Robert Wringham

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Robert Wringham (actually Robert Westwood , born on 28. November 1982 in Dudley , West Midlands in England) is a British comedian and cabaret artist , the founder and editor of the magazine New Escapologist gained and as a book author international attention. He lives in Glasgow and Montreal .

life and work

Wringham describes his home parish as a desolate place, “although there is a beautiful castle there. And a zoo […] ”. His childhood was happy, he was always making up stories and his sister never managed to beat him at the Hippo-Flip. The father was originally a miner and ultimately had to earn his living as a truck driver. The mother initially worked as a nurse, later as a childminder. Since she was of neo-paganism , "we spent the holidays looking at stone circles and met a lot of eccentric people."

In 2004 he “fled” to Glasgow . His pseudonym comes from James Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner , a Scottish gaudy novella from 1824 that was not published until sixty years later. As a stand-up comedian , he portrays a character specially tailored to him, a mischievous and somewhat dodgy city dweller, averse to hard work and suspicious of nature. Wringham described his stage persona as follows: "English dandy meets hipster -Blödmann." As impromptu -Komödiant and performance artists, he joined, among others, in the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh, the Mainline Theater in Montreal and the Center for Contemporary Arts on and at festivals such as the Edinburgh Fringe and the Montreal Infringement Festival . Together with Alan Bissett, Magi Gibson, Iain Heggie and Ian Macpherson, he founded DiscoMbObUlate , a night of cabaret and the spoken word - dedicated to humorous literature. He was the first guest actor in Stewart Laing's The Salon Project at the Traverse Theater.

In 2007 he founded the biannual magazine New Escapologist , which is devoted to ways out of the daily routine. The magazine published and published articles by or interviews with Leo Babauta , Alain de Botton , Richard Herring , Tom Hodgkinson , Momus , Ewan Morrison , Luke Rhinehart , Will Self , Poly Styrene , Dave Thompson , Lord Whimsy, and other authors who advocated the Use the principle of enjoyment of life. The magazine also contains sentences such as: “Consume less, work less is my advice. Become a minimalist and be free. ”[My advice is to consume less, work less. Become a minimalist and be free.] Another place: “The solution is to slow down.” [The solution is called slowing down]. The magazine is a mixture of humor, practical information and moral support for people who choose to live an unconventional lifestyle or a job free life.

He also writes satirical and essayistic articles for magazines and websites such as HiLoBrow , The Idler , Playboy , for the British Comedy Guide, Splitsider and a number of other publications. Most of his essays refer to incidents in his supposedly sluggish and lazy life. In 2014 he wrote about convalescence for Playboy - “Stay at home. Make yourself comfortable. There is a silver lining in every illness. ”- and about napping .

Wringham is one of the campaigners of a new form of criticism of capitalism that is being reformed in the 21st century - occasionally referring to historical, often anarchist models, denouncing the totalitarianism of globalization and its economic priority and propagating consumption renunciation. This position is occasionally represented by groups and clusters such as Attac , Global 2000 or the Berlin Center for Career Refusal , Haus Bartleby , founded by Alix Faßmann , Anselm Lenz and Jörg Petzold , but mostly by lone fighters in science and journalism. Other prominent representatives of the exit movement include the Irish-Mexican political scientist John Holloway , the South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han , the Belgian cultural philosopher Raoul Vaneigem and the Swiss social researcher Kurt Wyss . The heterogeneous movement is united by the demands for an unconditional basic income and a worldwide transaction tax . Within this movement, Wringham is one of the discreet wings, on the one hand because he mostly uses the fine edge of humor, on the other hand because his demand for a basic income of 600 to 700 euros is consistently modest.

He has been married to his long-term partner, the Canadian illustrator and curator Samara Leibner , since 2014 . His wife is the art director of the New Escapologist and occasionally appears as an antagonist in his publications. The couple live alternately in Glasgow and Montreal .

Three books

Wringham has published three books since 2012, the last one also being published in German.

You are nothing

His first book was published by Go Faster Stripe and tells the story of the Dadaist theater group Cluub Zarathustra , which existed from 1994 to 1997 and which included cabaret artists Julian Barratt , Kevin Eldon , Stewart Lee , Graham Linehan , Roger Mann , Simon Munnery , Sally Phillips and Johnny Vegas belonged to. The book is considered a micro-history of Dadaism , written from Wringham's perspective, who conducted interviews with group members and their audiences for this book, as well as evaluating newspaper clippings from the 1990s and fanzines . The television series Attention Scum! and the development of the musical Jerry Springer - The Opera and Wringham considers the formation's influence to have shaped the entire British comedy and cabaret landscape up to the present day.

