Instant Genius - Robin Ince: Inside the mind of a comedian

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

Comedians often take to the stage to talk about the quirks of the human race, and comedian Robin Ince has years of experience in that area. In his new book, he’s adding insights from neuroscientists and psychologists to talk about creativity, imagination, trauma and why people become comics in the first place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. visit name audio.com to learn more. And I had this little bit about talking about the fact that sometimes you look at your partner and you know you love each other, but you just get this little inkling that occasionally think, but would I be happier as a melancholy widow? And then my wife actually came to the show where I was probably going to talk about that, and I thought, oh God, I'm going to have to ask, but I'll either drop it or so I said, I've got this one bit where I just say, you know, that sometimes you look at your partner

and you just get an inkling, they're sometimes think, but would I be happy as a melancholy widow? Do you mind? She just laughed you and don't worry about that. I've spoken to loads of my friends and quite often we just wonder if we'll be happier if you lot were dead. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alice Ipscombe-Southwell, the production editor at BBC Focus magazine. Comedians often go out of their way to highlight their own absurdities and shortcomings, just for the sake of the audience's entertainment.

Because of that, comedian Robin Inns believes that comedy is a great platform from which to understand the peculiarities of the human race. In his new book, I'm a joke and so are you. He touches on trauma, anxiety and grief, as well as imagination, creativity and humour. He gets neuroscientists, psychologists and other comedians to weigh in on the quirks of the human mind. We talked to him about all of that, as well as about the role of comedy beyond just making people laugh, where to draw the line on offensive jokes and where the comedy and tragedy are inextricably linked. Here is BBC Focus's editorial assistant Helen Glennie talking to Robin Inns.

Robin, your new book is called I'm a Joke and So Are You, a comedian's take on what makes us human. So can you give me a rundown? What's the book about? Well, it started off. I was up at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and one night I was doing a show called Cheapest and Theron Theroner which was comedians talking as comedy as therapy, sometimes just about actually having therapy, lots of different kind of stand-up routines. And then in the interval, before I went on with an American comic called Eddie Pepitone to discuss mental health and comedy, the news came through that Robin Williams had taken his life. And so it was kind of one of those strange moments, and certainly Robin Williams was a huge influence on me and one of my icons.

cons when I was a teen and only two months before that, Rick Mail had died. And the next day I was looking at the way the newspapers reported it and they kept reporting about the fact that, oh, you know, tears of a clown, tragedy of a comedian, as if it's just part of the normal narrative that, of course, another comedian takes their life. And I thought that this was just, it's a very shallow take. And certainly with Robin Williams and a lot of the health issues he had to just say, oh, you know, the way it is with funny people. They spend so much time making other people laugh that eventually it turns them so bleak.

It got me just to thinking more and more about the fact that I think comedians are sometimes exaggerated versions of human beings, but there's nothing particularly different about them, apart from the fact that perhaps sometimes they talk about things more often. They have a card that basically is given to you when you walk on stage, the fact that if you want,

you can sometimes talk about quite weird things, eccentricities that you'd probably keep quiet in just a normal social circle environment. So they're quite good at using to go, right, hang on a minute, they talk about that. It seems to be making a link with the audience. They are exaggerated versions of human beings. So if we work backwards, we might come across a few more of the strange foibles of what makes us human, but which many of us keep private. So is this sort of using comedians as, because you described them as exaggerated versions of

human beings. It's sort of a case study for the whole human race. Well, that's what I hope is that by talking to comedians, I mean, I've been a comedian since I was 21 years old. It's been, you know, pretty much the whole of my adult life. It's an obsession of mine. I've loved watching, you know, since being a little, like all little kids, you know, for my generation, it's things like, you know, the goodies which I loved, and then the nine o'clock news, and then the young ones. And it's been such a major part of my life. And I started to think more and more just about the fact that, you know, do I have? some specific foible that has meant that the only thing that I can do,

and in many ways the only thing I really want to do is be a comedian, or are the journeys that end up making us who we are. There's many more turnings on that particular path. And so, yeah, it was just trying to, I think in some ways, work out just how different comedians are and then looking at the fact that I think that most human beings share and are not, you know, I'm always fascinated. When I stand on stage and for the first time talk about an idea where I don't know if the audience are going to go,

