INTERVIEW: Robin Ince

- By Allan Lear

Robin Ince and Johnny Mains are back with Dead Funny: Encore, another collection of short horror stories written by stand-up comedians and, this time around, Ince’s good friend Alan Moore (of Watchmen and being-best-at-comics fame). I had the luck to run into Robin Ince at the Bluedot science festival, and he very kindly agreed to share his thoughts on the new book…

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So you produced the first Dead Funny about…

That was about eighteen months ago, yeah. It basically came out of – I can’t remember if it was a sober or a drunken conversation – at a book festival in Devon in a town where homeopaths rule. That, alone, is like the start of a horror story. So I was talking to Johnny Mains, and I’d really got back into horror quite a lot; I’d been starting to read HP Lovecraft and stuff like that, and it’s something a lot of my friends, people like Stewart Lee, really like. Certainly as teenagers we loved horror, and I think now we’re in middle age we’ve returned to our teenage excitements.

And you assembled another fantastic range of comedians for this second collection.

Well, the original idea was that it would be an entirely different line-up. And then Stewart Lee was very keen to do another, because the story we’d used in the first volume was actually something I’d commissioned him to do for the New Statesman when I did a guest edit on that, and he had a new story that he wanted to write. And then Rufus Hound had enjoyed writing a story so much that he really wanted to do another; and then there are other people who wanted to do it, so in the end we said, I’ll tell you what, if we’re hoping to do a third volume, we want to try and make sure that there’s as many new voices as possible. And we wanted to make sure there was a good mix of people; like the first one, we wanted to make sure it wasn’t too male as well, because I think quite often these anthologies are so one-sided. We knew Josie Long would have an interesting idea in her head, and then there’s Alice Lowe, who has such a fantastic imagination – as anyone who’s seen Sightseers will know already – she’s written three stories, so we ended up having a lot of people who wanted to as well. John Robertson, who does some really interesting live shows, which have certainly got some gothic and horror elements to them, as well as some excellent professional shouting. Isy Suttie was in the first book.

You were talking about how a lot of comedians grow up reading horror. There’s a lot of the same worldview, isn’t there?

I think that the kind of comics I hang around with, quite a lot of them were solitary individuals. And one of the reasons we may well be stand-ups is because, for a brief period of time, we can control the world; we can create the world in a different way. That’s why some comedians are so good at writing short stories, because the short is almost like…it can be a joke, it’s three thousand words and then a punchline. I wrote my first one a few years ago, a can’t remember what volume of horror anthology it was*, and then I found that the one I’ve written for this one is much better than the one I wrote for the first one. A lot of other things that I’ve seen from other friends of mine who’ve become increasingly involved in the written word…again, seeing what you use in stand-up but how you change that style to work on the printed page, I think that’s very interesting.

I think it will surprise a lot of people with the end result, because very few of the stories are proper funny-funny stories. Al Murray’s story in the first one is tremendously haunting story, partly based on something from the history of his own family; I don’t think that has any jokes in at all, and I think anyone who’s seen the Pub Landord would possibly…because everyone is only meant to be one thing, as we know, everyone is meant to fit into a very specific slot…I don’t think they’d associate the two. I think that’s what I loved about editing this one as well, which is, again, sometimes very horrific imagination, sometimes very haunting, melancholy imagination, and sometimes you can see – though no-one really writes about gigs or the act of being a stand-up comedian – you can see something being reflected from a nightmare scenario in a stand-up gig, and then you get back to your Travelodge and then you go, “I’ve just come up with the idea for the story, because my mind has reached the correct place of darkness”.

You were saying that people tend to be pigeonholed, and if we were to look at Robert Bloch – that’s a man who’s known as a brilliant horror writer, but he was also a brilliant comedy writer; and sometimes, like in Stewart Lee’s latest tour, where – he mentions the suicide of Robin Williams – the comedy comes from a very dark place. So there’s definitely a shared view of the world**.

I think there is something, and I think there’s an interesting thing with what I call the New Alternative, because some of the “New Alternative” comedians are so old that they could actually have been around the first time, and there is a lot of very immediate, gut-punching laugh comedy out there – which is great – and also the arena stuff. And there’s also a smaller section of that community, and in a lot of the arts, there is a realisation that sometimes things can be entertaining without there being uproarious laughter all the way through. That’s something you see with Stewart, people are really gripped by the narrative, they’re gripped by the risk that he takes, the jeopardy of dealing with things like the suicide of Robin Williams. Again, I think that level of risk-taking is why so many people in this volume are adept at writing horror.