A loose egg

In 2014 a collection of humorous, often smug texts appeared under the title A Loose Egg . These were previously published in a variety of different media and Eric Echo placed them in the tradition of outrageous comedy, as it was shaped by the great Canadian humorist Eric Nicol (1919–2011): “Light and silly, it seems dedicated to no other purpose than to amuse people like me. ”[Light and stupid, this book doesn't seem to have any other purpose than amusing people like me]. In 2015 the book was nominated for the Canadian Leacock Medal, although the author is from the UK.

Escape Everything!

Harry Houdini is pictured on the cover of Wringhams' third book.

Wringham's third book is a passionate plea for escapism , admittedly not in the classic sense of the word meaning as an escape from reality or "unconscious refusal of social goals and ideas for action", but in a new interpretation as a conscious dropout and deliberate ignoring of the constraints of capitalism and consumer society . The publisher's announcement says, similar to a battle cry : “Escape from work. Escape from consumerism. Escape from despair. ”[Escape from work! Escape the compulsion to consume! Escape from despair!]

The design of the English-language book cover illustrates and clarifies in a dramatic way the request to get out through a depiction of the escape artist Harry Houdini in the middle, strictly tied to the upper body, arms and feet, subtitled with The Drudgery of Work . Houdini is flanked by two tied hands each time, subtitled with Debt , Mortage , Consumerism and Loneliness [  debt , mortgage , consumerism , loneliness  ]. Fonts and illustrations are reminiscent of Art Deco posters or signs on the Paris Métro from the early 20th century.

The starting point of the book is the thesis of the trap in which the citizen of the present finds himself: “Trapped in modern life. Captured! Trapped in work, consumption, stress, debt, isolation and general dissatisfaction. ”The author recalls that we spend an average of 87,000 hours of our lives at work and another 5,000 on the way there and back, countless more hours preparing for work, worrying about work and taking a break from work. “Most of us hate the job. But without work we cannot afford all that that we are told that we want and need. ”Conclusion:“ So around we go. ”Like the illustration of the cover, the promise of happiness is reminiscent of the political ideologies of the early 20th century: "Become a modern-day escapologist and freedom and happiness might be possible after all." [Become a modern escapist and you will be waving freedom and happiness in spite of everything!] The Viennese daily Der Standard formulates the same requirement a little more elegantly: " For him, it's not about a social utopia, but about the possibility of achieving certain things for yourself. To paraphrase Sartre: The position of freedom is the more demanding one, so we should take it. "

The metaphor Houdini - the artist escaped from prison cells, straitjackets and even from the inside of a dead whale - is deliberately used by the author as a promise of “real life”, beyond the shackles of everyday work. The author, whose facial features are not dissimilar to those of Houdini, says of Houdini: “In his age, a hundred years ago, there were many new technologies that were believed to make life easier: the telephone, the car. But they also caught us. ”The original English edition was crowdfunded , achieved 113%, published by Unbound and distributed by Penguin Random House . The promotional video used the overture to Gioachino Rossini's opera Guillaume Tell , which in turn became known as the theme music for the television series The Lone Ranger (1949–1957). Which at the same time put two further icons of media history, consciously or unconsciously, at the service of the dropouts - the Swiss freedom fighter Wilhelm Tell and the ranger, believed to be dead, who roams the area as a “masked avenger against crime”.

The German-language website of the Random House publishing group describes Wringham as “Entfesselungexperten”, but with quotation marks.

The four no

“So:
* I don't have a car. That is fundamental. I walk a lot.
* I don't have a house, I rent it.
* And I don't have a cell phone. Those are the three main no's. When I have a problem I go for a walk.
* We don't have a TV either, but we go to art house cinemas. I watch European films that hardly anyone in Glasgow wants to see. They're cheap. We also read to each other, my wife and I. "

- Robert Wringham : "Cleaning is fun when you can see it correctly", Interview with Bert Rebhandl , Der Standard (Vienna), 23 August 2016, online: [2] , accessed on 25 August 2016.

