Comedy is dead and Simon Munnery killed it. We know this to be true because he has told us so. "Attention Scum!" he shouts from the stage. "If conventional wisdom is a forest, then I am a chainshaw. Comedy is dead. Welcome instead The League Against Tedium." We all gulp a bit and look nervously at each other.
The League (which is basically just Munnery himself) enters stage right, wearing a hat made up as a giant exclamation mark (it's post-irony, apparently), a pair of nerdy glasses ("I wear glasses as an affectation, as a badge of intellect . . . and to see with") and florid late 17th-century style garb. In one hand he brandishes the "sword of truth", in the other "the shield of irony". This could be a long night.
"I am television," he shouts. "I am my own channel and I am editing myself as we go along." There are a few epigrams - "Get rid of the poor. Give them money" - before, as a mark of his own moral and intellectual superiority, he begins to speak in his own language: "Eye do nit spik lik yow, because eye am nit lik yow." A few people in the front row get up and leave, half in terror, half in uncomprehension perhaps. The rest of us are transfixed.
The creator of his own comedic genre, snappily titled Ubertechnokomedie, The League Against Tedium, has set the Edinburgh Fringe alight this year, and is, as they say, the talk of the town. In a world of solo male stand-ups grabbing a microphone to bore us rigid with twee little self-deprecations, The League Against Tedium is the sort of show that, whether you like it or not, represents an almost vertical shift in the development of stand-up.
Part Nietzsche, part Anthony Burgess (dig that Clockwork Orange language), part nutter and part Dada surrealism, The League Against Tedium is hotly tipped to carry off this year's Perrier award. Not that its creator, Simon Munnery, cares. "The Perrier thing is just so corrupt anyway," he says in between violent bouts of coughing. "Sure, it's a big talking point, but I couldn't care less."
Such disdain for the "increased commercialisation" of comedy didn't, however, stop Munnery from agreeing to participate in Channel 4's Fringe documentary Edinburgh Or Bust, which charts the fortune of five acts at this year's festival. "Why did I do it? Why not? I'm firmly of the belief that everyone should have a documentary crew following them around. Mind you, they seemed to have missed out on the best bits. In my first week here, someone at my show was so drunk he pissed himself and then was sick all over the stage. I don't think they have that on camera." Indeed.
If, beneath it all, Munnery's face is sort of familiar, it's because he used to be (and occasionally still is, if you get a few drinks down him) the character we came to know and love as Alan Parker (Urban Warrior). An inspired creation, Alan was a parody of student leftwing activism. Taking his ideology form the lyrics of Sham 69 records, Parker either railed about "smashing" things, i.e. the system, the Tories, the Nazi police state, or "supporting" either the miners/dockers/ nurses. "Thirty million people own Phil Collins albums; 30 million people voted for Hitler. Draw you own conclusions," as he used to say.
Munnery (32) is a Cambridge graduate who doesn't quite understand why some people hate Cambridge graduates, just for the sake of it. "I was doing this interview once and the woman sort of sneered at me in the first question saying, `So, you're a Cambridge graduate then?' and I said, `Yes, and I went to Oxford too,' which I didn't, but now all the articles about me say that I went to both Cambridge and Oxford, which goes down a treat with class-obsessed British people."
After getting a job as a road sweeper after college, he drifted into comedy courtesy of a little-remembered double act called God and Jesus ("I was God" he points out). The religious theme is still present in his League Against Tedium persona, when he plays Jesus as Michael Caine would have played him: "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough," says the Jesus/Caine character. What most enthuses him about this, the third incarnation of The League Against Tedium at the Fringe, are the "technological developments". Basically, these refer to Munnery placing a tiny camera into the tip of his "sword of destiny" and flashing up the images on a screen behind him. "It's putting the camera into the wrong hands; it's a very revolutionary act. It's all about seizing the means of production and turning myself into a television station. I really think filming, screening and editing your show as you go along is the future. People might laugh now, but then they laughed at the first umbrella," he deadpans.
Munnery's ascent ties in neatly with the rise of the new surrealism in comedy, where acts like The Mighty Boosh, which previously would have been deemed too "out there", are now centre stage. "You can certainly see a lot more experimental stuff going on, particularly with the younger comics coming through. I wouldn't say it's a movement as such, but certainly people seem more accepting of the antics that I get up to in my show than they have been before," he says.
Munnery is determined to bring his show to Ireland in the near future, if only to make up for a distinctly odd performance of it last time out: "I played in a place in Dublin and it didn't really work that well. Mind you, that might have been because I performed the whole thing in French . . ."
The League Against Tedium is at the Gilded Ballon in the Edinburgh Fringe until August 30th. Simon Munnery received a nomination for the Perrier Award, which will be announced tonight.
