Comedy is not premier league  The League Against Tedium - Attention Scum Live

Light Ent Review: Soho Theatre 

The Stage  19/04/2001 

CHRIS BARTLETT 

Much like comic Simon Munnery's sloganeering, nihilistic League Against Tedium character itself, this show is an odd fish.

Purporting to be a spin-off from Attention Scum, Munnery's recent patchy and mostly unwatched BBC2 series, it is basically a pared down version of last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe show I Am, I Will. Only it fails uniformly to build up anything like the momemtum that made that and previous shows such a hit.

Entering dressed in a wierd, orange owl-like cloak, Munnery spends the first five minutes talking about language in a strange, cod Spanish accent.

Disconcerting but at least original, this opening is quickly followed by the familiar onscreen projections, non-sequiturs and taboo-baiting that make up the League's hard to define manifesto.

New material about reorganising libraries, moral victories at the Scrabble championships and a too brief reflective interlude about childhood show all the timing and well-honed delivery of previous outings.

But there is also a worrying reliance on old material. Made worse by the fact that such familiar pieces seem so unpolished and still grind to a halt when the technology fails. However, the shear wealth of Munnery's ideas just about hold it together.

The climax - a bizarre and painfully over extended parody of Bob Dylan songs - undoes a lot of this good work. And like Cluub Zarathustra, the confrontational cabaret troupe the League sprang from, it can be seen as an exercise in seeing what you can get away with.

But while that show chipped away at the conventions of chummy, modern comedy, Munnery's latest outing looks to being doing little more than pushing the boundaries of how far you can recycle old jokes.