Edinburgh Fringe Preview: Robin Ince (original) (raw)

This could be an interesting show. Dammit, it will be an interesting show. The first time I saw Robin Ince he wasn't onstage, he was voting at the same polling station as me in the 1997 General Election. The next time I saw him he was supporting a relatively youthful Ricky Gervais and being slightly smutty in a schoolboyish way. At some point in the last decade Ince found a new voice. A questioning, philosophical one. I guess I first noticed this rebirth when he created the Book Club in the mid-noughties. At the start it was fairly frivolous, all Don Estelle autobiographies, whimsy and Josie Long playing Boggle. But gradually the cardigans crept in and the references to Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman became more frequent. These days Ince is comedy’s best-known boffin and fast-talking, multi-tasking deep thinker. He warms up here for one of his latest Fringe-bound shows, Robin Ince’s Blooming Buzzing Confusion, in which he attempts to explore the brain and establish what consciousness actually is. Normal people go to university to crack this conundrum, Ince does a comedy show. He is a complex performer, boasting the insecurities of your typical comedian but also an intellectual certainty that he is pursuing the right path. As he recently wrote on his blog: “I am the sort of person who finds doubt in an audience’s eyes when there is none. The chutzpah me and the paranoid I duel on many nights.” He is at the Camden Head tonight, with that other idiot’s thinking person or is it thinking person's idiot, Richard Herring.

Robin Ince is at The Stand III from July 29 - August 12. Tickets here.

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