John Robins: "We're not rockstars, we're dweebs"

It's not quite akin to a magician revealing an illusion and being ostracised from The Magic Circle. But when John Robins brings up “pussy lines” in his latest show—those verbal tricks male comics try onstage to lure female fans into bed—“Russell Kane, for one, is going to be very angry,” he quips.

Though hardly one of the more misogynist or lewd performers at the Fringe, Robins argues that the practice is essentially human nature. Every heterosexual male comic at some point, “either consciously or not, specifically writes material or tweaks stories to impress women. And the cleverer they are, the harder it is to spot.”

Other acts have identified it in his material, just as he's spotted it in theirs, and “it's become a sort of weirdly acceptable joke among male comics”.

The first time he performed this exposé from his new Fringe show, This Tornado Loves You, “at the back of the room there were eight or nine comics, and the girls all turned to the boys with an expression of 'Is this true?'”

Robins is way of “bullshit” comedy trends and orthodoxy; he has always been a bit of an iconoclast. While his schoolfriends were into Nirvana, the future XFM DJ was championing Queen. And when it came to the early days of his comedy career, he was soon challenging the more grandstanding atheism he saw on the circuit.

All performers are “peacocks” to an extent, he concedes, but comedians should never be cool – “We're not rock stars, we're dweebs."

“It's not about winning, we're the people who didn't get the girl or boy at school. So when I see a comic putting across an image to impress people or look sexy, something's not right. You should be in the Rolling Stones, not a comedy club.”

Last year's show Where Is My Mind? represented a critical breakthrough for Robins. Yet although it's the hour he's proudest of, he's under no illusions as to the role a £10,000 marketing budget and a room in the Pleasance played in its success.

He describes his Edinburgh shows as “emotionally driven”, and most of them have been about relationships – he's currently happily involved with fellow comic Sara Pascoe. As a teenager, though, he recalls “feeling pulled from pillar to post by crushes and infatuations” and wrote This Tornado to reject the idea that “there's a perfect person out there, because that means that everyone you meet disappoints you. It's about the clash between fantasy and reality.”

So comedians needn't get too sold on happiness. Robins used to live with Jon Richardson, the quickest wit he knows, before the exacting Richardson moved to unfashionable Swindon, in order to distance himself from friends and family and focus on his misanthropic stand-up. It seems to have worked for him.

Robins dismisses stand-ups exploiting audiences simply to unburden themselves of their problems, insisting: “You have to be led by what's funny”. But he acknowledges the obvious temptation to “make life decisions for the material” and that some comics routinely put themselves in harmful situations to “get a story out of it”.

In part, that's because “no-one wants to hear that you're doing well. The deal between performers and audiences is that they've had a tough week at work, they've paid £10, they want to hear how crap your life is. So you can be blissfully happy, four months go by, and then you start panicking that you've got nothing to write about for Edinburgh.

“There's this inherent tragedy for comedians that when life's going wrong and you're getting into embarrassing scrapes, it's unfortunately much, much funnier.”