And Nothing But

Simon Munnery begins And Nothing But by being dragged onto the stage by “wild horses,” which is actually just a rope tied around his ankle accompanied by horse-hoof sound effects, setting the tone for an hour of deliberately underwhelming, self-effacing whimsy. This isn’t high-concept character work like his past alter egos, Alan Parker: Urban Warrior or The League Against Tedium; instead, Munnery spends the hour being himself—or at least a version of himself infinitesimally obsessed with the mechanics of stand-up. The show begins with him trying out six different openings he considered for the performance, letting the audience in on the sheer artifice of the whole endeavor.

Filmed at London’s Bloomsbury Theatre in November 2015 as part of the Go Faster Festival and released on DVD by indie comedy label Go Faster Stripe in June 2016, the special runs a tight 57 minutes. Munnery delivers a loose, travelogue-style set detailing his touring misadventures from Enniskillen to Canada, pausing to analyze the internal rhyme of the word “Bono” and the design flaws of seaplanes. Between bits about his local homeless man, Munnery introduces a delightfully lo-fi homemade contraption designed to demonstrate the “New Can-Can,” defined simply as a high kick and a brief glimpse of his underwear.

Reviewing his own performance mid-set, Munnery describes the hour as a “scattergun” where “some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but nobody’s getting hurt”. It is a characteristically dry self-assessment of a pedantic, language-focused set that bypasses conventional joke structures for quick, dadaist observations on everything from capitalism to the architectural absurdity of houses.