"An exciting buffet of thinly sliced treats, palatable without exception, dangerously moreish yet stealthily wholesome", Mike Stephenson reviews Simon Munnery's latest show.
It's tricky to get a handle on Simon Munnery. Just when you think you've found a suitable nutshell for him you notice another protruding nodule on the far side of the proverbial nut that is he. The collected and suited gent you see before you is a far cry from the surreptitiously vulnerable youngster that once was, but he retains with full force the alert eyes and demanding expression of a man to whom the world is a fresh place.
He'll dangle you over a colour-streaked acid bath of surrealism only to cut the rope and leave you securely balanced on a transparent plexiglass floor of logic (proving, if proof be needed, that the world is a surreal place when you look at it logically). The compass swings effortlessly from tangent to tangent, hints of satire melt suddenly into the abstract then coagulate into a whole new shape. The kind of wry revelations and memetic disassemblies on which many a comedian would hinge a whole routine are the kind of throat-clearing asides that Munnery tosses in between jokes like mere semicolons.
The effect is fast but subtle, as though it's so funny you'd often rather not waste time laughing. Nothing is lost, but stored somewhere, and you leave having learned a lot more than you can consciously recall. That's what's so difficult to describe. He never slides into an extreme or even distinctive niche like the slow boiling sarcasm of Stewart Lee, the engaging transmogrification of Kevin Eldon or the sleepwalking psychedelia of the Mighty Boosh. Instead he calmly satisfies you that he is more than capable of pulling off all of the above, journeying across all such tenets, gingerly teasing pieces off as he goes.
What's clever is that the overall result is not, as can often be the case, a dizzying oscillation between worlds but an exciting buffet of thinly sliced treats, palatable without exception, dangerously moreish yet stealthily wholesome. Like, as he illustrates in his opening, a salad made of facts and concepts. Though of course, as he later goes on to quip – “Salad doesn't exist. It's just putting ingredients on a plate.” And he lives up to his word, being not just a collection of ingredients but a mixture. Perhaps the reason he remains partly obscured in the public eye compared with his peers is precisely to do with his pigeon-hole-dodging jack-of-all-trades approach. It's a shame that the business works this way because it's difficult to imagine anyone not appreciating his shows on some level. Sometimes the best niche is a nicheless niche.
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