hang on a minute, mate, you are just weird. And that moment, the first time I talked about impulsive thoughts, for instance, that moment when you are holding someone's baby and suddenly out of nowhere, you get a little image of your head of throwing the baby down the stairs, and you go, oh, my God, I think I want to throw babies down the stairs. And I did a whole long piece about that. And what was fascinating was not merely the number of people in an audience

who would feel that they could admit to having had that sensation. but also the number of people who came up to you after us went, oh my God, I always thought that I had this urge. I thought that I was perhaps some kind of psychopath, and it turns out I'm not because, I'm sure, you probably know, impulsive thoughts very often, they're not in any way of desire to do that. What they're doing is your brain playing your public information film,

which basically says, you're holding a baby. So remember when holding a baby, don't throw it down the stairs. But we misinterpret it, and we go, oh, no, I think that's an urge, and it's not. And so that was an interesting thing to be able to talk about on stage. And it ended up becoming about half an hour of a show because so many people had different. Oh, well, I had this experience. My granddad was telling me all these memories of the terrible war that he was in. And suddenly it had a burning urge to kiss him, I thought.

You know, all of these different things were coming out. And, you know, most famously, there's a scene in Willie Allen's Annie Hall where Christopher Walkens talked about the idea of that sometimes when he's driving in a car, he just wants to swerve it into the oncoming traffic. And that is a very normal impulsive thought as well. So it's things like that that just made me realize that I'm in a fortunate position where I am paid to talk about what many others might possibly think was potentially madness. That's nice. That sort of presents comedy as been quite a reassuring thing to go to as well as an enjoyable thing. Well, it's so, I mean, it's really interesting. I've just been the Edinburgh Fringe Festival

and last year as well, it's a fascinating. I think what I find particularly intriguing is the post-World War II comedians. There were many comedians who, I would say, were keeping a secret. Of course, because of our laws, for instance, homosexuality was illegal. So you had quite a few comedians who on stage, they could kind of be camp and stuff, but they were never actually gay. And they had, you know, a certain front. They were creating a carapace.

They were equally people who were. who were damaged, who kind of really had post-traumatic stress disorder, I think, from the war. Things are, so they were making this front. They were creating a mask. You know, Peter Sellers being one of the great and truly strange examples of that. Whereas now we have a lot of comedians who, rather than create a mask, it's the moment they can go on stage and say, I have a problem with this thing. Or I have, you know, more and more comedians I've seen talking, for instance, about suicide,

about social anxiety, about irritable bowel syndrome, all manner of things and about sexuality. And so it's interesting, there's a kind of change from comedy being a mask to comedy being the point where you go, I can drop my mask off for a couple of hours now and I'll pop it back on when I get on the train. Interesting. Okay, so this is quite a big brief for a book.

How did you go about doing it? Who did you talk to? What did you decide to look into? Well, I suppose what happened first of all was I wrote 200,000 words for the, 120,000 word book and the editor went, oh my God, I think we're going to need another editor. So it was really, it felt like that moment in jaws, you know, we're going to need a bigger boat. It was, first of all, working out what I was particularly going to take on because, of course,

it can't in any way be a complete overview. And I also didn't want to water it down too much so that I could deal with everything. I wanted to deal with things that I felt, well, part of it was that in each chapter, I hope there's some personal story of my own experience of my own psychology. So, for instance, when I, of course, I start with birth and I end with death. And the thing of what we become and why we become who we are always interest me. Because again, in comedy documentaries, very often there will be that moment. But of course, Kenneth Williams never got on with his father and that led to him doing silly voices.

Or the fact that Eddie Isard, you know, lost his mother when he was very young and has spoken more and more. with age about the fact that he does see the audience as replacing the love that he lost as a seven-year-old boy. And so for my personal experience, when I was trying to think, well, what might be? And by the way, I also make it very clear that I'm not saying at any point, one incident turns someone into who they are, because I think that's, you know, one of the things that I'm trying to show, I hope occasionally in the book anyway, is what a hotch-potch it is that turns us into the humans we are.

