The windmills and intelligent hedge gaps in comic Simon Munnery’s mind

Poster for Simon Munnery’s new Fylm show

A few days ago, I posted a blog in which comedian Simon Munnery talked about his stage show Simon Munnery – Fylm, which opens at the Leicester Square Theatre on Tuesday for ten nights.

I also asked him:

“You’re the comedians’ comedian aren’t you? Everyone says Oh, that Simon Munnery, he’s a genius.”

“Not everyone,” laughed Simon.

“But you’re said to be an intellectual comedian, aren’t you?”

“I dunno… I don’t really… Am I?… I’ve got a joke about Socrates.”

“You were a member of Mensa.”

“Only briefly. My English teacher at school was talking about Mensa and people with high IQs and said Of course, nobody in this room could join and I went home and there was an ad in a newspaper – Write off for the IQ test – and I joined Mensa on those grounds for about six months.”

“And you left because…?”

“I went to a couple of meetings. I went ice skating, though I didn’t actually ice skate. And a picnic at Kenwood House. Friendly people. I’d thought we might be doing puzzles or trying clever things out but, instead, people were just chatting about their lives. I was a bit young – 13 or 14.”

“Your comedy’s not going to play Butlins, is it?” I suggested.

“I’d give it a go,” said Simon. “I’ve had a set for the last three years. It plays clubs everywhere. It changes slowly like a sedimentary rock. I’m happy to play that anywhere to anyone.”

Simon Munnery spoke as Buckethead

“When Malcolm Hardee and I compiled the book Sit-Down Comedy,” I said, “the first thing you submitted was basically the script for your Buckethead show plus footnotes and I thought it was absolutely wonderful but it was too unconventional for Ebury Press/Random House. You then wrote a more conventional and wonderful Sherlock Holmes story. But, when I read the Buckethead script (with footnotes), it was almost funnier than the stage show, because the comedy material was so dense there was a lot I had not picked up.”

“Well,” said Simon. “Maybe that’s what comes of speaking through a bucket… It doesn’t help your diction.”

“You should be writing books,” I suggested.

“I’m too busy doing this Fylm show,” said Simon.

His new show involves him sitting behind the audience, speaking into a camera, so they see him on screen in front of them while he performs behind them.

“I’m not inventing the wheel,” he told me, “but I think I’ve discovered a wheel… Well, the wheel’s there and there’s another one over there and I put them together and – Look! – I’ve got a bicycle!… I’m surprised no-one else does it. Talks to the camera. People do Powerpoint presentations and they’re well aware of the power of the visual. Powerpoint, slides, little videos. But talking to the camera? Why not?”

“I thought your stage act changed after you lost a bollock,” I told him.

“Really?”

“Before that, you were always a character – Alan Parker, Urban Warrior, Buckethead or whatever. Then you had testicular cancer and, after you had one removed, I think in Australia you started talking about it and talking about yourself, which you hadn’t done before.”

“Yes. That’s right,” said Simon. “As in classic stand-up. But, no, I did Buckethead after losing a testicle.”

“So that’s that theory buggered then,” I said. “But you did seem to become more yourself on stage.”

“Yeah,” said Simon. “Deliberately. I thought I’d give that a go. I’d just been doing a series of characters forever.”

Simon performing in London last week

“Had you wanted to be a comedian when you were at Cambridge University?” I asked.

“I suppose when I went there I wanted to be a physicist but,” he laughed, “within a week…”

“Did you actually have a career idea?”

“No. I was just looking forward to studying, finding out things. But I went a bit mad. I didn’t work very hard.”

“How did you stumble into comedy?”

“I was at Cambridge and I joined all the clubs.”

“You were doing Physics?”

“I ended up doing The History & Philosophy of Science. It was a long time ago. I didn’t really do it. That’s when I started doing gigs. And I loved it the first time. It’s a bit like a gambler walking into a casino and winning. You’ll be back. Fortunate or unfortunate. I still like it.”

“I’ve never,” I said, “understood the mentality of comedians. If you fail, then you think you’re as bad as you think you possibly are on your worst days. If you do the best gig in the world, then you think I can only go downhill from here. I can never be this good again; it will all be a comparative disaster. You just know that, at some point, on stage – not necessarily because of you or the material – but maybe because of the audience or whatever – you are going to die on stage.”

“Statistically. Yeah,” said Simon. “That’s very exciting.”

“The thought of dying?”

“Yeah.”

“The thought of clawing them back?”

“Or not,” said Simon.

“So, after your Fylm show,” I asked, “what are you going to do? You’ve done stand-up comedy and mastered the art…”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Simon.

“What have you yet to master?”

“I dunno. Make a windmill.”

“A comedy windmill?”

“Or a tent.”

“I‘ve seen you put a tent up at Glastonbury.”

