 Dispensing second-hand books by astronomer Carl Sagan at the end of his gigs, comedian Robin Ince has become accustomed to suggesting further reading to audiences, filling out tangential routines that flit between quantum physics, evolutionary biology and Schr?dinger s cat in the disorganised leaps of his passionate delivery. He s getting more ambitious though, even as he s grounded in the self-awareness of an  excited idiot who each year knows a little bit more and each year appreciates how much he doesn t know .  It s the eve of the UK s first Uncaged Monkeys show, a live adaptation of Radio 4 s irreverent science series The Infinite Monkey Cage featuring an intellectual supergroup of Wonders Of The Solar System presenter Brian Cox, his fellow physicist Simon Singh, NHS doctor and scourge of Bad Science reporting Ben Goldacre, musical comic Helen arney and assorted heavyweight guest brains. ahead of that Glasgow premiere, Ince admits that  my dream is that when I m 70 years old, I get a letter from a Nobel Prize winner for physics, explaining that watching you tell a childish joke about the human genome made me want to become a scientist!  Is he delusional? Committed political comics like Mark Thomas notwithstanding, comedy s recent boom arguably consolidated the notion that it s an art form that can t inspire change, facilitate the transmission of important ideas or be a crucible for debate. Yet such defeatist, uncritical thinking is anathema to the scientific method. Not only will the Monkeys be tailoring specific material to whichever town or city they re playing in but, via Twitter, they ll be inviting the audience to challenge them with questions during the course of the show.  We re saying: investigate things, be properly sceptical when you see bad science in the news,  Ince states.  If you look back at some of the misreporting of MMR, you can see the holes in it.  The Monkeys are an opinionated troop at any time. Denunciations of  charlatans and bamboozlers  led to Singh being sued unsuccessfully by the British Chiropractic association; Goldacre similarly, by vitamin pill magnate Matthias Rath; and both Cox and Ince had to defend themselves against accusations of attacking religion. On the live stage, therefore, they ll appreciate the freedom of not needing to adhere to BBC guidelines on balance. Ince flags up dissent within the group about certain recent discoveries and maintains he would hate the show to  come across as consensus science . Selling fewer tickets than psychics and spiritualists in the same venues would irk him more, however.  There s something so inspiring about not seeing an afterlife when I die,  he says,  that every atom that ceases to make up me and my consciousness will go on to make other things ... I ll be depressed if more people want to hear Sally Morgan s answer to death, which is that they re over on the other side and they know where your cufflinks are.  Partly as a response to such snake-oil salesmanship, there s been a discernible trend for science-inspired live comedy shows in recent years. Ince s Yuletide celebrations of rationalism, Nine Lessons and Carols For Godless People, featured the likes of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins sharing a stage with Ricky Gervais, Stewart Lee, Dara O Briain and Jarvis Cocker. Elsewhere, Professor Richard Wiseman and Dr Peter Lamont s recently established Edinburgh Secret Society held clandestine talks on the darker side of the human psyche and self-improvement.  Look further through the Comedy Festival programme, and you ll find environmental journalist George Monbiot s Left Hook political deb 