But there may well be something that happened that becomes a core part of developing here we are. For me, it was being in a car accident when I was just before my third birthday, which led to my mother being in a coma and various different illnesses, etc., then continued after that. And the more I thought about it, thought when you're nearly three years old, and I thought it was my fault that I'd cause the car accident. One of those stupid things, when you're a child, your action, you immediately think may well cause the next action. So the fact that I was looking for my toy machine gun under the passenger seat made me think, oh no, it must have been that that led to a car coming in the opposite direction at high speed. And I look more and more back to the fact that as a little boy, I blamed myself for that instant. And I could kind of feed into different ideas about hypervigilance that I might experience,

or indeed the hope of making people happy, having some kind of controlled situation. So in each chapter, I try and find something that has happened to me, personal experience of social anxiety, of impulsive thoughts, or of the way that I use inner voices, and then use that as a hook to go into other people's lives and how they've used things that sometimes could be seen as extreme eccentricities to turn into very often pretty successful careers. But I think that's one of the things that I'm interested in is the fact that very often the things that we think, there's that great line that Richard Feynman talked about, which was when he was talking to a monk once,

and they were talking about physics and the fact that knowledge can lead to wonderful things, but the same knowledge can also lead to things like nuclear weapons. And the monk said to him, the keys to heaven also open the gates to hell. And I think that in some ways actually hangs over the book because some of the oddities that may well drive people towards obsessive-compulsive behavior

or indeed even obsessive-compulsive disorder. Sometimes if you're able to tap into it, you may well be able to turn it also into something. which is creatively useful. And one of my favorite things that ever happened at a gig. I can't remember if I'll write about this book, but this man came up to me

and he said, he looked very angry. He said, I came to your gig and I'm rather angry now. I've always thought that I was a little bit odd, but I've just sat and watched you and sat with your audience, and I found out we're all odd. So now I'm normal.

He was obviously joking, but the way he delivered him to me. Oh, my whole life I've thought, well, at least I'm eccentric. And it turns out we're all insane. And I think that's one of the important things, which is some of the worst human beings that we see, and I'm not going to mention particular kind of political leaders or whatever,

I think are people who don't face up to their absurdity. It's such an insane thing in one way to be a living creature that is aware that it's being born, that it will die, that we look up to the stars, and we ask the questions that we do, and we're aware of other people's gaze, and all of those things. It's a kind of absurd situation. You know, that's why there aren't many creatures like that. on this planet. As far as we can see, there is only one that is as fully developed in its

self-consciousness as human beings. And I think that does make an intriguing case study. Now, you mentioned starting at childhood, and I know you say that no one experience determines who we become, but did you see certain childhood experiences in your research that might predispose people towards becoming comedians? Well, there are certain things that are There does seem to be a higher percentage of people who were adopted, for instance, who are comedians, that does go a little bit above the norm. There does seem to be slightly above the norm. Again, it would depend on defining things,

but what you might call pre-fubescent major incidents in terms of loss of a parent or messy divorce, that kind of. But, of course, also there are an enormous number of people who experience those things and don't decide to go and stand in front of strangers seeking their probation. But certainly there was a bit of a pattern. My friend Joe Brown talked about the fact that when we first ever had a conversation about mental health, and of course, Joe spent her early part of the life as a mental health nurse. So she's being right up close to people who have been diagnosed with illnesses.

And she says, I don't necessarily think the comedians are mentally ill. But what she does say, she said, I think they're all damaged. Now, of course, what that might be is that actually everyone's damaged, but at least we've got a voice to talk about the damage. And that's part of what I'm trying to work out as well. I'm still caught up in it because one side of me doesn't want to, I don't want to, I'd feel very arrogant to go, oh, well, of course, I'm different to the others because, you know, because everyone is struggling in different ways. But I do think, you know, it is interesting. It does seem to be a certain level of pattern, just a little bit above the norm in terms of, you know, some form of major childhood event.

