Dylan Moran

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This is Dylan on Jonathan Ross last year

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Dylan Moran takes on the world
What do you do when you hate celebrity, advertising, technology and interviews? Start telling it like it is, says the Black Books star on the eve of his tour
By Julian Hall
Tuesday, 23 September 2008

Approach with caution, is the advice of those who have encountered Dylan Moran. Not because he is the same misanthropic shambles as Bernard Black, the character he played in the popular sitcom Black Books – "I'd be in jail or in hospital if I was, that much should be obvious," he jokes – but because he has made his feelings on interviews quite clear. In the DVD extras of his stand-up show Monster, he recreates taking inane interview questions in a bored manner; in a past interview, he observed that: "There is nothing left to say, of course, but they keep asking. It's necessary, but it makes you feel like one of those guys standing outside a dodgy restaurant saying: 'Come in, come in.'"

"You've got to bang a pot, but it's not the best part of the gig," confirms Moran to me as we sit outside a restaurant on Great Portland Street in London at the height of the lunchtime rush hour. "You can't take it for granted, but on the other hand you can't do it [stand-up] if you don't take it for granted and work on the assumption that there is an audience. And indeed there is one, luckily for me. I can't offer a guarantee that people will enjoy my new show, though. I've not done a lot of stuff lately – I hope it goes all right."

Not that the 36-year-old Irishman is overly interested in his reviews. "If you're a sketch troupe, for example, you're thinking, 'How can we make our optician sketch funny?', not, 'How can we make it funnier than the optician the reviewer saw two weeks ago?' Also, when someone writes something like, 'Such and such a comedian's tired material about that hoary old subject, differences between men and women', it's a ludicrously wrong-headed and backward statement. The topic is neither here nor there – the approach is everything, whether it's men and women, cats and dogs or Israel and Palestine."

All this could, unkindly perhaps, be construed as Moran getting his retaliation in first before his new theatre tour begins. His preparation for the tour is minimal: he will only do a handful of warm-up club dates, and says that he only feels fully rehearsed after a week and a half on tour. "When I go out, most of it will have been said not at all. My normal rehearsal space is the show."

That said, the comedian and actor wants his latest live stand-up show, What It Is, to be more "fully realised" than his previous work. This might seem difficult, considering that he must now juggle a career spanning film and TV, but Moran brushes it off. "Juggling is exaggerated. It's not that often that you're on tour and you get asked if you want to do a really great film or collaborate on this script. Maybe if you're P Diddy and your wires are crossed and you have to promote your pyjama range while selling your garden gnome accessories."

However, some things have changed, he says. "The bullshit becomes harder. You get more intolerant of verbal props and habits. If I swear now I really want it to be justified. Everything has to work a bit harder to be included."

Much of Moran's new show stems from his "not very cheery" assessment of how the world is faring. "Life is very cheap right now. There's an undervaluing of the human, and of human essentials like community. There's a few things going on here: the advertisement materialist culture, the rise of technology and the information age, the demise of religion, all these secular people like you and me who are up for grabs in terms of their belief systems, individuals free-floating in this homogenised community of the world, where there is too much of everything and where the high streets look the same everywhere and everywhere is nowhere. It's kind of lonely, and everyone is reinventing themselves constantly."

Moran believes that eco-activity has filled the void left by the demise of religion, and that in the context of the world as he sees it, "politics becomes performance, because you're imbued with a culture that is materialistic, where people shop for what they want. And they do that with politicians as well. Look at who is running for president of the US – you don't get anymore photogenic, smart, or nimble than Barack Obama. I watched that guy dance [to Beyoncé's "Crazy In Love"] on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which I happened to see on telly. Can you imagine a politician 20 years ago dancing his way to an election?

"Politicians used to be people who couldn't communicate effectively on television, and now you look weird if you appear human. One of the most striking things about Blair was watching him upstage Catherine Tate. It was eerily brilliant, vastly savvy and deeply wrong. Everybody nowadays is pretty wised-up when it comes to perception, and that has taken priority."

Moran's demeanour, though intense, is some way removed from his stage persona and the perceived misanthropy that has dogged him in previous interviews. "I was lucky in the sense that I was never blessed with an overly reflective nature," he says. Though he now lives in Scotland with his wife and two children, as a child growing up in Ireland, he says, "I wanted to show off – a simple impulse or drive; in much the same way as some kids wanted to play football, I wanted to show off. Not complicated in that sense, very natural, it just depends on how you want to show off."

