Tonight, in a west London theatre, a group of punters will pay good money to be treated like dirt. Their host, a weedy-looking bloke with messy hair and NHS specs, will greet them with the words, "Attention scum!", then lay into them like some deranged demagogue. The self-styled High Pope of Nietzschean Camp will lecture cockneys about their boorish ways and Italians about their endless hand-waving. He'll insult the women and declare war on America. And he won't forget his homage to his home town: "A thousand years ago I shat by a river thus London."
As the megalomania kicks in, he will use his electronic Glove of Power to flash ego-sapping slogans and cartoons on a screen on stage. Later there will be live TV, as he thrusts a video camera at his face for some nightmarish close-ups.
This is The League Against Tedium, which is about to begin its first London run at the Lyric Hammersmith. It's one of the oddest and most enjoyable events in British comedy a mix of power-crazed fantasy, gentle blasphemy and plain silliness. And it's a remarkable testimony to the power of lust and self-belief.
Simon Munnery, 32, who wrote and performs the show, grew up near Watford, the son of a plumber and a seamstress. He went to the local grammar school, then took not one but two Oxbridge degrees: first science at Cambridge, then Latin at Oxford. He hated both places, but was drawn by the "glamour" of the double-whammy. It was at this time that he learned the blind confidence that animates the League. University "boosted my arrogance incredibly, so much so that it became funny," he says.
It's not clear whether he's talking about performance or real life, and his conversation leaves the matter open. He tends to meet questions with non-answers, as if they're really not worth the effort. How did he get into comedy? "I just sort of drifted into it..." What's his act about? "About an hour long. I dunno." Where do his twisted aphorisms come from? "I dunno. Books."
It eventually emerges that it was his hormones that set him on the road to comedy, while he was at Cambridge. "I wanted to be an actor," he explains over a fry-up in a London cafe. "I used to audition for every play that was going. Basically it was so I could meet girls, and be in a situation where they'd perhaps be more open to advances.
"Actresses are notorious for their immense sex drives. I thought maybe I'd get lucky but no. Anyway, I didn't get any parts, so I had a go at cabaret, enjoyed it and did it again and again."
His first words as a stand-up were, "Hello, my name's Matthew. No, it isn't I was only pretending. That's a sort of joke." Then he smashed a tomato on his head. He was an instant success. "And I enjoyed doing it. I splattered the front row." He describes that early act as "aggressive deadpan"; you could apply that label to most of what he's done since.
Munnery paid his way through Oxford designing computer games, and he might have gone on to make a good living at it, but he's rarely had cause to regret choosing showbiz. He has won a cult following with the League, the "futurist komedy kabaret" Cluub Zarathustra, and his best-known creation, Alan Parker, Urban Warrior a kind of Citizen Smith for the 90s. His Radio 1 series, 29 Minutes Of Truth, picked up a Sony award for best radio comedy. In 1997 Munnery took the League onto Radio 1, and he has just finished a one-man series for UK Play called FuturTV.
His only serious grouse is over a planned series of Cluub Zarathustra for Channel 4, which is stuck in development, presumed dead. "They commissioned us to write scripts for it, but with no possibility of it ever being made," he fumes. "TV people are weak-willed namby-pambies, all of them."
Anyone else might feel a twinge of self-doubt at such a reversal. But Munnery is probably thinking of one of the League's favourite sayings: "You are nothing, absolutely nothing. Behold superiority!"
