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"Using the stinking carcass of so-called comedy as a LENS we shall focus harsh philosophee, religion, poetree and base animal passion onto your ear, causing it to smoulder."
At the Edinburgh Festival in 1997, I was unfortunate enough to find myself sitting, mildly terrified, in the front row of Pleasance Two. For the full duration of the show, I was insulted, spat at, heckled and sat upon by the performers. By the end of the show, the audience left the theatre in a nervous, giggling silence, as the performers stood in a line and drooled on the floor. At the door we exchanged the black dunce caps we were forced to wear with a medal presented to us for our endurance. I left that show, shaking and exhilarated.
What I had just witnessed was the result of five year's work from a team of performers usually associated with the 'safe' (for the audience at least) performance of stand-up comedy. The Cluub Zarathustra team included "off of the telly" personalities such as Stewart Lee, Kevin Eldon and Richard Thomas, as well as the (then) lesser known, such as Roger Mann, Jason Freeman, Sally Phillips and Julian Barratt. The show revolves around it's anchor, The League Against Tedium, played by Simon Munnery, a compere with an obvious contempt for the audience.
Simon's character, the "clearly deranged yet brilliant" League Against Tedium, is based on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and more specifically on his novel Thus Spake Zarathustra. The League Against Tedium is Nietzsche's concept, warped and perverted, brought to life. The League is a being firmly convinced of his own omniscience and omnipotence. He is above us all, illustrated by the fact that he does not even speak like anyone else - "Eye Do Not Spik Lik Yow, Becoch I Um Not Lik Yow..." In Cluub Zarathustra, his large cast of servants and followers shuffle on and off stage to his every beck and call.
Simon began performing the character of The League Against Tedium nine years ago. Stewart Lee remembers the Simon's first performance of the character in Edinburgh, in 1990. "All he had was just a little note book with about ten phrases in it, and it was like a parody of Nietzsche basically. That was all there was to it, except that he had this idea about showing that man was superior to worms." They went to place called Mike's Fishing Tackle Shop in Edinburgh, and bought some worms for bait. "Simon made this guillotine for worms which was a little thing the worms would be tied on to. They were back lit by a huge light that was projected onto a big sheet, so at the end of the act, you had this silhouette of a live worm projected 20 feet high on to the back wall. Simon would say "I will now prove man's superiority to worms" and then cut the worm up with a scissors - it was all wriggling around, going mad on this bit of cotton and you could see it." Simon grins at the memory. "I only did it once! It was a tough gig. Anyway. It was going well, and I had this thing with a worm. I cut a worm in two. I killed a worm, yeah. And I got in a fight then afterwards..." "Which was funny," says Stew, "given that we had bought the worms from a fishing supplies shop where they were gonna be stuck with hooks and stuff."
Stew and Simon teamed up with Roger Mann and Kevin Eldon and started doing Cluub Zarathustra in about the Summer of 1993. "Simon wanted to set up a venue where he could do that character every week with weird acts on." Like Reeves and Mortimer ten years before them, the Cluub Z brand of entertainment lay outside the tone of today's big comedy venues - it is too detached from the elaborate stereotyped amusement that passes for a lot of stand-up acts these days - so the team took over the basement of the Market Tavern in North London for one night a week between 1993 and 1995. "I started a sort of club and asked anyone I knew, or anyone really, to come down and do some stuff," explains Simon, "stuff that they couldn't do on the circuit, just not stand up." These acts included Johnny Vegas, Graham Linehan and the Universal Grinding Wheel. Simon, Stew, Kev and Roger Mann brought the show to the Edinburgh Festival in 1995. "It had some really good bits in it", Stew remembers. "The League bits sometimes would normally be the best bits, and Kev worked out his character of the poet, Paul Hamilton [which he subsequently used for a Channel 4 Special]. That used to be one of the high points in it."
On the back of the 1995 show, Cluub Zarathustra made a pilot for Channel 4. "They only gave us enough money to make 20 minutes and it wasn't for broadcast and it was really good" says Stew. "They turned it down, but it was really good." Simon wasn't as impressed with the final result. "I thought a lot was wrong with it, but I thought, that's not bad, that should come out right, but then Channel 4 went 'Nah!' They commissioned us to write some scripts but didn't give us a series, so that was a bit mad because written down in scripts, these jokes aren't funny. Who are we writing it for?" The pilot episode has never seen the light of day, although it was illegally released over the internet last year. Simon still has hopes for the future of Cluub Zarathustra television. "It's still hanging over, as far as I know. We could hand in the scripts. But I went off it, I felt very bitter about it." Stew feels the same way. "We always really feel annoyed at Channel 4 for not pushing it through really. It's just another one of those things. I don't really know why they wouldn't take that, but took some other things that were sort of the same but not as good."
1997 was the next year the show was brought to the Festival, despite the fact that it was advertised extensively around Edinburgh during the 1996 festival. The audience reaction to the show was very split, and reviews of the show became more surreal than the performances. Some critics blamed the split audience reaction on the somewhat aggressive nature of the show, but Simon disagrees. "My thing about the beginning, 'ATTENTION SCUM!' and all that, was I thought, if I saw that, I'd laugh. I found it funny. It was a brilliant way to begin a show, it's the ideal way to begin a show."
Following their successful run at the Fringe, Simon feels that the energy disintegrated from the team as they each moved down separate career paths. "In Edinburgh it was 'Yaaaaaaaaaaay!' After Edinburgh, it was just sort of random things in spates. Either we got a show, or we could do whatever we wanted, a sort of mad cabaret thing. But the whole thing fell apart then, in that time." Stew agrees. "It was really hard work trying to coordinate about twelve people and get these shows up every week. We must have done it all together, me and Roger and Kev and Simon, for about four years and nothing came of it at all. And," he laughs, "we lost loads and loads of money on it."
Simon began to feel the pressure of performing as the anchor. "When it didn't work, it was like, irritating, with sort of all right sketches. When it worked, it was WOW! With some WOW! sketches, so basically, I was sort of the weak link. If I went well, it was great; if I went badly, it was shit. I got a lot of pressure from the others, which made it even worse."
Stew cites the hit-and-miss quality of the show as one of the main reasons the team went their separate ways. "Five times out of ten, Cluub Zarathustra would go down really badly in silence, and it had been performed really badly as well, and it wasn't any good, and it didn't work. And, we'd all go 'Well, it was really good, they didn't like it, but it was good', but it probably just wasn't, actually, in retrospect. Because I've seen people go badly, but it's not their fault, but I know a lot of the time we went badly it just wasn't very good...I think maybe we just had too much spare time about six years ago."
Even with the solo success of The League Against Tedium, culminating last year with a Perrier Nomination for his Edinburgh show 'Dis Am Ubertechnocomedie', Simon still has a soft spot for the old days. "I miss Cluub Zarathustra, I really miss it. That atmosphere... Nothing ever got finished. I was rubbish. That's why. I was in the wilderness. But I'd like to do it again."
Despite plans for a special appearance last new year's eve, Cluub Zarathustra have yet to reform in any organised manner. But with Simon's new television series involving many people from the early days of Cluub Zarathusra, this will perhaps be the closest there will ever be to a full Cluub Z reunion.
All Hail Zarathustra.
