"I WENT to a funeral the other day. Caught the wreath." So begins Middlesex stand-up Simon Munnery's 16th successive show at the Edinburgh Fringe, previewed in a work-in-progress appearance at York's Great Yorkshire Fringe tomorrow night in The Turn Pot.

"That’s what came to me, from the mysterious source of the inexplicable," he says, paraphrasing Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. "Hear the story of the joke, the painting and what happened next," comes the invitation on his show publicity. "Though I've changed that to 'what happened along the way' as I'm now looking back a bit too," says Munnery.

Writing a new show for each summer, that must be exciting, Simon? "I absolutely love it...no, it's like exams coming up when you haven't studied enough. But I like the early [warm-up] shows when I just go on and talk and something magical develops. And no, I don't record them; I wouldn't want to listen back to them," says Munnery.

"What tends to happen is that you try something out and it sort of works, and there's delight that it works, with everyone laughing, and that's a great feeling. But the next time, no-one laughs, and the next time half do, so it all gets honed until it's all dropped, but from somewhere 'the mysterious source of the inexplicable' turns into a show."

The Wreath is built around "the joke and the painting", the painting in question featuring Munnery's depiction of those who attended a fake funeral held in his garden "just after the snow in March". "I invited friends, family, the Bedford Morris Men and a couple of comedians, and we had sandwiches, cake, cider and tea," he recalls. "I made invitations, built a coffin, dug a grave, and took a photograph of the wreath throwing to do the painting from." 

Munnery has done three paintings so far and was working on a fourth when he had to take this call to the accompaniment of his dog barking – "he's a poohuahua, a cross between a poodle and chihuahua," he says. "The painting's standing in a tent because it's too hot to paint in the sun," he reasons, in a break from covering over the sky on the canvas again. "No task is ever complete; painting is a Sysiphean task that's infinite and endless, just like no surface is ever completely clean."

Complete or not, Munnery does say that "everything is roughly in the right place" in the painting, just as The Wreath is taking shape, show by show.

"I'm not a regular painter," he says. "I've never particularly enjoyed it; well, maybe at school, and I did sell a few paintings maybe ten years ago, but when The Wreath joke came to me, I thought 'this would make a great painting' and since no-one else could paint it, I've painted it myself."

As for Edinburgh, "I'll be at The Stand, 3.20pm, August 3 to 26; same place, same time, for 16 years," he says. "They sometimes vary it by ten minutes, just to keep me on my toes, but I'm wily, I'm ready."

Simon Munnery: The Wreath (preview), Great Yorkshire Fringe, The Turn Pot, York, tomorrow (July 26), 7pm. Box office: 01904 500600 or at greatyorkshirefringe.com