Leo Nikolaidis meets bucket-loving comedian, Simon Munnery.

Infamous on the alternative comedy circuit for his variously bonkers stage personae, Simon Munnery has now resorted to doing impressions of himself as part of his new tour ‘Self-Employed’. Gone are the misplaced anarchic tirades of Alan Parker: Urban Warrior and the four-foot stovepipe hat of his one-man, philosophical dictator group The League Against Tedium (from BBC2’s ‘Attention Scum!’), replaced now by straight-up anecdotes from Munnery’s own life. And it’s hard to tell which is the odder.

Many will also be unaware of the pithy little lines Munnery contributed to Banksy’s 2005 coffee-table must-have ‘Wall and Piece’ and even fewer will be aware that when the LA Times was investigating the elusive graffer’s real identity, Munnery was put forward as the Bankster’s lawyer to try and muddle matters. He was, quite simply, the obvious choice.

His tendency for the experimental, bizarre and risky has given him a reputation as one of the most unpredictable, amorphous, offbeat and just plain weird comedians on the circuit, an embracer of the dead joke, happy to walk a tightrope on stage between meanderingly inconsequential and eccentric, unconventional brilliance. Appropriately, Venue’s interview takes place over three phonecalls, in different locations with (possibly) more than one kind of Munnery answering the questions. In different tenses. These, then, are the few wispy plumes of logic we managed to extract…

Did you find it easier to perform as – or hide behind – your ‘other’ characters? Will ‘Self-Employed’ be more exposing? No-one is ever quite themselves on stage. You’re always a sort of version of yourself. It’s like when you answer the phone, you speak in different voices depending on who you’re talking to. It’s natural, the tendency to emulate. But with an audience, you don’t know who they are, so I don’t know what I’m doing. The more you think about it the worse it gets. So I try not to.

Is TV easier? Does that appeal to you? Yes, it does. It’s like a fruit machine, all flashing lights and noises. I’m watching one with each eye right now. It’s great. And then you wake up and you want to buy something. Oh, being on TV? Well, it’s better to be on the inside pissing out.

You’re not afraid to take a chance on stage. What’s the worst ‘death’ you’ve ever experienced? I’d been doing a show where, for the first 20 minutes, I wore a bucket on my head [‘Buckethead’]. I had this great opening – or so I thought – where I’d go on stage with a bucket on my head and say ‘It’s nice to be here... I imagine’, and then I’d do about 10 minutes of bucket-based material. It went all right in Edinburgh, but in Birmingham, before I’d even got anywhere near the mic, the abuse started. I hadn’t been heckled in a bucket before. You know you’re being shouted at, but you can’t really hear what they’re saying. And you have no idea which direction it’s coming from.

The crowd really took offence to the fact I was wearing a bucket. I knew that eventually I was going to be taking this bucket off, so I ploughed on. When I did take the bucket off, people were shouting ‘tell us a joke!’ It’s very hard to make someone laugh who’s going ‘make me laugh!’ – you wouldn’t go up to a surgeon and go ‘make me well!’ – but anyway, I did my time, got off stage, had a quick drink and thought I’d make my escape. So I’m creeping back to the dressing room when a bloke blocks my path and says into my face ‘you’re shit!’ I didn’t do anything. So he said ‘aren’t you going to react then?’, as if the additional duty I had was to react. But the longer you go on performing, the fewer of those you get.

SIMON MUNNERY PERFORMED ‘SELF-EMPLOYMENT’ AT THE HEN & CHICKEN, BRISTOL ON THUR 3 MAR AND AT THE RONDO THEATRE, BATH ON FRI 4 MAR. FFI: WWW.SIMONMUNNERY.COM

Copyright Leo Nikolaidis 2011

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