Simon’s bizarre cult BBC TV series in 2001

“Not put one up. Design a tent. A house. Design a house. A totally eco-house. Making things out of concrete. Get a plastic tube, fill it with concrete, leave it for a couple of days, come back and you’ve got a concrete pillar. Easy. I’ve just got to find a use for it… It’s invention… then necessity.”

“Is all this,” I asked, “because there’s a scientific/physics element to your brain?”

“I think about things like that a lot,” said Simon. “Windmills.”

“Why windmills?” I asked.

“I dunno. It’s very windy. Might be that. I’d like to build a collapsible windmill, like a camping one. I like being in things that are just on the verge of collapsing.”

“What is a camping windmill?” I asked.

“Say you’re camping somewhere and it’s windy and you’d like to tax the wind for a bit of electricity. Perhaps you’re a refugee. I dunno. A collapsible, easy-to-carry windmill, wind generator. That would be worth making. I think you could make one out of four poles. No, five poles.”

“You’ve thought this through,” I said.

“I’ve been obsessed by it. I nearly cut up an umbrella the other day. But I stopped myself.”

“Because?”

“Why damage an umbrella? I could think about it a little more. I could see it wouldn’t work exactly as I wanted. I thought if you slashed one of the panes of the umbrella and brought it back and stretched it to the next pole, then that would be a bit like the blade of a propeller. If the wind came along from here… Whoooshh!!… All of them. All just coming back rather than going straight round, each one comes back at an angle, it could spin round its axis.”

“Is there a practical reason why you want to build a windmill?” I asked. “Or do you just like the idea of something spinning round?”

“For a long time, I’ve had some sort of Survivalist approach to…” Simon started, then began laughing. “I like building things like that. I look at gaps in hedges and think I could live there. Dis-used railway sidings. I’m always on the lookout for that sort of thing. Give me a network of tunnels I’d be happy.”

“So,” I said, “the cliché question is Where will you be in five years time?”

“No idea.”

“You don’t care?”

“Can’t answer it. Dunno. I’m happy doing what I do. Hopefully I will pursue the visual thing.”

“To the extent of doing a half-hour or 90 minute film?”

“I’m still playing with it. It’s a very rich seam. I’ve just discovered 3D. Apart from my face, there’s cardboard animations and graphics.”

“Do you like being interviewed?”

“Dunno. Not really. Don’t mind. Dunno. Call it a draw?”

“Is it OK if I take some pictures now?” I asked.

“Yeah. But that’d be illegal in King’s Cross.”

Photo of King’s Cross station, London, taken without a flash

“King’s Cross?” I asked.

“King’s Cross station,” said Simon. “You’re not allowed to do flash photography. There was a big announcement on the tannoy: Flash photography is not permitted in King’s Cross. The people using flash photography on Platform 5, stop immediately or you will be escorted from the station and you will not be allowed to travel! It was really harsh. At 6 o’clock today.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Life’s a mystery.”

The black man fails to show up but the god-like comic Simon Munnery shines

Last night, comedy club Pull The Other One’s second monthly show in Herne Hill was packed, so word-of-mouth must have spread about last month’s bizarre events which I blogged about here.

During last month’s show, a very large black man with one eye, a speech defect, a shaven head, a beard and a doctor’s stethoscope round his neck sat in a gold costume alone at a table right in front of the stage occasionally re-arranging half-glimpsed works of art on the surface in front of him. In any other show, he would have been a disruptive distraction but, given Pull The Other One’s unique mix of surreality, alternative variety and downright bizarreness, he actually fitted right in with the show. It turned it into a two-ring circus.

I went to the Half Moon venue in Herne Hill again last night half-hoping the black man and his half-glimpsed mysterious works of art would make a comeback. Alas he wasn’t there. But Charmian Hughes, who had been one of four comperes last month and was one of three comperes last night  (look – it works, it adds to the oddness, so don’t ask) told me:

“That man with the stethoscope gave me a picture of a face which is half pharaoh and half enslaved black man. It’s actually really effective and I’ve hung it up. The title is Was my ancestor illegally detained?’’

Charmian had done a sand dance during last month’s show (again, don’t ask).

“He must,” Charmian continued, “have found it quite a strange coincidence that he went to a show on his night off from Egyptology or whatever he’s into and someone started talking about Egypt and the pharaohs and did a sand dance on stage.”

“Well,” I thought, “It wasn’t just him who found it strange.”

Last night, in an unusual move for Pull The Other One, they actually had three straight(-ish) stand-up comics in among real magic from David Don’t, Sam Fletcher’s fake magic, Charmian’s explanation of the Abelard & Heloise story using pandas, Holly Burn’s… well… indescribably odd performances… and the equally odd Nick Sun’s audience-baiting.

Towards the end of his set, Nick Sun persuaded the audience to show their appreciation (and they were very enthusiastically appreciative of his odd act throughout) to boo him and heckle him and he refused to leave the stage except in silence. He took any clapping as inappropriate and refused to leave except to complete silence. A good bit of memorable schtick.

