Simon Munnery: Fylm-Makker

Good old Simon Munnery. As countless other veteran comics re-hash the same old jokes for the umpteenth time, this absurdist master of wilful contrariness brings a show that sees him broadcast live onto a projector screen behind an empty stage from a base in the centre of the room using video cameras—one of his face in close-up and another of his hands shot from overhead—along to a live soundtrack combining guitar, sinister vocal chants, loops and drumbeats. To mostly calamitous effect, it must be said, but bless the guy for trying.

The elaborate set-up works—or rather doesn’t work—on several levels. Principally it: a) allows Munnery to circumvent the awkward formality of having the audience stare at him, and: b) offers him the opportunity to present a kind of live animated sketch film using crude cardboard cut outs and hand drawings, like something Terry Gilliam might have attempted as a bored child.

We get a Beckettian monologue about gays in space, a tense desert standoff between two one-eyed Mexicans, and a musical tribute to the doomed airship R101, all resplendently daft. At the midway stage we get a film about anthropomorphic wheelie bins (“not very funny,” Munnery admits), while he goes and gets half a cider from the bar.

Has Munnery revolutionised live comedy at a stroke? As a climactic mash-up sequence descends into techno nightmare farce when the DVD player goes haywire, the answer in a word is: no. But as the fylm-makker himself put it quite succinctly at one point: “you try that Peter Kay.”