So you took part in an experiment where you played the Radio 4 game just a minute in an MRI scanner. Can you tell me about the experiment? What was it all about? That was fascinating. That was at UCL. And the idea was that it was trying to find out what parts of, really a public, someone who improvises,

someone who makes stories up, so predominantly comedians, but also sometimes public speakers generally. And it was just to get in the scanner and see if, as you were, so what we would do just a minute, for anyone who doesn't know is basically a panel game, an incredibly tricky panel game on Radio 4

that I've sometimes been on myself. And you're given a subject, and then you just have to talk about that subject for a minute without deviation. Oh my God, what is it? I should remember now without deviation without, because I've started to do with pausing, you can't pause, you can't go off the topic.

And you can't repetition deviation. and whatever Nicholas Barson says is pausing. So they did the same thing with us lying in scanners where they would give us a subject only for 30 seconds because the test group apparently can't talk rubbish for a minute. It's an interesting thing where you realize that not all members of the public can talk rubbish for ages. You know, comedians don't have many great skills,

but waffling on and on and on, as you're discovering now, is the one thing we have got. Too many blinking verbs in our heads. And then it was just to find out what parts of the brain are what's going on. And what they basically found was, well, unfortunately, they've never managed to publish it because some of the comedians who went in the scanners still couldn't get rid of their competitiveness. Now, you didn't have to be funny. You just had to talk about ginger snaps or trifle or, you know, the Eiffel Tower or whatever, 30 seconds.

But people got so well, I wonder if the other comedian and he got loads of good laughs. So they jiggled around too much so the scans can actually be used, which, you know, in some ways tells you a lot about comedians, really. and about human competition, which is you fail to actually do the experiment properly for any effective use because you're so busy thinking about yourself and whether you're winning. But it was interesting because what they did see was generally people who publicly speak a lot, not as much blood needs to go to certain areas of the brain in terms of the control of the mouth and the throat and various, because it's the exercise that we take all the time is talking, talking, talking, which frees up more blood to go to other areas of the brain.

But there were other things as well within that, but it was an interest. So there's no special, much like when they put a bunch of karma-like nuns into brain scanners to find out if there was a god spot in the brain. And they had to go into a brain scanner and they'd have to think about Jesus or God or something biblical. And then the scientists said, they go, ah, there you see, that section of the brain there, just by the hippocampus is obviously where the god of God lives. in the same way what they found out is there isn't a special bit which goes,

ah, now this little cluster of cells there, they're the jester cluster of cells, and that's where comedy is made. So you've volunteered yourself for brain scans a few times. Were you hoping that you'd find something out across all of these experiments? Do you know what? The only thing I'm always hoping every time is I go, I have been having headaches for a while, so I do hope they don't. So that's, you know, my main thing is that I don't want that moment.

They go, ah, there appears to be a shadow. But I just, I found it fascinating the first time that I got a chance to actually have my brain scan. Again, to see the hardware, to get this three-dimensional view of what makes you, you, and of course how much of it is not even involved in the u-ness of you. It's often, you know, there's an old line by Ken Campbell. You is just one of the things that your brain does. But actually being able to view that picture of that bit, which is unavailable at any other time, apart from through scanning.

It just makes you think about the fragility. I think of it. I mean, when I did a thing with Sophie Scott, Professor Sophie Scott from UCL at the Royal Institute, Christmas lectures, where I had a blast, just a little magnetic blast to the motor region

of my brain on the left-hand side. And it stops you being able to talk. And again, it just reminds you that the complexity of it all. So that's most, for me, it's not that I was really hoping that there would be something that would be found that would explain the whole terrible tragedy and joy of my existence. I just thought there, that's the bits and that's the complexity of it all. And somehow that leads me to believe that I exist.

Yeah, I remember myself going for my first MRI skin for a science experiment and then seeing the brain afterwards and being like, oh, thank God, it's there. Well, that's the other thing. Yeah, you do go, it definitely exists. Because that was a little bit where there was a moment of thinking about Schrodinger's brain, whether, you know, for my whole life I've lived without a brain, but as long as it was unobserved, I would continue living. But the moment that, oh, you haven't got a brain, then I would be dead. So, yeah, Schrodinger's brain part of the scanner did come into my thoughts the first time I had it.

