Simon Munnery – And Nothing But
31st March, 2016 – Regent Room, Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne
A few days before seeing Simon Munnery at Melbourne Town Hall, we read a guide on ‘How to Go See Comedy’ in the local paper. We wondered if the article was trying to be funny. It included Top 10 tips for seeing a comedy show, which included ‘Don’t heckle’. We thought ‘this is the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, not a country pub’. Surely they jest.
Apparently not.
We always make a list of comedians we want to see each year at MICF: the priorities. We always see more and discover a few we haven’t heard of along the way. This year we were delighted to see that Simon Munnery was touring and he went close to the top of our list of comedians to see this year.
Simon Munnery has been described as an aburdist legend. He has mastered and re-mastered so many aspects of the comedic arts, we suspect that he is in that rare category of comedians who know they will get laughs and so challenge themselves to explore the outer limits of HOW they get those laughs. He is held in extraordinarily high regard by the comedians’ comedian Stewart Lee. We conclude that makes Simon Munnery the comedians’ comedian’s comedian.
We arrived early at the Regent Room in Melbourne Town Hall for Munnery’s opening night. There was already a queue of people, tickets-in-hand, waiting for the room to open. A few nods of recognition between strangers took place: mutual acknowledgment between comedy connoisseurs. The room holds 60 people and the first 52 were ready and waiting when the doors opened.
Munnery opened his show with an elaborate visual gag. He could have fashioned the joke into a pun and delivered it in a second or two and still received the laughs he got, but that would be like a bespoke carpenter buying from IKEA. Great, skilful comedians operate, and deliver, on multiple layers and Munnery is setting the tone of the show with it already in his first joke. We can all see how simply that joke could have been delivered and the complex delivery method is another layer of comedy, layered on for our added amusement.
With a knowing nod to his comedy aficionado audience, Munnery references a Bill Hicks line, deconstructs it and reassembles it, all the while teasing out the early laughs with meticulous care. I am reminded of a spider starting to spin it’s web: this opening looks deceptively fragile, yet it is intricate, masterful and disguisedly strong. Something impressively good is being built for us here.
Munnery delivers another strand. Tension grows, ever so gently.
Munnery pauses, refers us back to each of his previous jokes and points out they could all be good openings to a comedy show. There are all the vertical strands already woven! He then suggests he could do an entire show of just openings. A hilarious horizontal strand is instantly woven across the vertical ones.
Munnery continues weaving comedy strands; now the radials, adding to the bulk and effectiveness of his comedy web. Radials
woven in different directions included Munnery’s daughter’s use of ‘like’ and it’s effect on family dinners.
Some inedible insects strike the web: eight drunk twenty-something idiots come disruptively into the show 10 minutes late; loudly and clumsily.
Munnery already has momentum up and his now brisk pace leaves the dull-witted behind. The tardy dull-witted have no hope of catching up. Four of the dullards are talking loudly, and constantly texting on their phones. Three times they are asked by others in the audience to shut (the fuck) up.
It occurs to me that this show is in too late a timeslot. You get drunks and tired people. Munnery is quick and clever. Too quick and clever for a 9.45 pm timeslot.
More radials are woven: a tangled tale about the Road to Enniskillen. The story arrives at its end. The silk is snipped, ready for the next one and a dullard yells out: “that’s not a joke!”
Munnery diplomatically asks for a vote. The oafs are outvoted 52/8. The people have spoken. It’s a joke.
Munnery resumes spinning – a story about Canada with multiple punchlines and characteristic frippery. One of our urban yokels (with an Aussie accent) yells out that he’s from Canada and doesn’t get the joke. Munnery begs pardon and the heckler repeats his nonsense then says he doesn’t get the entire show. Munnery politely points out the logical alternative is to leave and six of the inedible insects shake themselves loose. The audience cheers loudly. The final two insects follow them ten minutes later.
Munnery repairs the web better than before with:
- A clever, simple bit he calls “Phrases that irk me”.
- His reinterpretation of the Can-Can. Like his opening opener, this is an unnecessarily complicated visual joke, beautifully layered with gags.
- A brilliant, meandering story about repairing his washing machine.
- His observations of Bono.
We are used to many comedians following established templates, including the template of finishing with your best material. Spiders don’t work to templates! So Munnery starts to wind up the show with observations of online dating: and an act-out of how he imagines a very specific first-date conversation would go.
Munnery had the hard work done three-quarters of the way through the show and so the final minutes are spent trimming the web. We’ve all been caught in his humour. There is no escape. No need for a dramatic end. We got what we came for, and so, it seems, did Simon Munnery.
