Comic's Hitler Moustache was an inspiration

Amy Gledhill has revealed that she wrote her university dissertation about Richard Herring’s stand-up show Hitler Moustache.

Before becoming a comedian, Gledhill studied at Leeds University’s School of Performance and Cultural Industries, based at Bretton Hall in Yorkshire, whose  alumni includes The League of Gentlemen, Joe Kent-Walters, Mark Thomas and Natasia Demetriou.

However, Gledhill admitted she initially struggled with the ‘wanky course’ where they were encouraged to ‘all go dance in the woods and devise theatre’ and with the fact that everyone on it seemed to be from London.

‘I’d never interacted with anyone who wasn’t a working-class kid and I didn’t understand,’ she told Russell Howard on his Five Brilliant Things podcast. ‘I was a bit like "What’s this? Why are we doing that? That’s daft. I thought we were going to do reading scripts and that, what do you mean dance?"

But after her initial reluctance to dive in, she confessed she ‘was the most pretentious of everyone’.

She wrote her dissertation on the power of performance to effect positive social change, having been inspired by Herring’s 2009 show. In it, he sought to reclaim the moustache favoured by both Hitler and Charlie Chaplin for comedy.

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Gledhill said the show inspired her to analyse ‘which was the best medium to talk about difficult things, is it comedy or is it something that’s more serious?’ and to conclude that ‘comedy is more able to effect a change’.

Hitler Moustache ‘just sort of blew my mind that a comedian was tackling [that] – it was when the BNP was coming up, and [the show] was funny’ she recalled.

‘I didn’t go and watch it to do my dissertation on it, I watched and was like "I think that’s changed my brain a bit that. I didn’t know comedians could effect social change".’

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 11 Feb 2026