But then, since then, every time I can have a go, I just love doing it. I like the piece of it as well. I know people don't like it, but some of them, the sound of the magnets of the machinery. But I find just the coolness of just lying there and just a base. whatever instructions of whatever particular command is they're trying to look at, you know, what's going on. I find that, do you know what, it's probably the nearest I get to a religious experience. You looked into imagination as well. You seem, sounds in the book like you have a bit of a fascination with imagination.

And when you're coming up with stand-up sets, I imagine that you've got to do a lot of inventing things and your imagination plays a really big role. What did you find out when you were writing the book about imagination? Well, again, it's one of those things where so many times people will say to you, but where do you get your ideas from? And of course, that's the brilliant thing about brains is that you, there is no particular place where you go, because otherwise every writer would be able to do this, every comedian would be able to do this, we would sit down for two hours a day, we would go to the place in our brain where we make the funniest jokes, we would deliver those jokes, and then we would go, that's it

done for the day, and now I can do my set tonight. Of course, the problem would be that then everyone will be able to do that. because we'd know exactly where they came from. And I think what I find, you know, one of my favorite conversations was with Alan Moore, the great writer of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen of Vendetta and Watchmen,

many others in Swamp Thing. He has one of the most active imaginations that I know. I mean, in fact, where I'm seeing now, there's a bookshelf, which is only his books, all of his comic books, his novel that is as long as the Old Testament's most recent one, Jerusalem. for him he's fascinated about how he can travel around his mind how he can go to what he calls idea space how he can then walk into something which is almost a three-dimensional landscape

and something which sometimes he feels is almost shared in a kind of Jungian way but even those things are us merely imagining what our imagination might be and why you know why some of us feel the necessity of expressing what we imagine to me is the most intriguing part of it. Why, when you come up with an idea, do you want to share that story? Do you want to share that joke? Why, I mean, some comedians, for instance, with their imagination, they require sitting down with a pen and paper and they just write and they write and they write and they write until they find the correct joke form that they're looking for. There's quite a few joke people that I know who do that. It's a method of writing, whereas I can't really do that. So everything I do is I just have loads of scribbly bits of paper. paper and then I go on stage and I start working out in front of people. And what I don't understand is why, if I've spent three days ago, still can't come up with an idea of this joke about people who have flat earthers. I'm looking for this kind of particular way as well, which can be enlightening about, and then you stand on stage in front of people and suddenly you go,

oh, there it was. It was in there all the time. That, to me, is part of the joy of it is, where have all of these things been? Why can't we access them immediately? Why do we have to bang our heads on the wall? I mean, writing this book was agonizing. at times trying to find what I hope are the right sentences and uh because that was a very different process to the way that I do stand up but I also think one of the lovely things about imagination

is it'll be interesting to see where the next generation goes because both Alan and myself and quite few other people that I talked to just said it's um boredom was such a necessity nothing was as boring as a Sunday in England in the 1970s you know the the need for that right I'm going to have to the video games have not been invented yet and at least my mum and dad haven't bought one for me television's not on all the day and I wouldn't be allowed to watch it I now have to go and sit in a tree and find some way of making this tree entertaining

and I'm interested now to see where that imagination goes with people who are playing Minecraft and doing all those things who have a lot more interactivity with other people's imagination and how that changes things but the main thing I think that I found with everyone I spoke to, Noel Fielding as well which is there is an urge which cannot be defined, which is I just need to create things.

You know, for Noel, he actually can feel quite physically sick if he hasn't got to, you know, I need to paint today. You have to create something, that sense of getting something out of your head. And I think that's where imagination is useful for those who feel they have to use it, which is I've got this thing in my head and it begins to hurt if it's been in here too long.

I found when I took a break from stand up, there are only a certain number of days I could take off before I thought, oh, but I've come up with this idea and I really want to share that idea and I want to see if that idea works. I want to see if that idea is something in common with other people's ideas. I just want to do it. So it's not an agony in any way, but it, well, I mean, it can be, but it is, it's that bit where we don't seem to be able to nail down why any particular path that specifically leads to why some of us want to just share as many ideas as possible. But also note that one of the things I find most fascinating about imagination is

one of the problems very often is that what you've imagined will never be as good once it's come out of your head. That's another thing that I think is not common of all people who create things, but there's a great thing in a book by Joyce Carey. It was turning to film by Alec Guinness called The Horse's Mouth. There's a moment where the painter has spent the whole, like a month painting this incredible mural. And finally he finishes and he looks at it. And for just a split second he is happy, but then he turns. His head falls against the wall and he goes, but why doesn't it look like it does in here? And I think, you know, that's another thing, which is imagination.

