Robin Ince is as Dumb as You is aptly named. Broadly speaking, this show is about stupidity, the stupidity of people, newspapers, telly and the society around us. Disarmingly though, Robin Ince imbues his material with a healthy sense of his own stupidity.
The show begins with an accordion accompaniment overture as Robin launches into his deconstruction of lazy comedy banter. There are moments of Stewart Lee or Richard Herring here and throughout the show, where he takes a simple idea and pushes it through a sieve to extract every ounce comedy potential out of it.
That being said, Robin can also pack a hell of a lot of material in a short space of time, seemingly tripping over himself at times to get all his thoughts out. He covers his third favourite sloth fact, the sound of sex against bins, a Grimm’s fairytale bread boy, waving at trains, new age shops, newspapers, Paedophile season, an otter sanctuary, owl iridology, and the notion of wisdom amongst a plethora of other topics with great expedience. His quick topic turnover can make for dense content and one must be alert to the subject-run to fully appreciate it. As such, his mentions of turrets syndrome at couple of points during the show seem poetically appropriate
Robin is charmingly personable. His cranky old man persona suits the Generation X audience which, now, like me, are in their mid to late thirties. His personal allure is mesmerising in parts and left me forgetting that I wasn’t in the live audience at times. At the end I even started to applaud before I caught myself.
As the show progresses he moves his tirade into some lengthier, more developed subject matter, including psychic mediums and creationist loons. His material on his own ability to do observational material was a favourite with this reviewer, showing an engagingly eccentric side to Robin.
Robin bears the mark of a well experienced performer. He handles himself through this hour and ten minutes of often frenetic material with the ease of a seasoned professional. His material is not edgy as such, a fact which he explains at the beginning of the show, but it is certainly original, both in content and delivery. I was struck on occasion by the similarity he bears to Australia’s own Justin Hamilton, with whom he shares a distinctive style of mannerism and theatrically based energy.
Included in the DVD extras is a twenty minute interview with Robin in which he chats about his relationship with Ricky Gervais, insomnia, the loss of his record collection in a pool of poo, Tommy Vance and the origin of Robin’s award winning creation, The Book Club. It’s also well worth looking at this interview to see a few examples of Robin’s skill as an impressionist, including a bang-on Stewart Lee impersonation. There are also another twenty five minutes of choice deleted bits and some easter eggs which I won’t tell you about, in respect for the nature of the easter egg.
Robin Ince is as Dumb as You is well worth a look, and coming from independent producers Go Faster Stripe it is also easily affordable. I only knew bits of Robin’s work before I saw this DVD. Now I’m a confirmed fan.
Check out the Go Faster Stripe website for this DVD