The three stand-ups included the extremely good Maureen Younger, who shamed me. I was then and still am ashamed because I had never seen her perform before and I am amazed I had not seen someone that good. An absolutely top-notch and clearly highly experienced professional. My only excuse is that she seems to have worked abroad a lot. And that’s not much of an excuse. Woe is me. The shame. The shame.

Steve Jameson’s Borscht Belt character act Sol Bernstein – much admired by many – leaves me a bit cold because I have some general problem with watching live character comedy, which brings me on to Simon Munnery, who is on stunningly good form at the moment.

He was introduced as “a legend” which he certainly is, even though his existence is not in question and has been independently authenticated. He has always been extremely good but I have now seen him twice in two weeks and I am very surprised.

It’s rare for a comic to keep getting better. After a lot of experience, a good comic usually reaches a plateau of excellence. You don’t expect him or her to get better and he or she doesn’t have to. They have reached a plateau of excellence. Simon Munnery reached that plateau ages ago but now seems to be getting even better. It’s not that he wasn’t excellent before, but he is even better now.

As I said, I have a blank and difficult-to-explain spot about character comedy and I was never much impressed (though everyone else was) with Simon’s very early character Alan Parker: Urban Warrior.

I’ve always liked Simon as a person but it wasn’t until I saw Cluub Zarathustra at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1994 that I really started to appreciate his act. I thought the subsequent 2001 TV series Attention Scum! slightly watered-down the amazingly admirable nastiness of Cluub Zarathustra.

Simon’s original character which was OTT with audience-despising Nietzschean superiority and contempt for the audience in Cluub Zarathustra had (it seemed to me) been watered-down into the less-though-still-effective League Against Tedium.

The Attention Scum! TV series (directed by Stewart Lee) was highly original and, legend has it, much disliked by BBC TV executives until it was nominated for the prestigious Golden Rose of Montreux in 2001, at which point they had to feign enthusiastic support despite having already decided not to produce a second series.

Perhaps it was too interesting for them.

Simon’s League Against Tedium and Buckethead character shows were always interesting but sometimes variable – you can see that a man with an orange bucket over his head spouting poetry might partially alienate a more mainstream audience.

I think the less Simon hid behind a character and the more he started to perform as himself (well, as much as any comic does) the better and better and better he became.

In 2003, he contributed to Sit-Down Comedy, the Random House anthology of original writing which Malcolm Hardee and I commissioned and edited to which 19 stand-up comedians contributed short pieces. (Now newly available for download in Apple iBooks for iPad and in a Kindle edition.)

Simon at first submitted Noble Thoughts of a Noble Mind – basically a print version of his 2002 Edinburgh Fringe show which I thought was fascinating. It took me aback that the printed version was even better than the performed version. I think I had seen the hour-long show twice yet, when I read it on the page, I realised I had missed some of the verbal and mental cleverness.

He eventually supplied The True Confessions of Sherlock Holmes, a wonderfully original story. When I read it, it was one of only three times in my life that I have ever laughed out loud while reading a piece of writing (the other two occasions were both Terry Southern books – Blue Movie and one tiny section of The Magic Christian)

Simon wrote The True Confessions of Sherlock Holmes after the publishers of Sit-Down Comedy thought Noble Thoughts of a Noble Mind was too complicatedly experimental. Well, I think they thought it was too original and too intellectual; that’s often a problem with publishers.

And it has always been Simon’s semi-problem. Arguably too clever. Too original.

Until now, quite a lot of his acts – with sections often tending towards performance art – have been slightly hit-and-miss and I think sometimes too dense with intellectual, mental and linguistic cleverness to fully succeed with an only-half-paying-attention mainstream comedy audience. That’s not a criticism of audiences as dim; but sometimes audiences who had not seen Simon perform before were not expecting what they got. You had to pay very close attention.

Last night, there was a gag involving Sisyphus and Icarus which was wonderfully explained, became part of a cluster of linked, overlapping gags and even managed to bring in modern-day, up-to-the-minute economics.

Simon used to be intellectual and much-loved by the Guardian-reading chattering classes of Islington – and he still is. But now he seems to have pulled off the neat trick of losing none of his intellectual content but performing a highly intelligent act which is populist and maintains a uniformity of laughter-making for all audiences.

In other words, he’s bloody funny from beginning to end and has an astonishing act of overlapping, densely-packed gags and observations which in no way dumbs down yet is totally accessible to a mainstream audience.

How he has done it I don’t know, but he has.

I once tried to persuade Simon that we should follow in L.Ron Hubbard’s footsteps and write a book about philosophy which many in the UK would see as a joke but which many in California might read without irony and blindly believe in as a new religion. That way, we could make money now, have a laugh and statues of him might be worshipped in 2,000 years as a God-like figure.

He wasn’t impressed.

Maybe because today many already worship him as a godlike figure in British comedy.

Quite right too.