For five years Simon Munnery has been holding his Annual General Meetings at the Edinburgh Fringe. Sadly this year is his last. He said that that he had planned from the beginning to do it for only five years, but then again….Simon was hinting that this might not be the last one after all. You might know him as the League Against Tedium, or for the last time he was in Melbourne when he did an amazing trilogy of shows. He hasn’t been back in Australia for a while which is sad, but my hopes are high that he will return because like so many British comedians before him, Simon has an Australian wife.
The last time I saw Simon do his AGM in Edinburgh in 2004 there were two distinct halves. The first half was his stand up, at interval the audience was encouraged to place written motions for the meeting in a box, then the second half was Simon riffing on the motions. The acts at The Stand always have an interval to encourage punters to get a drink but I’m not sure if Simon lost track of time, but this year the interval happened at the ¾ mark. He only had time to read out a couple of motions, which he had little to say about and then invited everybody across the road to the pub to read the rest. I wasn’t able to as I had to rush off to another show. I suspect this was done because Simon has worked out over the five years that the reading of the motions can be a bit drawn out and not as hilarious as we’d all hoped. That was certainly the case at my first AGM experience four years ago.
His stand up that took up the bulk of the show was wonderfully whimsical, silly, and fun. He arrived with an aubergine and a special guest – the inflatable Richard Dawkins, well, it was an inflatable kangaroo, (there were unsurprisingly quite a few references to Australia) with a Richard Dawkins mask. He had quite a bit to say about Richard Dawkins, who’s on the telly here talking up atheism. Simon hasn’t read Richard’s book “but I do feel the urge to mock it”. Simon also talked about show reviews and how someone had said that his show was the closest thing comedy comes to art. So he brought out a Venn diagram to show that he didn’t believe the two overlapped, but it was true that the crapper art was, the closer it became to being comedy.
The highlight of the show was his home movies of his science experiment, he travelled the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland in search of railings. To test how they sound when whacked with a spoon. He also scraped stone with a fork and you’ll have to find our for yourself what he does with the knife. Finally the aubergine was given the spotlight and it was a fine end to an entertaining show, or would be if you weren’t joining Simon and friends in the pub across the road for the reading of the motions. If it does prove to be the last AGM, it will be a sadly missed short lived Fringe institution.
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