RICHARD Herring has tackled all the big subjects: religion, politics, love, school days, the male appendage, loneliness, moustaches, hitting 40, supporting York City.

Like his former partner in comedy, Stewart Lee, he is a thinker first, an ideas man, with plenty to say without the convention of always having to have a punchline. Instead a sting in the tale will often suffice instead.

It has become rather too much the norm for comedians new to fatherhood to feel the need to talk about the wonders of being a dad. Only a fortnight ago in York, for example, Paddy McGuinness was presenting Daddy McGuinness at the Grand Opera House.

As is his wont, Herring takes the Harold Wilson philosophy to life, where the Prime Minister was "an optimist but one who always takes an umbrella just in case". Herring starts from the premise that, as he at last begins to embrace the conventional path through adult life, with a wife and sensible jumpers and the arrival of a baby daughter at 47, should he by happy now?

Happiness doesn't work like that, he decides. There is no tick list or wish list to complete to find a place called nirvana. Instead, suggests Herring, we can have only moments of happiness, rather than eternal bliss, and a good start point to finding happiness is a state of unhappiness. Experience tells him too that a child's happiness, a baby's gurgling laugh, is a thing of innocence, soon to be shattered by the breath of reality.

All of these points could have been made by a philosopher, but the role of the comic - the doomsday fool in Shakespeare's plays – is to make us laugh as well as think, rather than lecture us, but Herring's show kept trying too hard, stretching routines too far, for all his gifts of literacy and imagery.

Happy Now? would have worked much better at the regulation one-hour length of an Edinburgh Fringe show, where the comic focus has to be much tighter, whereas Friday night was full of preambles and rambles.

Is Herring happy now? He is enjoying fatherhood but fearful of what lies ahead for any child, and if York City miraculously avoid the dreaded drop, happiness will be his, albeit briefly, as football fans of all but the moneyed elite know only too well.

Why do people go to watch comedians? To feel happy in that moment; to cheer themselves up; to forget their troubles; to have a laugh; to see life through different eyes;p the reasons are familiar, but even joy that is fleeting. Irritation can take over as soon as you are stuck in car-park queue.

What's more, not finding a comedian funny can be a route to unhappiness the more he rabbits on. In Herring's case, he had moments of perceptive humour, but lulls too, a case of happy now, then not happy now, happy now, then...