mostly rich, people go to an exclusive restaurant on an island and then things get strange. I really do not want to give much away, but it is something like an Agatha Christie story where you know bad things will happen.
It is a very stylish movie with fancy food dreamt up by a real top chef. It is labelled as a comedy horror and I did laugh, but perhaps more in amazement than for what I would normally consider funny.
It was entertaining, but in a very different way to the book above. What I like about movies is that they just take up a couple of hours of your life and so even if they are not great you did not lose a lot. I did not think this one was time wasted. I am more picky about the books I read as those have a bigger demand on my time.
This may surprise some people, but I am only just starting to watch Firefly, also on Disney+. I know it is about twenty years old, but I never got around to it. I think I saw the later movie, but would need to see it again to refresh my memory. So far I am enjoying it. It really seems like a western in space, but so are lots of other things, including some of the Star Wars stories. I shall report on my impressions when I have watched it all. There is only one season, but it may take a few weeks as I tend not to binge.