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Robin Ince 'Is as Dumb as You'
- Etcetera Theatre, Camden, London
- 7May 2007
Heard the jokes about the Daily Mail, Geordies, and Richard Littlejohn? Yes, we have too. Want to hear them again? No, us neither.
The problem at the heart of Robin Ince’s gig at the Etcetera theatre is that, in visiting older material, he wanders through comedic territory in need of a good spring clean.
It's not enough be anti-holocaust deniers, Christian evangelists, and Chris Moyles. And yet in this show Ince is just that, and little else. It’s full of hackneyed references to cultural and political phenomena, delivered with an “aren’t I getting old and behind the times?” shtick.
The bits on ancient philosophy don’t help matters. Ince nabs quotes from philosophers to use as putdowns among boozed up, potentially violent audiences, or when he gets confronted in the street by thugs. But there’s no sense that he’s done anything more than flick through a copy of any bog-standard toilet philosophy tome. There’s no back story or context. And, anyway, isn’t using intellectual superiority as a tool with which to baffle and suppress the great unwashed masses a bit patronising?
Occasionally Ince finesses a familiar subject matter and ekes out something fresh and funny. I laughed for instance, when he claimed to have found a magic eye piece in a copy of the Daily Mail: if you slowly moved the page backwards and forwards it revealed itself to be bullshit.
But it's the lack of original subject matter that is the show’s undoing. One low point was a reference to watching The Jeremy Kyle Show in preparation to doing a gig in Ipswich. See also his spiel about Crawley. Yes, it sounds like quite a shit place to live. Yes, no one knows anyone famous from there. But just because the local paper took umbrage at comments you made about it doesn’t mean there is anything inherently funny in taking the piss out of it.
Thank God there's enough evidence elsewhere to prove that he can do better than this.
Alex Olorenshaw
