Edinburgh International Festival Fringe - Mind blowing comedy at The Stand (original) (raw)

In his new comedy show ‘Robin Ince is In (and out of) His Mind’, Ince explains that the human mind is one of the most complex organisms in the Universe. This week’s sell-out show at Edinburgh’s Stand comedy Club left the audience in no doubt that Ince’s mind is in a league of complexity all its own.

He took the audience on a comedic magical mystery tour, full of intriguing ideas, scientific questioning and random cul-de- sacs.

He covered a mind-boggling array of subjects from the cerebral to the silly, as intellectual as the writings of Kafka and as banal as his stint as toilet monitor on the Scotrail train to Perth. The pace and content of this show made for an exhilarating ride.

Ince often cites himself as the ‘interested idiot’, so his voyage of discovery and self-discovery through psychology and the science of the mind doesn’t assume any prior knowledge, and anyway takes so many random detours and daft observations (including one about the Undersecretary to the Tooth Fairy) that no -one is left feeling inadequate. His humour is warm and inclusive, impulsive and erratic, but always face -achingly funny.

We often talk about comedians having excellent comic timing, but Ince’s version of comic timing is to talk as fast as he can in order to squeeze as many laughs as humanly possible.

As always, there was so much humour and so little time, this show seemed to be the tip of the iceberg of brain-based humour to come. This bodes very well for August and the madness of the Fringe, where we can roll up and do it all again, with even more new material for Ince to pack into his two week stint at The Stand.

But for tonight the audience left The Stand gasping for air, as the laughs per minute and the speed of topic changes left them hot, breathless and happy. Not bad going for a lecture about the brain. I might even have learned something too.

Robin Ince’s Blooming Buzzing Confusion is at The Stand 31st July-12th August 16.25pm