Simon Munnery is touring his stand-up show having just completed his 30th Edinburgh Festival season (yup, does he get a clock?). The flyers promise much; and with Munnery you can look forward to songs, poems, a reasonable pinch of politics, all delivered with the seeming ill preparedness of someone filling in at the last minute and only just making it to the gig from Bedford (whence our hero hails).
Shambling on to the stage, sporting a not quite good enough to be a faux Dalek get-up, he demolishes a stage set of some never to be explained post-Brexit props. It turns out that our hero is garbed in a mail of old Strongbow cans and empty Golden Virginia pouches (you get it, don't you – production values!)
We encounter a vagrant overlord incanting doom laden nonsense not out of place in a Norse saga – is this the shape of things to come? As it happens not! This character seems to be a one-off diversion as Munnery slips into some of his old material critiquing modern life, all from the witty and acerbic angles seen by this bookish thoughtful comic.
Munnery's style (for that is surely what he's crafted for himself, even if he's uneasy with that) is an antidote to the more smug, slick or snide stand up. His political disillusionment at the mess of a post-Brexit society and growth of nationalism punctuates the first half, during which he falls back to his character Alan Parker: Urban Warrior to deliver some clever punk poetry, and he happily intones some Billy Bragg.
On his radar is the performance or lack of it by the England football team and closer to home his lap dog, Leo and paternal fears about his 13 year old daughter in the Snapchat, selfie-driven sexualised society (for the record the audience were considering an age of consent around 52 years…I kid you not!) but also worrying about getting his children to eat vegetables which they don't like before they've even tried it! The first stanza is interrupted by his phone signalling the interval in the midst of a clothes pegs dialogue (trust me you had to be there!) Our return closes the clothes peg narrative (something of Alas Smith and Jones and their talking heads' sketches there). Munnery is quite content to raise the intellectual bar, indeed when he references Icarus and Sisyphus, it is remarked that background reading before the show is advisable!
Simon's social justice interests are clear and he riffs with authority about the enclosure acts, the removal of the common rights of farming open land and leading to the agricultural revolution; whilst later he introduces the exploits of Glasgow folk heroine, Mary Barbour, who in 1915 led (and ultimately won) a rent strike, for which he gets the audience to join in his folk ditty about 'Mrs Barbour's Army'; at first we are all self-conscious and hesitant but by verse 4 we are in good voice.
After some reflections on his touring and travelling and a search for his supposedly 'dodgy' great Uncle in the environs of Marylebone station we conclude with a monologue imagining the possible content of a couple's all night conversation about skiing (sorry, you really do have to be there!).
To those who know anything about the day job and interests of this reviewer, the many ironies of an evening combining politics, law, constitutional issues, real estate and comedy simply cannot be ignored. Munnery, you are my stalker!
A pithy patchwork of an evening and much chucklement. Well done Simon.