We keep going back to it because we keep trying to improve. And every time you think you've come up with the right idea, six months down the line, you go, that idea is weak, that idea is bad, need more ideas. So did you manage to come up with any techniques for being able to create things or be able to sort of facilitate that idea generation process that were common amongst, lots of comedians or that you might start doing more in your own life? I think it is. In the end, it just comes down to very simply. You just have to do it. You have to find some form of deadline. You have to find some way that you go, right.

I mean, that's for a lot of people. That's why they go on comedy courses, I think. If you go on a comedy course, it turns out that at the end of every week you have to perform for five minutes. Now, the rest of what they're taught may be of no use, but suddenly they've got to stand in front of people who've now become their peers. and they have so that idea of and procrastination part of the problem is there are people like Graham Green, the author Graham Green, who could get up in the morning, he would go,

right, I'll get the writing out of the way and he'd write a thousand words and then he'd go right, that's a thousand words, and he would stop sometimes mid-sentence, he'd go, that's the thousandth word and now I can go off and I can play Russian roulette or do whatever, you know, gamble or do whatever he wants to do, and other people spend the whole day not doing

what they're meant to be doing and then suddenly going, oh, now at 11 at night, a found what I was looking for and suddenly 3,000 words come out. And I think so actually finding the different system, you know, Nick Cave used to have that. Nick Cave counted in some ways his writing of lyrics, of film scores. I think he'd only recently stopped doing it, but he would get up and he would go to the office. And he would sit in his office and he would have a nine to five day of writing some of the most beautiful songs in the world. And then at the end of the day, he'd done his job of work of writing these beautiful things. But it was both a job of work and a job of art.

I think that's one thing that is very useful that I would say is quite common, is to have a separate space that is not the rest of your living space, to have somewhere where you go and in terms of the actual creating the solid form. And I think that's an important thing. And get off the internet. Get off the internet. Stop arguing. Stop arguing with moon hoaxes.

What are you doing? You're not going to persuade them. It doesn't matter. Make something beautiful instead. It's good advice. Yeah, you talk about the, the boredom thing. People on his board these days. We're so stimulated. And what effect that might potentially have on idea generation and then comedy as well? What's your prediction for that?

Where do you think that's going to go? Are there good things about these technological advances that we've had that will make up for the fact that we're lacking that boredom? Yeah, I think there's so many of the games that I see kids playing are, they're not just interactive as in, you know, shoot them up. They're interactive in terms of creating worlds. And I I think we're at so, you know, I've reached an age where the default position would be, well, of course, children nowadays. They won't have any imagination, blah, blah, blah. And that's the default position of all middle age people, unless you work against it.

Looking at the way my son's imagination works, and he spends quite a lot of time having screen time and stuff, but I would make sure there's a cutoff point as well. He seems to have as rich and ridiculous as imagination as I had when, if not richer, you know, as a 10-year-old. So I think what might, but what can. can be sometimes I worry slightly about a level of narcissism that that can rise up in in the creative process but I think people will still keep writing beautiful people will still be wanting to understand why the world is as it is it doesn't matter how many video games you've got in

front of you and that probably is an archaic term by the way video games that probably makes it very clear that I'm 49 years old but you'll still have moments you know whether it's existential dread or existential joy we're still going to be trying to work we're never going to I don't think we're going to end up in that oldest Huxley, brave new world where we're just going off to watch the Phillies and we're taking our soma and we've somehow reached this drug sense of happiness. I think there will always be enough people who go, but why is this as it is? I mean, it's like when you see the teenagers, some of the teenagers in America, for instance, they're proactive reactions to what's going on in terms of mass shooting, all of those things. there are still enough people out there who are not happy just to sit contentedly pressing two buttons and going back and forth and blowing up some monstrous zombie alien. Now, one of the things that I found really interesting in the book was your discussion about offensive jokes.

