Robin Ince: What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding?

What happens when you put an atheist in a field of believers? This week, the brilliantly bookish Robin Ince, stand up, actor, book-disector and co-host of the Infinite Monkey Cage science podcast, comes to Scotland. On Friday he joins the line-up for Solas Festival – a family-friendly boutique arts fest with a liberal Christian tilt, committed to “equality, justice, beauty and hospitality.” As one of Britain's most lauded poster-boys for non-belief, how does this work? We caught up to chat club nights, the Fringe, and to find out how his cornucopia of rationalism and nonsense fit alongside a bill of preachers, musicians and literary experts...

2014 seems like it’s been a busy one; new club nights, new tour. How’s it all been going? Best bits?

This is my favourite tour so far, I think it is – perhaps rightly for a show about the mind – the most insane and intense. I would like to say “I am the abyss, and I will stare back;” I have no idea why, but free will is an illusion so it’s not my fault.

I really enjoy the new club night Your Art is Dead? Neither I nor the audience know what the artists are going to create, so there is a lovely air of suspense. So much entertainment is designed to tell you where to react and how; we hope to confuse and beguile more than that.

Next week you’re playing two pretty different venues; an open-air festival and The Stand comedy club. Do you have a preference? Do you calibrate your material to suit the crowd?

I try to never prejudge the crowd; there are so many things I want to talk about and so I just start jumping around and bellowing. I just jump a bit higher when I’m in a field.

You co-host arguably the biggest science podcast in the UK; how do you think comedy helps in the popularisation of scientific thought and discussion?

I am employed as an idiot (I have been working on being an idiot for some years), and so I can interrupt the wise and pretty Brian Cox when he gets too confusing with his muons and his gluons. We hope to make something that entertains enough that we can talk about intriguing scientific ideas, but without treating them with so much reverence they become fearful.

This weekend you’re appearing at Solas festival, an event that has roots in the broader Christian tradition – as an atheist, do you feel simultaneously promoting faith and non-faith is culturally important?

My predominant fury is with dogma – it is the fundamentalists with ultimate truths and utter certainty that we must fight against. I am not really bothered by faith or non-faith, just working out how we can communicate with each other clearly and find the best, most peaceful way to get through the confusion of being alive and curious.

This isn’t the first time you’ve played a festival with an ethos a little different to your own. What did you learn from Greenbelt? Did it challenge your preconceptions?

The mass media is keen on melodrama and lunatics. Anything that will get their shows or newspapers trending and getting plenty of hits, so often, the better examples of societies are not on display because they don’t provide the fireworks. These sort of festivals are good for reminding us that not all religious people are spiteful bigots – in fact, most I come across are not at all.

Most religious people I meet have no qualms about same sex marriage, evolutionary theory and so on.

Given the smelting pot of belief (and lack thereof) these sort of festivals encourage, is there anyone you would really like to see on the bill?

I always want to see Alan Moore on the bill of any event I am at.

You’re coming back to the Fringe in August. Do you still get a kick out of performing at it?

The last time I did a full run on the Fringe, I did four shows of my own a day, plus anything else I was asked to do – what a delightful, frenetic exhaustion. It is going to be a few years before I return for a full run, but I am excited to be doing a half run, even if I am only lazily doing two shows a day.

How do you feel about the rise of the Free Fringe?

The Free Fringe has meant there is a proper Fringe again. It was all getting a  bit mainstream for my liking. The Fringe, partly due to its cost, became a place to pray that TV would discover you; the Free Fringe helps return it to being an art festival, a place of risk. Also, those audiences that were priced out of it are coming back. It is a reminder that there is a new alternative out there.

What's next for you?

More of the same, on and on and on until no one turns up. Plus a new series of Infinite Monkey Cage, a book, a documentary about the history of self help, some events about particle colliders, you know, the usual...