The latter element, his “lines,” is perhaps the single most
unique thing about him. For, besides being a great character comic and a
brilliant “mad professor” of comedy concepts, Munnery is one of the only modern
standups who regularly includes humorous aphorisms in his act.
Yes, aphorisms — sayings. I’ll call them maxims, because
perhaps that might not make the reader run away, thinking that Simon’s sayings
are of the “a penny saved is a penny earned” variety. Instead he was written a
number of maxims that are not one-liner, set-up/punchline jokes; they are also
not the kind of surreal observations that are the meat of the great Steven
Wright’s act.
So reviewers struggle to describe what he does (as I am
now). He responded by musing on how the worst thing you can call a comedian’s
show is “close to art”:
I was hesitant to run through a number of his maxims (they
are copyrighted material) until I considered the fact that many of them are on
YouTube in his performance clips and that there are pages like this one
that contain dozens of them. Thus, my 16 favorite maxims — I have tried not to
duplicate some of the ones that are available in several places on the Net and
ones that work only if spoken verbally (“If you want to take offense, take
offense. If you want to build a wall, get some bricks.”)
MUNNERY MAXIMS:
All men are brothers. Hence war.
What should one say after making love? Thank you seems too
much. I’m sorry — not enough.
“Brevity is the soul of wit,” said Shakespeare. “ I say,
“Wank!” Thus I win.
Behind every great man there lies a great woman. And one in
front of him as well if he’s lucky.
It is said that at the age of 55 each man becomes what he
most despised at the age of 25. I live in constant fear lest I become badly
organized trip to Bournemouth.
Have you anything to say? No? Then shut up. Unless you are a
woman, in which case carry on — it’s delightful.
It is the vanity of women to spend hours in front of a
mirror. It is the vanity of men not to bother.
If you only read one book in your life… I highly recommend
you keep your mouth shut.
To the Italians I say this. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Perhaps it could have been if you spoke less with your arms.”
Perhaps it was women who invented kissing — to stop men’s
mouths.
Your importance in this world is incalculable. Now get some
sleep.
Does pornography degrade women? Or does it merely raise the
standard by which they are judged?
Whatever it says in the Bible the truth remains: You can
read the Bible and dismiss it as nonsense if you like; you can dismiss it as
nonsense without reading it to save time if you prefer.
A million monkeys were given a million typewriters. It’s
called the Internet.
****
If you like the above, Simon is selling his book of
aphorisms How to Live at his website. I am a proud
owner of this strange little book.
Munnery is also a very talented “character comedian.” One of
his first characters — which he performed onstage, on TV, and in a radio series
— was a lunk-headed anarchist who called himself “Alan Parker, Urban Warrior.”
Alan is a uniquely British creation, as young Americans (on
the whole — thankfully there are exceptions), are not politically motivated
enough to be satirized. Munnery created Parker as an amalgam of people he’d
encountered and made certain that the character does have a thoroughly
consistent philosophy that of course makes absolutely no sense. Get a dose of
Alan here (from ’94):
Here he is live, in 1993:
The 1993-94 radio show “29 Minutes of Truth” with Munnery as
“APUW” and Stewart Lee as his dim-witted bandmate is available for download at
the fistoffun.net site. Like all the radio projects done by Lee, Herring,
and their chums, it’s top-notch stuff. Alan also hosted a failed TV pilot, “London Shouting,” that counted among its guests Super Furry Animals.
Simon also decided that security guards needed their own
standup routine, so he created a security guard comedian who exclusively tells
jokes that people in that profession would find funny (what was it I was saying
about him being a very unusual performer?). Here he does his security
guard-specific standup in 2007.
Simon also played a Cockney newsstand hawker who
offers a meditation on people who wear buckets on their heads. This links to
his weirdest creation, standup “Billy Buckethead.” This isn’t one of my
favorite Munnery bits, but it’s characteristically bizarre (and seemingly was
*not* inspired by the American guitarist who wears a KFC bucket on his head).
The full act that featured this character outlined a world in which everyone
goes around with buckets on their heads (it’s available on an MP3 on Simon’s site).
For my money, Simon’s ultimate incarnation is “The League
Against Tedium.” The League is a gentleman decked out in what looks like a
military outfit (a renegade admiral) who wears a top hat and is dripping with
loathing for everyone he encounters. The League is here to tell you that “you
are nothing!” It’s a brave comic gambit, but Munnery is, again, an incredibly
brave performer.