And one of the things you say, I'll quote you here, is that a joke is a shortcut to understanding someone's ethics, morals and belief. For you, are there things that are too serious to be joked about? It's never about the seriousness. It's about, I mean, I think sometimes it's why would I want to make that joke? So, for instance, when Frankie Boyle, there was a big case a while ago, I think it was in Reading as far as I remember. Frankie Boyle was just making really quite unpleasant jokes about people with Down syndrome. My theory is that that doesn't help anyone. That doesn't get, you know, the idea of go, yeah, but if we don't talk about these, you know, sometimes we have that from the three.

if we don't talk about these things and these things get hidden, well, they don't have to be hidden. And there may well be very clever jokes to be made about Down syndrome, but he wasn't making them. And so personally, I would go, why would you want to make that? And I talk about my friend, in fact, who I've actually, you probably only have a proof copy of the book called a Magic, so it's just being done.

But I dedicate the book to Barry Crimmins, who I interviewed for that chapter. And Barry is someone who has talked about, child abuse on stage. He's talked about some of the most terrible atrocities committed by governments. He has taken on. He ended up in Washington fighting AOL. He is in no way what someone would say is a snowflake or was, sadly, he died earlier this year. But we were talking and he said he thinks very carefully about what he says. So because, any of the told me this story where he said one day he was doing a gig and the couple of the front road just loved it.

They were having such a great time. And he thought, it was really nice. They're really laughing. And after he gets chatting to them at the bar. And he says, oh, I'm really glad you enjoyed that. Yeah, we had a really great time. And said, oh, yeah, I'm glad you're happy. He said, yeah, we only come out once a year.

And he said this company. You only come out once a year. They went, yeah, yeah, we have a child who's severely disabled. And there's only one person who can look after our child. And so this time we thought, well, let's go to some comedy. And the first two acts on, they kept saying retard this and retard that. And we just were very uncomfortable. And then you came on very quickly, we just knew you weren't that kind of person.

And he talked about, you know, the fact that words are shrapnel. And I don't think that means that you can talk about anything you want. But I think you have to think about the damage. Is it worth upsetting? So are you happy? Is the joke funny enough and pertinent enough to go, oh, do you know, I don't care about the three people who are crying at the back. And I do, and I think about that a lot. You know, there's nothing that I've wanted to talk about that I haven't talked about on stage. There's nothing that I've stopped myself talking about stage. But sometimes I've come up with a joke and I've thought about it. And I've gone, nah, do you know what? I don't want to do that one. That doesn't seem to it. So that's my personal. And I know that obviously someone like Ricky Javeh, who I interviewed for the, but, you know, it's a very different take on it, which, you know, I don't necessarily really agree with him on that.

Tim Minchin, I mean, it was quite an interesting journey from Ricky's tape, which is pretty much, yeah, jokes are joke and this kind of. And then you get Tim Minchin who thinks very seriously about, because he's written some very powerful pieces, and he thinks very carefully about the way that he uses his humor and his songs. And then Barry, again, who's had it in both his life experience and comedian experiences, He's really taken people on. But he also would think every time he came up with a certain kind of joke,

he'd think, yeah, do you know what? That might do more damage than good. I think comedy is really powerful. I think it can be really useful. And I think it is, you know, when you get, it can give permission to sometimes people in the audience to get a sense of, you know, of how they can express themselves as well.

And I don't think you should censor yourself, but I see nothing. one of the things with free speech is if you have free speech, then you have to, you shouldn't just go, oh, it's free speech, say anything I want. Free speech is something that has been hard one. So, boy, oh boy, you know, use it well. But it's that thing where you have to, again, about the effect that a joke can have and the fact that I don't have, you know, I don't have permission to,

