There have been a lot of Simon Munneries over the years.
It is no strain to spend an hour or more listening to the outpourings of this marvelous comic brain
We’ve had Simon Munnery the absurdist bureaucrat with a clipboard, Simon Munnery with a bucket on his head, Simon Munnery as a comic dictator standing on top of a bus and shouting.
More recently we’ve seen Munnery the “fylm maker” – using props and home movies to create a new style of pictorial humour.
But it really is a sheer delight to see Munnery appearing as himself and to spend an hour flying alongside his gloriously inventive, enormously clever and irredeemably tangential mind.
Even this unplugged version of Munnery dips in and out of different styles. He takes on the manner of a football supporter to extol the wonders of supermarkets. He becomes an impressionist – albeit one with a strange perspective.
There is a brilliantly clever, logical and funny argument in praise of feminism, with a devastating sideswipe at capitalism.
Munnery even becomes a prop comic, donning an unnecessarily elaborate wooden costume to give us his own one second version of the Can-Can.
There’s something of a Will of the Wisp about his style of humour, something light, ethereal, that dances briefly on the wind and then is gone. Sometimes his punchlines are so perfect, so brilliantly written yet so understated that you can almost fail to catch them as they fly past your ears.
You don’t want to miss a single one of his poetically beautiful jokes – but it is no strain to spend an hour or more listening to the outpourings of this marvelous comic brain. Munnery wears his brilliance more lightly than ever and there is an offbeat warmth to his performance which makes it an absolute joy to be in his audience.
His description of the most boring first date ever, delivered in the solemn but ludicrous style of a Radio Four play had me crying with laughter.