There is a point where…I remember I was writing a play for Hammer, it was a Hammer audio a few years ago***. It wasn’t a great bit of work – I’m still learning, I’m learning all the time – but I didn’t realise it was horrible. Then I found out that the actors had been disgusted by it. It wasn’t because there was anything overly gory in it, but there were a lot of hints of decaying flesh and flies, and it was meant to be the kind of thing that, when you were listening to it, you would be itching a lot, you would go, “Urgh, it’s crawling in me”. I think that’s part of taking the risk, how far you can go with horror, because it’s very easy just to be gory. The story I wrote for the first Dead Funny was partly me imaging something between Guy N Smith and a Pan book of horror short stories, and also I was doing a show about neuroscience, so I wanted to do a story about ideas of consciousness, but throw in some really ridiculous gore as well. Whereas the new one is very different, it’s mainly about the suspense, which is very difficult. I did a live reading of it and I didn’t know if it was working or not until I said “shall I stop there?” and everyone said “no!”, so that was good, at least some people were with it.

That’s what horror’s about, it’s checking the boundaries all the time. That’s where you get really great horror. Robert Aickman’s stories are amazing because, very often, very little happens…you don’t even really know what has happened…but there’s something ominous happening throughout it. And the person survives, it’s not somebody who’s devoured at the end, but you know that they have with them the memory of something which they will never truly be able to explain, maybe never even truly able to express. I think that, once again, is taking enormous risks with the genre, doing things like that.

You mentioned your interest in neuroscience and taking that sort of multidisciplinary approach to horror writing – does that come from your science podcast, The Infinite Monkey Cage, or is it from your natural butterfly-gathering instinct?

Robin & Brian Cox’s The Infinite Monkey Cage

It’s butterfly-gathering. If I get the chance to do something different, something I really like – I love horror, so it’s great to do that; I love science, so it’s great to do that; sometimes it’s political stuff; I wrote a film about children’s dance competitions once with my friend Carolyn Wilson**** – I just like to try as many different things as possible and then, if I find them boring, I won’t do them again. But the only problem I have now is that most of the things I’m offered, I want to do, and I find them interesting. Very often there’s no money in them – I mean, books like this, there’s no money in it – but that doesn’t matter, because you want to write the story and you want to bleed the minds of friends of yours who you know might have to be pushed a little: “ooh, I don’t know if I’ve got a horror story in me”; “you have, you have, I know you have”. Then when it came out you got reactions like Rufus Hound, who was really desperate to write a story for the second one – it was great. He’d never really gone into this genre before, and he said that immediately afterwards he had another idea, which is sort of what his story’s about – he wrote something and said “oh my god, this is like something from Inside Number 9”. He actually got in contact with Reese Shearsmith, who said they’d pretty much written the new series – because Reese and Steve [Pemberton] do the writing.

That was another great thing; I didn’t realise that Reese had never written a short story. He’d never written anything for a book. He’s written film, obviously, and TV, and he’s written for radio, and his story Dog which opens the first volume is very funny and very dark. The one bad review I saw – I’m sure there are others posted about the internet, please don’t send them to me – said, “I only read the first story, and it was about killing dogs, which is something that is not funny at all. I did not bother reading past the third page. Two stars”. And I thought, oh, they only read three pages and they gave us two stars? That’s very generous, I think, for three pages and disgust.

But again, a lot of people I know are very restless and they want to do lots of things. Josie Long goes off and does her political work, and she set up a very important charity called Arts Emergency with a friend of hers, and then she does her normal stand up and she does radio shows and narrates documentaries…all of those things, to be given the chance, as long as money isn’t your definition, as long as the first question isn’t “how much is this?” – we all want to make a living, but as long as you can afford to live, you can afford to experiment even more.

Dylan Moran said once that comedians find it hard to write novels, because what a comedian does is produce ideas that last thirty seconds. There must be ideas that don’t fit into stand-up, that you can’t find an outlet for, that become short stories.

Well, that’s an interesting thing about Stewart Lee again, isn’t it, because some of his ideas for his TV series are very long ideas, very long for stand-up – I mean, to have twelve minutes of Rod Liddle eating a papadum…that was basically a free jazz experiment, as far as I could see. But that’s a good point by Dylan Moran because I think that’s why short stories do work with comedians.

I was talking with a friend of mine who’s just been in a play, and we were both saying that comedians are very good for the first few days of rehearsal. They have all the energy, they muck around, and the actors are so slow, they’re always asking questions…and then by the time it actually gets to doing the play, the actors are awfully good at repeating the same thing and doing it very believably, and sometimes the comedians are quite terrible, because they’re bored and saying “Why can’t we change it tonight?” Because this was how it’s written, and that’s what the story is. “Awww, does it have to be?” So we remain children in that sense.

Dead Funny: Encore is produced by Salt Publishing and retails for £9.99 in all good bookshops.

* It was The Screaming Book of Horror, also edited by Johnny Mains

** Except in the interview I didn’t say “a shared view of the world”, I said “a Weltanschauung”, because I am a spectacular prick.

*** Sticks and Stones, on Hammer Chillers. Available from Audible.

**** Razzle-Dazzle: A Journey Into Dance, rated PG for “thematic material and some brief mild language”, whatever the thundering fuck that’s supposed to mean.

- By Allan Lear