What makes the League so goddamned memorable is that Munnery
made him subject of a TV series that I consider one of his greatest
achievements — although Simon himself seems to partially dismiss it in recent
interviews. Believe me, there has never been another show as willfully weird
and cynically funny as the 2001 six-episode League Against Tedium series
Attention, Scum.
Directed by Stewart Lee (him again!), the show is
extremely hard to describe because it consists of a number of equally odd
elements. First and foremost the League visits English towns and preaches to
crowds about how inferior they are from the back of a truck. He also dispenses
his special brand of acidly sarcastic wisdom (herein enters the aphorisms).
Add to this framework a number of equally discordant elements and you have what I described on the Funhouse TV show as “the perfect alien comedy.” Upon first seeing the show I felt as if I’d been dropped into another (far wittier, belligerently bizarre) universe. Punctuating Simon’s segments are odd sketches, including “24-hour news from a man who’s been up for 24 hours” (the brilliant raw-nerve comic Johnny Vegas), short gag sequences set in a field that are reminiscent of Spike Milligan’s visual work (in films like Lester’s “The Running, Jumping, Standing Still Film”), and “Kombat Opera,” musical sequences featuring poetically vulgar arias performed by Lori Lixenberg accompanied by composer Richard Thomas (who gave us the Jerry Springer and Anna Nicole operas — and for some reason is dressed here as Nosferatu!).
Attention Scum is a matter of taste —
when I showed scenes from it on the Funhouse TV show there were as many
politely negative comments (“just didn’t get it”) as there were positive ones
(“I can’t get it out of my head”). I happen to love its blatant weirdness and
caustic intelligence. But judge for yourself — due to the fact that the show
has never been (and probably never will be) on DVD in the UK, the entire series
is on YouTube. The first episode starts here:
The series was an outgrowth of Munnery’s solo standup shows
as the League Against Tedium (see one amazing clip here) and his
involvement with a conceptual cabaret group he headed called “Cluub
Zarathustra.” The book You Are Nothing by Robert Wringham,
from Go Faster Stripe, chronicles the activities of Cluub Z and its influence
on modern alternative comedy in the U.K. Wringham sums up “Cluub Z” quite
handily:
Over the years it featured prop comics, violinists, punk
rockers, postmodern interpretive dances, brightly-colored wigs, malfunctioning
homemade contraptions, lectures, film screenings, slide shows, and melting
ice.” (p. 12)
Wringham's book includes quotes from the major participants
in Cluub Z. The roster of people that collaborated on the shows reads like a
who's who of modern British alternative comedy: Munnery, Lee, Kevin Eldon,
Sally Phillips, Julian Barratt (of the Mighty Boosh), Al Murray, Graham
Linehan, Richard Herring, and Johnny Vegas.
The reflections of the comedians are fascinating to read, as
the material they describe sounds absolutely brilliant, fully insane, and madly
self-indulgent (as the audiences' experience began at some shows with a bouncer
carrying them *in* to the proceedings). The pullquote from Stewart Lee featured
on the book's cover sums up the bizarre nature of the experimentation: “It was
the best and worst thing I ever worked on.”
Wringham's research into the Cluub Z phenomenon is very
thorough, and the book is essential for those who are interested in this crop
of performers. He discusses both the concrete details of what the troupe did
onstage and also their influences — when Munnery was asked once about the
connection his comedy has to the work of Beckett and Wagner, he answered
“They're people I steal from. If you're a comedian you're entitled to steal
from great literature and take it into the filthy world of jokes.” (pp. 120-21)
Another form of dealing with hecklers was the
“self-knowledge impregnator,” described here by Munnery to Richard Herring on his must-listen podcast:
A pilot was made for a “Cluub Z” TV series. It is
essentially a dry run for Attention Scum. Some well-meaning
fan-persons have shared this rarity with the world:
The invaluable indie mail-order DVD company Go Faster Stripe
has released three Munnery discs, all of which show the range of his material.
He seems somewhat nervous in a few of the short segments you can see online,
but then he tosses off expert lines at random and uses strange conceptual
devices to deliver very funny material.
The first Go Faster Stripe disc is called
Hello and it’s a portmanteau collection of many of Simon’s
different routines and personas. It also includes a short segment where he reads
aphorisms from his book How to Live:
The Fylm Makker DVD is a concept show in
which he sits in the audience with a video projector trained on him. He talks
to the audience from a large screen on the stage (he reminds them that “it’s
the first time in history that you can shout at a screen and it can hear you”).