Publications

Award

  • 2015: Nomination for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humor (for his book A Loose Egg )

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ a b Interview with Robert Wringham: I'm out , Random House publishing group , accessed on August 24, 2016.
  2. ^ Robert Wringham: What is Robert Wringham? , accessed August 26, 2016.
  3. ^ Robert Wringham: Twitter , January 4, 2016, accessed August 26, 2016.
  4. ↑ flickr: DiscoMbObUlate poster , March 6, 2008, accessed on August 26, 2016.
  5. ↑ Laura Ennor: Director Stewart Laing on The Salon Project , The List, September 21, 2011, accessed August 26, 2016.
  6. ^ Robert Wringham: I'm not an employee by nature. Nobody is , New Escapologist, reproduced from an interview by Wringham with the student magazine Mongrel, April 10, 2014, accessed August 26, 2016.
  7. ↑ Russia Today: 'Extremely damaging' work stress causes Brits to drink, smoke and be lazy , February 12, 2015, accessed August 26, 2016.
  8. ↑ Penguin : Penguin Authors: Robert Wringham , accessed August 26, 2016.
  9. ^ Robert Wringham: How to Quit Your Job , The Idler, September 22, 2015, accessed August 26, 2016.
  10. ↑ Robert Wringham: The Anatomy of the Man Cold ( Memento of the original from June 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.playboy.com archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Playboy, January 27, 2014, accessed August 26, 2016.
  11. ↑ Robert Wringham: The Nap: Modern Man's Final Refuge ( Memento of the original from June 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.playboy.com archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Playboy, February 13, 2014, accessed August 26, 2016.
  12. ↑ In addition to Gesell , Gramsci , Kropotkin and Lafargue, important reference points for critics of capitalism in the 21st century are Italian operaism , Michel Foucault and the theoretical foundation of the Mexican Zapatistas . Divergent texts such as Herman Melville's Bartleby the Writer (1853), Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) and Walter Benjamin's fragment Capitalism as Religion (1921) as well as Epicureanism are mentioned as essential approaches to the discussion . See u. a. Bartleby House: [hausbartleby.org/bibliothek/ Bibliothek] , accessed August 23, 2016.
  13. ↑ In 2016, Haus Bartleby eV organized, in cooperation with brut Wien , the Club of Rome , the Heinrich Böll Foundation and the Wiener Passagen Verlag - in Vienna - The Capitalism Tribunal , in which specific cases were indicted and negotiated. See Bartleby House: The Capitalism Tribunal ( Memento of the original dated May 7, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / capitalismtribunal.org archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Wednesday 4th to Tuesday 10th May 2016, accessed on 23 August 2016.
  14. ↑ a b c Robert Wringham: Cleaning is fun when you see it correctly , Interview with Bert Rebhandl , Der Standard (Vienna), 23 August 2016, accessed on 23 August 2016.
  15. ^ Robert Wringham: Day of the Coconut , August 2, 2014, accessed August 26, 2016.
  16. ↑ Go Faster Stripe: Robert Wringham - You Are Nothing , accessed August 25, 2016.
  17. ↑ Steve Bennett: You Are Nothing by Robert Wringham: book review by Steve Bennett , Chortle, May 29, 2012, accessed August 25, 2016.
  18. ^ Brian Donaldson: Robert Wringham - You Are Nothing , The List, June 25, 2012, accessed August 25, 2016.
  19. ↑ Dominic Cavendish: Cluub Zarathustra: where British comedy was reborn , The Daily Telegraph (London), July 5, 2014, accessed August 25, 2016.
  20. ↑ Eric Echo: 2015 Finalist - A Loose Egg - Robert Wringham , Canus Humorous, May 2015, accessed August 26, 2016.
  21. ↑ Andrew Philips: Author wins Leacock Medal for Humor for second time , Orillia Packet and Times, April 30, 2015, accessed August 26, 2016.
  22. ↑ Frank Matys: Leacock humor shortlist unveiled in Orillia , Simco.com, April 1, 2015, accessed on August 26, 2016.
  23. ↑ CBC-books: 2015 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humor shortlist revealed , April 1, 2015, accessed August 26, 2016.
  24. ↑ Deborah Dundas: Terry Fallis Wins 2015 Leacock Humor Award , Toronto Star , April 30, 2015, accessed August 26, 2016.
  25. ↑ a b Penguin : Escape Everything! Robert Wringham ( Memento of the original from August 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.penguin.co.uk archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed August 25, 2016.
  26. ↑ Both the English and the German cover can be found on the author's website, see: [1] , accessed on August 25, 2016.
  27. ↑ The term general unhappiness is translated here with general dissatisfaction , although other translations would be just as legitimate. We have deliberately translated the term consumerism differently, depending on the context - as compulsion to consume, consumerism and consumption.
  28. ↑ Unbound: Escape Everything! with the announcement video for the book, accessed August 25, 2016.
  29. ↑ Robert Wringham , on: Random House Publishing Group , accessed August 25, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Wringham, Robert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Westwood, Robert (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British humorist, journalist and book author
DATE OF BIRTH November 28, 1982
PLACE OF BIRTH Dudley , West Midlands in England