Laughing last, laughing longest FORUM The Stage 11/11/2004 JEREMY AUSTIN Many of the nineties 'rock'n'roll' comedians have faded into obscurity or turned mainstream. But Stewart Lee and Simon Munnery tell Jeremy Austin how longevity and experience have helped rather than hindered innovation It was something like 15 years ago that some cursed fool dubbed comedy 'the new rock'n'roll' Ð thus creating an epithet that launched a thousand faces. It was a great journalistic hook and one that carried a little weight. Comedy was sexy, it was cutting edge, anti-establishment. Anybody with a mic and an audience could have a go. There was a buzz. Audiences flocked to dingy clubs in the hope of spotting an emerging talent. Broadcasters started sniffing around. Entrepreneurs followed Ð wolves following the scent of a newly born cash cow Ð to launch their brand on the back of them. Now it is the generation of comedians spawned under that banner that carry a little weight Ð mostly around their middles. They have become the establishment. Those who have not faded away have become regular faces on light entertainment television shows. The ironic, mocking tone that defined early nineties comedy has become the voice of advertisements, of commercial radio stations. If this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe was notable for anything, it was the return of these former young bucks to their spawning ground. Among them were Stewart Lee and Simon Munnery Ð both older, wiser and using a festival that once would have been thought of as pretty much solely a spawning ground for new talent, a place to develop as an artist. There was a sense of experimentation. If they are the acts once dubbed the new rock'n'rollers, there was a feeling they had passed the disappointing third album stage and had come back with a new collection of songs that built on and improved their past work. The metaphor can be stretched no more. Let the performers speak. Lee first performed at the Fringe as a student in 1987 with Richard Herring. Four years later he was an award-winning writer of On the Hour, the radio show that eventually turned into BBC2's The Day Today and gave the world Alan Partridge. He and Herring then created Fist of Fun, first on the radio then for two series on BBC2. He has worked as a script editor for Harry Hill and directed Munnery's BBC2's Attention Scum. But a three-year comedy sabbatical Ð during which time he wrote and directed Jerry Springer Ð the Opera Ð was only broken this year. Why? "That's probably why I stopped three years ago, actually, because I couldn't seem to write anything that I liked but I had just got really good at doing this stuff that I had got hanging around. I was trapped in there. I was sort of stuck in quite an adolescent character of me, I think, because when I started doing stand up I was 20, " he says. "And so after stopping for three years I found I tried to come back and write things that weren't like what I would normally do. Inevitably it ended up sounding like it but I tried to do stuff about subjects that I normally wouldn't have done and make it a bit more difficult. I finally let go of certain little tricks that I knew always worked just because they were boring me and becoming slightly contentious with the audience." Munnery, a regular at the Festival Fringe, took two shows there this year. One was his play Buckethead and the other AGM, which involved the audience submitting motions that were then discussed. His character-based shows have included the great Alan Parker Ð Urban Warrior, The League Against Tedium and Attention Scum, with the latter becoming a television series. He knows why he returns. "It was habit. I can't think of anywhere else I would like to be in August. I can't think of anything I would rather be doing than a show of some sort. And The Stand, I love the people there. I like to see the same staff working there and they are all a dysfunctional family but it hangs together, the way everyone mucks in. "I think Edinburgh is about experimenting. You have got to get something out of it as well. You either go there with a finished thing you want to sell to the world or it is about learning something. And this year, my second show the AGM, I did without anything, completely unprepared. "There are two routes, you either write it and perform it or you make it up as you go along. And I had never really tried making it up as you go along. I got something out of it, that you can make it up as you go along. Keep breathing. Don't worry about it too much. Accept death. Carry on. And maybe something will come of it and maybe it won't. It doesn't matter and it's all right." Munnery has always been about testing the boundaries of comedy and performance. Of looking at how things are done and then, through his shows, asking why that has to be so. Lee, too, needs to challenge himself, to place himself in opposition to the status quo, as he explains. "We need to define ourselves in opposition to Jongleurs and that 'chicken in a basket', stag night out, observational comedy. Not to say that's bad, it takes all sorts of skills but when you talk to people who don't know comedy, they say 'oh yeah, I went to Jongleurs' and they never go again because there is nothing there to stimulate them. "People apologise and say 'oh, I'm not a Jongleurs act' to help people to see them as something else. But if you saw a rock concert you wouldn't write off the whole genre because you didn't like whatever you had seen, " he says. Lee believes that the new generation of 24-year-old comics has its own voice Ð a sincerity that defines them in opposition to their ironic elders. Does that make it harder for Lee's generation to find inspiration? "Richard Pryor once said it takes a comedian 15 years to find out what it's like and I thought 'yeah, fuck off grandad'. But now I actually think this is the first show I have done that has a consistent tone to it Ð a beginning, middle and end. It just feels like finished in a way that they never did before. I also feel like I know a bit more who I am and am able to convey something in a more comfortable way, so he might be right, " he says. "When me and Rich Herring wrote for On the Air we got cut out of it on who would get a percentage on Alan Partridge and I remember not being particularly annoyed about all the other performers because I remember thinking a lot of them are 29, 30, 31 Ð they must be really worried that this is their last chance, but it's different for us because we are 22. "I remember really thinking that and now it is funny to be 36 and every year of the last few years I have done something that I would never have thought of doing before. It is the opposite of being over, it is just starting." Simon Munnery performs his play Buckethead at Soho Theatre from November 9-13. Stewart Lee appears at the same venue from November 1627. Jerry Springer Ð the Opera is at the Cambridge Theatre, London New tricks Ð Stewart Lee (left) and Simon Munnery