Since the home viewer is watching what he projected on the screen, we enter
straight “into” the act as he moves through various bits of no-budget animation
and deft verbal humor. He explains the concept at the beginning of the show with
a catchy little ditty:
Simon’s third DVD from Go Faster Stripe,
Fylm finds the concept refined and Simon offering more absurdist
material. Munnery has worked in a few punk-sounding bands and he uses that
experience well in his standup, crafting odd songs that seem to be the bastard
stepchild of punk and Spike Milligan’s “Goon”-ish puns:
One of Simon’s best poems (again with a hint of punk, as
well as John Cooper Clarke), performed here without a musical backing (you can
hear it with a steady drum backing on the Hello DVD). His
feelings about London:
Another GFS offering is the 2-CD set “Mr. Bartlett & Mr. Willis.” It’s a radio series that, to my knowledge, never aired on the
radio. The series follows two chatty men, played by Simon Munnery and Kevin
Eldon, who make small talk and are prone to time travel. Here’s the only
episode missing from the set, because of music rights:
Simon’s experiments in audience confrontation have
reportedly not resulted in any irate “punters” belting him one, but his good
friend Stewart Lee reported that Munnery got a lot of grief for showing how
superior the League was by killing a worm onstage. That part of his act has been preserved in what seems like the earliest clip of Simon online (not
counting his odd comedy team “God and Jesus” found here), from a 1990 film
called The Edinburgh Years.
One of the best vehicles for the League was a music-video
hosting gig on a show called “Futur TV.” Here Simon’s bon mots and plain old
weirdness could punctuate other content and warp the minds of the souls who
tuned in to see a bunch of prefabricated music-vids.
A 1999 standup clip in which Simon demonstrates what it’s
like after ingesting shitloads of drugs and watching way too many Michael Caine
movies:
One of Simon’s oddest routines is a paper puppet show in
which he plays the parts of the thieves who were crucified with Christ. A
Munnery fan has converted this bizarrely cartoonish routine into an actual
cartoon.
A recent live Munnery show was as far removed from standup
as theater can get — he played various employees at a
"restaurant" in an open field called “La Concepta,” at which there is no food (it's “all the
rigmarole of haute cuisine, without the shame of eating”). I particularly like
the cheapness of the props (and Simon's awful mustache). [Note: the website
mentioned in the clip is now defunct — quelle horreur!]
And if that is too conventional for you, there's always
Simon's more recent show in which he “sings Kierkegaard.” Two things that
I recently caught up to are further down the conceptual wormhole. The first is
an event where Simon took a leaf from Andy Kaufman’s book (you remember him) and became an intergender wrestling champ for an evening.
The second is a gameshow (!) that Simon devised and hosted
for a total of seven episodes. Named “Either/Or” (another nod to the melancholy
Mr. Kierkegaard), the show features the League Against Tedium interrogating a
bunch of audience members cloaked in hooded garments. If they win, they can
leave and keep their anonymity; if they lose they are given fame, something the
League has no use for.
That said, there are some great off-the-cuff quips by
Munnery, and some delightfully daft choices the hooded unknowns must choose
between — my personal favorites are “Either… the Dalai Lama, Or… Bananarama” and
“Either… Celine Dion, Or… heroin.” (Anyone who doesn’t choose heroin deserves a
good overdose.)
Lixenberg’s insults aren’t exactly subtle (“Is that your
face/or is it an armpit?” “Keep your toilet clean/by shitting on the carpet”),
but the fact that she’s delivering them as mini-arias contributes to the
overall weirdness of the show. For anyone unfamiliar with Munnery’s work I
would not suggest watching “Either/Or” first — you’d do far better with the
standup clips embedded above or “Attention Scum” for a better dose of the
League and his minions. But I am very grateful that YT poster Christian
Daugherty has decided to share “Either/Or” with us.
Munnery’s sole appearance in American media (that I’m aware
of — feel free to leave comments) was an interview with Marc Maron on the
WTF podcast (currently locked up behind Marc’s inimitable
“pay cash for a formerly free podcast” firewall). In the UK, he’s been seen in
recent years in sketches on shows hosted by his friends and colleagues Stewart
Lee (Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle) and Kevin Eldon
(It’s Kevin) and doing standup on the Comedy Central UK show
The Alternative Comedy Experience (which isn’t excerpted
anywhere online).
I know that Simon has buried his League Against Tedium and
Alan Parker characters, but I look forward to a time when those of us in the U.S.
can experience Munnery’s weird inventiveness in person.
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