An inveterate wearer of bow-ties, he looks and sounds like a lively, slightly abrasive, polemical American journalist with a literary and libertarian bent.
Scholarly in approach, sceptical in tone and polemical in intent, this is a forceful and entertaining survey of how blockbuster exhibitions are upstaging the traditional role of museums by a highly respected art historian who died earlier this year.
But if Le Canard is all about scoops and unreported secrets, Charlie is both cruder and crueller - deploying a melange of cartoons and an often vicious polemical wit.
The polemical edge is unrelenting: deregulation of the financial markets was a disaster, and piling collateralized debt obligations and insurance swaps atop sub-prime mortgages was insane.
Mr Herring reckons that audiences are tired of being lectured at by 80s-style polemical comics and so he is planning to keep the political stuff in his act to a minimum.