Neuroscience – ComedyNews.Org :: Comedy News Organization

The comedian tells us why Francis Crick, Brian Cox and Stephen Hawking are the butt of his jokes in his new book and radio series

When I meet Robert Newman, he is wearing a homemade brain scanner on his head. He had it built as a prop for his most recent show about neuroscience. Newman is a writer and comedian who had a hugely successful career as part of a duo with David Baddiel in the 1990s and has since been doing his lecture-cum-standup style of high-brow comedy. His previous topics have included the history of oil, the war on terror and evolution.

Off stage, Newman is the only comedian to have been cited in the science journal Nature and he has written about neuroscience and robotics for Philosophy Now. He’s here to talk about his new book, Neuropolis, and its accompanying BBC Radio 4 programme, in which he guns for an unlikely bunch of targets – neuroscience writers – for having, he says, a reductionist view of the world.

It’s like there’s a competition among science writers – who can say the most horrible thing about humanity

Liam Williams quit standup fearing his pessimism about the state of the planet was making audiences worryingly apathetic. But is a sunny outlook really any healthier? We sat him down for a session with psychotherapist Philippa Perry

More uplifting culture for 2017

One day last year, Liam Williams locked himself out and tried to climb in through his bedroom window. “I’d done it before very skilfully when drunk,” he says, “but this time I was hungover, so I guess I had that reduced inhibition, but not that derring-do – you know, the reckless optimism of a drunkard.” It didn’t end well. “It was only the first storey but I didn’t have any shoes on and it was quite a high window. I fell and broke my heels. It really hurt.”

The comedian is telling this story to psychotherapist Philippa Perry and me as we meet in a London cafe to consider the merits of optimism and pessimism. Is pessimism necessarily bad for you? What health benefits come with being optimistic? Does being optimistic help you in relationships? Does being pessimistic make you pragmatic about a prospective lover’s shortcomings? If you’re as bleakly pessimistic as Eeyore, can you change? If you’re as misguidedly optimistic as Mr Micawber, can you get a firmer grip on reality? More troublingly, what looks like pessimism to one can seem like optimism to another. Consider Williams’s attempted break-in. Perry suggests that his climb was optimistic. Liam worries it was doomed by pessimism. “It comes under the heading of risk-taking,” says Perry. “Optimists are more likely to take risks – they think they can drive into that gap in traffic or climb through windows.” She pauses before adding: “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”

Tag: Neuroscience

Robert Newman: ‘Scientists think we’re all stupid. It makes me angry…’

Optimism v pessimism in 2017: the comedian and the psychologist debate

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