Robert Newman: ‘Scientists think we’re all stupid. It makes me angry…’
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
Related: David Baddiel: ‘I have no gene for shame. I just want to tell people the truth’
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