I can drag myself through the mud and make myself look as ridiculous as I want to. But every now and again, I have to think about, have I represent. that person fairly and he's you know and that's and I think about your ideas of fairness and and all of that that was preying on my mind quite a lot and I'm still worry now because the book's not out yet and I'm like oh god what if you know I've got I've got a copy now that I can hand to my dad is there anything I said that I shouldn't as yeah it's a strange thing actually which is you can share an enormous amount with strangers and I found that in stand-up where you know I can stand on stage and I can talk about some really ridiculous things in my life but if one of my

family's in, I go, oh God, I can't talk about tonight. So I can share with 500 plus strangers, but, oh no, they actually know me. There's a genetic link. It's like my wife came to a gig where I had this joke. When I took a little bit of a break from stand-up, I talked about the fact that my wife found out from reading an article in a newspaper. I was out in Australia. She was back in England. And she rang me up. She said, oh, my God, I can't believe you're going to give us. Oh, oh, no, you can't do that. How are we going to live? And all these things. And I said, no, it's going to be fine. I've got other ways of making money. It's not a problem. And then I realized what she was actually saying was, oh my God, you're going to be around the house the whole

time. When he's going to realize that I love him, but from a distance, I've made a graph, it's very specific. And I had this little bit about talking about the fact that sometimes you look at your partner and you know you love each other, but you just get this little inkling that occasionally think, but would I be happier as a melancholy widow? And then my wife actually came to the show where I was probably going to talk about that. And I thought, oh, God, I'm going to have to ask them before him because I'll either drop it or so I said I've got this one bit where I just say you know that sometimes you look at your partner and you just get an inkling they're sometimes think but would I be happy as a melancholy widow do you mind and she just laughed you and

don't worry about that I've spoken to loads of my friends and quite often we just wonder if we'll be happier if you lot were dead so that's very useful but yeah that was another thing that I I mean now my the main thing that is is triggered in me now of course is all just all of the fears that I talk about in performance and in creativity, which I'll write about in the book, I'm now tangible again because, of course, I'm just terrified of, you know, will people find the things that I hope in the book? Will they see something that I don't think is there? Will they be angry or will they, you know, at this point of publishing, you think, oh, what are my two destinies? Will I be hated or ignored? So this kind of links back a little bit to the stuff that

we were talking about at the beginning with the, you know, traumatic childhood experiences that some comedians have. Do you think there is sort of an inextricable link between tragedy and comedy? I suppose, yeah, it's that bit, isn't it, which is you slip on the banana skin before you manage to put the dagger through your heart.

There is, you know, both of them, it's a bit like horror stories, and jokes are very similar, for instance, where, you know, a lot of short horror stories lead up to a punchline, and their punchline is, you know, tragic and horrible and grotesque.

And our punchline is ridiculous and absurd. So in some ways, we're all walking towards different punchlines. It's just some of them don't have a laugh track at the end. Now, so with all of your work that you've done for this book, talking to scientists and psychologists and other comedians as well, could you sum up for us what you now know about yourself, what you found out about yourself through writing this? I do think that I've found out it's made me focus a lot,

more on that event that happened to me just before my third birthday and thinking and it allows me to play around with ideas of why my social brain is as it is and I think it's made me realize even more in I mean in terms of the shows that I've written while I was writing that book and I've written four different stand-up shows that I've toured around and the new one that I'm just about to tour around and it's made me it's made me think even more about how important comedy can be and how important it can be to the audience and how. A lot of it for me is the idea of giving permission that if someone who is publicly speaking, someone that you,

you know, you'd like, you've paid to go and see or whatever, talks about something that really sticks into and really has that moment of, of resonance that can give you permission to then go out and, you know, think, right, well,

I want to create this or I feel happier being who I am, or I'm not the only one. And I think a lot more about, I mean, that's, in some ways, that's only something that I think lies underneath the book, really. But it is about the fact that you've got to accept your absurdity. We're such strange, strange creatures. And if you do start just going, would you know what, I'm absurd? And I reckon that that person's sitting opposite me on the train,

they're probably absurd as well. And who knows what's going. And it just makes it, I find just a little bit easier when you realize the preposterousness of it all. That was Robin Inns talking about the quicks that make us human. His book, I'm a Joke and so are you, is available from Atlantic Books Now. Thanks for listening to The Science Focus podcast. The November issue of BBC Focus magazine is on sale now and in it we find out how spider bots could help reveal more about Neanderthal brains.

We also reveal how wolves communicate using facial expressions, explore the intriguing world of microbes in the British gut, discover how lava lamps are linked to election hacking, and find out more about the British Spaceport. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world.

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