Simon Munnery is a bit awkward, amicably eccentric and brilliantly nerdy. He comes on stage to The Fall’s ‘Jerusalem’ wearing a homemade crusader tabard. There are references to Schopenhauer, comments about programming 8-bit computer games and a self-referential discussion of Venn diagrams. He suggests his act could be considered as sitting somewhere between “unfunny comedy” and “shit art”. A meaner review might end right there, but the guy makes us laugh and we don’t even like art.
Simon Munnery emerged from London’s comedy scene in the 90s alongside people like Sally Phillips and Richard Herring. His short-lived BBC show Attention Scum featured turns from Johnny Vegas, Kevin Eldon and Catherine Tate, and was directed by long-term collaborator and friend Stewart Lee. (“He’s a good mate, but he can be irritating.”)
Munnery is a veteran, and he knows what he’s doing – even if we don’t. As he tells us tonight, he has been performing at Edinburgh Fringe for almost three decades. Early on, there’s a convoluted tale about losing his regular accommodation and having to share Lee’s luxury apartment. This is one of several celebrity stories. We hear about the time he awkwardly interviewed his hero Mark E Smith, the time he sort-of-met Madonna and the time he was invited to an “ethical social club” by Banksy. It would feel like namedropping if the stories weren’t so random and his part in them so comically self-effacing.
An incident in which he accidentally elbowed Matt Groening in the face becomes one of the few throughlines of the show, and serves to highlight a sense of missed opportunities, of blundering his way through a career. He remarks that he’s tried so hard to avoid being bitter that he’s now bitter about it. Still, his mate Stewart Lee once called him “one of the all-time great British stand-ups” which can’t hurt. Besides, The Old Market looks like it’s sold out: Munnery certainly has his crowd, even after thirty years.
The last time we saw him perform he had a bucket on his head. By comparison, this loose collection of anecdotes and skits is almost straight-up accessible. Yet it feels like watching a man decluttering his brain in real time: he tosses out ideas and observations, moves on, breaks into song and recites snippets of poetry. Like Robin Ince in his stand-up days, Munnery often seems distracted by his own train of thought, as if there’s always something else more amusing on his mind. But we’re not sure how much of the spontaneous spiel is part of the act, or whether that even matters.
After the interval, the material is more coherent. Since the show is entitled ‘Jerusalem’ we were kind of expecting a theme. Finally, he comes round to dissecting the poem by William Blake which is far more famous in its repurposed form as a patriotic hymn (he calls it “the B-side to the English national anthem”). He rips into the lyrics with the use of a flipchart, in the style of a dismissive school teacher. This segment is the strongest of the show, but it lasts all of 15 minutes. The poem has given us so many evocative phrases, and can be interpreted to support so many contradictory beliefs, you’d think there was scope to delve deeper into those satanic mills and pleasant lands. But no, we’re onto the next thing.
Munnery delights in non sequiturs and abrupt endings. To that extent the comedy is self-aware, and he seems to enjoy those little moments of confusion that follow from wrongfooting an audience. He also manages to find a new way to make a paedophile gag that’s both hilarious and horrendous. But if he sometimes toys with the conventions of comedy, at others he just disregards them. For instance, he tells a true-life shaggy dog story about his actual dog which gets all cutesy before the story – and the dog – veers off a cliff. That’s it, the dog dies.
The Old Market, Friday 8th March 2024
