Robin Ince: science and happiness

Comedy and science don’t seem the most obvious of bedfellows but funnyman Robin Ince has carved a career out of being fascinated by the scientific world. Best known to Australian audiences as the self-described “idiot bridge” alongside Professor Brian Cox as part of their Infinite Monkey Cage radio show and podcast, Ince will soon tour Australia with his Happiness Through Science show. “It will have stuff about Charles Darwin, Richard Feynman, particle physics and the Large Hydrogen Collider but also things about the brain,” says Ince. “I met this guy on the train a while ago who came up to me and said, ‘I’ve heard your radio show. Would you like a brain scan?’ This sounded ruder than he’d imagined. He was a neuroscientist; I was like, ‘Of course I want to get an MRI’. Someone else asked me three months later, so I’ve had a load of brain scans for fun, which is the best brain scan to have. I’ve got quite a lot of stuff about what we’re beginning to understand about the human brain.” The peer and friend of Ricky Gervais (Ince supported Gervais on his Politics and Fame tours and had a memorable guest role in an episode of The Office) rediscovered his love of science in his 20s after reading books by Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins. He blended science into his comedy soon after this. “I thought, ‘What can you do with this in stand up?’ because stand up is a great vehicle for ideas. The hardest thing, of course, is that you have to at least have some basic understanding of an idea before you turn it into a joke. Sometimes I think, ‘Wow, it’s taken a lot of reading to get to that one liner’. “The easiest thing to make jokes about is, I suppose, pseudoscience and things like homeopathy and those ideas. As time went on I thought it’s all very well having a go at psychics and things like that but I need to see if I can make jokes about proper science.” When asked if he considers himself a science communicator or a comedian who tells science-related jokes, Ince answers that he’s unsure of what he calls himself. “I hope that every single show I do will have some kind of possible inspiration for an audience to go off and go, ‘Oh that was an interesting idea. I want to learn more about that, but I want to know it from an authority rather than an idiot’. What I’m trying to do is be playful with ideas, so when people watch it they go, ‘Wow, if that bloke isn’t scared about reading books about this, then we certainly shouldn’t be. “I’d never consider myself an expert. I’m excited and curious. And I hope I can pass that onto people; infect them with that curiosity. I’ve always described myself as an idiot bridge and that’s what I do on Monkey Cage and other shows, say, ‘Hey, don’t be scared. Just because you’re not immediately going to understand everything about quantum mechanics – first of all, don’t worry. No one does, and secondly, you can’t just read a book and go, ‘Oh now I’ve read that I understand everything. The fun of it is the journey of trying to discover stuff. You may never become an authority on any of the subjects.”   In this day and age there seems to be a growing distrust of science. This suspicion looks to cross the political spectrum, as we see climate change deniers, anti-vaccination and anti-GM movements try to discredit certain aspects of science. Then there are creationists who think evolution is bogus. “One of the problems is our emotional side,” says Ince. “There are certain core beliefs we have that start from a very early age. We can agree with science until it clashes with one of our core ideologies. Unfortunately – however much information you give people, however many facts you give – facts don’t seem to combat our emotional beliefs.” Ince believes the climate change debate is a “financial battle”. “Climate change suggests we may have to change our model of capitalism and a lot of large companies aren’t interested in that and don’t want to do that. So there seems to have been a lot of money being spent creating this, ‘Oh it’s a 50/50 thing’. On one hand it might be nice to say, ‘Oh, it’s only the right that rejects certain scientific ideas’ but of course when we get to other ideas about genetic modification, I would say that’s more on the left where people are suspicious of that.” Ince thinks that a lot of the anti-science movements in western countries –such as Australia, the US and the UK – stem from comfort (as we have benefited from western medicine and science with long and comfortable lives) and ignorance. “I don’t just mean ignorance in terms of a scientific fact, I mean ignorance in realising how much our lives have changed.” To combat this, Ince says scientific ideas should be communicated to the public as much as possible. “Science shouldn’t be something for the back pages of newspapers and an occasional piece. You think about the amount of science on the evening news, there’s very little. The internet is a fantastic tool but it also has helped increase the voice of pseudoscientists and things on the cusp or even beyond madness. This is one of the issues now – that you can communicate with an enormous percentage of the world – and if you have an idea, however insane that idea is, you’ll probably find 11 people on the internet who agree with you. That is all that’s required for you to say, ‘I am right’.’” The Atheist Foundation of Australia is presenting Happiness Through Science and Ince finishes the interview by saying that, to him, life is about delivering a rich and fulfilling narrative that says, “life may well be finite, which is a very good reason for trying to pack in as much as possible”. “It’s a good reason to buy a telescope and look at the rings of Saturn. It’s a good reason to read Charles Darwin and, when you walk along the beach, to look at all the shells and not just think it was magic that brought them there but to think, ‘Wow, why has that shell evolved that way? Why has that tree evolved into that shape?’ Life is finite – it gives you a target. I’ve got a lot of things to fill this life with.” Robin Ince Happiness Through Science Dunstan’s Playhouse (Adelaide Festival Centre) Saturday, April 11 robinince.com