The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Simon Evans
Festival Marquee, Aberdour, July 29
Genius – it’s a word that, once upon a time actually meant something.
Nowadays, anyone who serves a decent cup of frothy coffee or can kick a ball between two sticks from a tight angle are considered to be somehow worthy of a title previously confined to those who created life-altering inventions or made discoveries beyond the ken of a regular human being.
Erudite stand-up Simon Evans, whose heroes include explorer Ernest Shackleton and philosophical economist John Stuart Mill, bemoans the fact genuine geniuses are few and far between.
“The show is about the notion of actual genius being hard to find anywhere, and about a collapse of any ambition for intelligent discourse or analysis in public life,” says Simon.
“My suspicion is that the geniuses are all going to Silicon Valley. I’m training my children to learn to code.
“My wife still insists on them having oboe lessons and doing modern dance. I’m just saying ‘forget it, there will be robots playing oboe soon’.”
As a means of contrasting how times have changed, he points to an iconic publication that has swapped knowledge and depth for trivia and gloss.
“One of the centrepieces of the show is a comparison between the Guinness Book Of World Records in the 1970s and my son’s copy now,” Simon says.
“His one is this smorgasbord of huge and garish full-colour photos of Neymar and the most tattooed man, whereas in my day it was an extraordinarily dense compendium of facts about things like the most predominant mineral deposits on the surface of the planet. Maybe things have just got more enjoyable?”
What has been enjoyable is witnessing the rise of Simon Evans as a reliable and thought-provoking stand-up. Critical acclaim and audience admiration have arrived on the back of live shows such as Fringe Magnet, Leashed and In The Money, and appearances on TV shows Mock The Week, Live At The Apollo and Dara Ó Briain: School Of Hard Sums.
Despite all this public exposure and acres of accolades, Simon still harbours reservations about his own abilities.
“While the show is about the ultimate decay and collapse of western civilisation, it’s also a recognition of my failure to live up to my own intellectual ambitions, and that moment when you suddenly realise your chances of a Nobel Prize are slipping over the horizon,” he says.
“There’s a delusion you have as a stand-up that you should be talking about something of significance.
“But actually, people just desperately want to come out and have a laugh. But it’s nice to drop a little something in to make people think ‘oh, that’s an interesting point, I haven’t thought of it in that way’.”