There’s no bigger brain in comedy than Simon Munnery. Formerly the hi-tech Nietszchean orator the League Against Tedium, before which he mocked Eighties anarchists as Alan Parker, Urban Warrior, he’s spent the past few Edinburghs plying his cheerfully messy Annual General Meetings.
They’re certainly a step on from his previous good wheeze, performing shows with a bucket on his head. But Munnery shareholders who adore his deconstructiveness, but wish he’d drop the mucking about, will be only partly satisfied by this Extraordinary General Meeting.
It starts beautifully, as the bespectacled Munnery mutters: “Good evening” – and then decodes the hidden agenda in this apparently innocuous greeting. “Hello” gets the same punishment as he continues his sharp-witted stand-up. No pretension is left unpricked: “A couple of years ago I gave up smoking,” he says, “and took up telling people I’ve given up smoking.” Using diagrams to support his motion, he mocks a critic’s claim that he is “the closest comedy gets to modern art”.
If only he could sustain a whole show at this level. But he is uneasy with the artifice of being himself on stage. So he revs himself up to resurrect Alan Parker, ending a decent routine with an offhand “OK, that’s enough of that”. He scowls as the Security Guard, the frills-free character he first played in the 1980s. He gives voice to two cardboard men left on their crosses after Jesus’s death. “It’s the waiting I can’t stand,” says one. “It’s the certain death at the end of it that gets me,” retorts the other.
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All of it has moments of peerless brilliance. None of it quite hypnotises you into forgetting the scrappiness of the hour as a whole. Munnery, you suspect, gets impatient with the bogusness of showmanship. Yet he’s selling himself short here. He’s a comic visionary who would profit hugely from figuring out just what line of his business he most wants to pursue.
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