Navan, County Meath, was then, he says, "very bureaucratic and a second-world economy, where the church had a lot of power". It suffered, he says, from "a pervasive kind of crappiness that you associate with Eastern Europe. It concentrated the mind as to what mattered. Talk was very important." Then, as now, Moran noticed those things that are "ridiculous or inherently absurd but widely accepted. It wasn't difficult to find in Ireland when I was growing up – when intelligent 19-year-olds would have to find out who had said mass so that they could pretend to their parents that they'd been to church."

After "making that transition from sitting around in cafés talking about stand-up, to doing something, allowing myself to get scared", Moran's own church became Dublin's Comedy Cellar, the venue that Father Ted's Ardal O'Hanlon helped to set up. He left Ireland at the age of 20 for London's comedy scene, and won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh in 1996, when he was 25. Three years later, he was cast in the comedy drama How Do You Want Me? opposite Charlotte Coleman; his subsequent screen credits have included The Actors with Michael Caine and Shaun of the Dead, as well as the much-loved sitcom Black Books, alongside Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig.

Despite reaching No 17 in Channel 4's 100 Greatest Comedy Stand-Ups, Moran once remarked that he was "as famous as a fourth-division footballer in the 1970s". He says his level of fame is "liveable with". "It came to a point where people would come up to me and say, 'You're that guy – you did that thing, it was really funny, my sister liked it.' It's never them who like it, it's always somebody else, their cousin, somebody who's died..."

Celebrity does not appeal to Moran. He says that celebrities have "every kind of psychological problem you can think of, totally messed-up with no real friends. They're on drugs, they're basket cases, they go in to rehab because they don't like the smell of paint or they're attracted to the wrong kind of chairs. They are people so insecure they have nothing left, literally vaporised in the limelight, they take it all too seriously and are done in by what they perceive other people's perceptions to be."

He would, however, like to write a novel. It's a step he has previously described as "inevitable", but despite recently reading extracts at Flat Lake Literary and Arts Festival in Ireland, he continues to describe his book as "a work in suspension". It's the only point in the interview when Moran sounds like his character in Black Books, deliciously vague and offhand. "Oh, I mean, you know, I will put a book out at some point... Er, I've got stuff in the pipes but no point talking about it. I'll talk about it when it's out. But it will happen eventually, no rush."

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Interview: Dylan Moran
3rd October 2008
www.blackpoolcitizen.co.uk

I WAS relieved to discover that comic Dylan Moran wasn’t at all “prickly” to interview, as I’d been warned. In fact, he was quite amiable and self-effacing. Admittedly he was a little distracted, having literally just stepped off his tour bus in deepest darkest Scotland for a series of warm-up gigs.

“I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” he said of the epic 41-date tour he’s tackling throughout October and November. “I’m very keen to do a good show and get it out there. At the moment I’m up here on my Scottish jaunt doing warm-up gigs and trying out all the crazy stuff that’s been in my head for months. I’m trying it all out to see how it goes and I’ll edit the show as I go along. I’ll throw out what doesn’t really work and do more of the stuff that does.”

So what will the audience be hearing about during this brand new show, entitled “What It Is”? “What do I talk about? Life and death... and crisps,” Moran deadpanned. “I suppose I a little bit try to talk about shared experience, you know.”

But on being asked about his label as heart-throb Moran became a little guarded. “I don’t go around thinking about myself as a heart-throb. "I don’t pay it much notice to be honest with you.”

Moran is most famous for the TV sitcom Black Books, which he co-wrote and starred in, as well as his work with Simon Pegg in Shaun of the Dead and Run Fat Boy Run. But stand-up is his first love. He reportedly fell into it at the age of 20 after watching Ardal O’Hanlon and other comedians perform at Dublin’s Comedy Cellar, a small 90-seater club with no microphone. Moran’s talent was acknowledged in 1993 when he won the So You Think You’re Funny award at the Edinburgh Festival. He went on to become the youngest person to win the Perrier Comedy Award in 1996 at the Edinburgh Festival, at age 24.

In 1998 Moran won his first major television role playing Ian Lyons in the BBC 2 sitcom How Do You Want Me? He went on to appear in a small role in the 1999 movie Notting Hill as Rufus the thief. In 2000, Black Books was first aired on Channel 4. The sitcom about a miserable, unsociable, drunken book shop owner, Bernard Black, was the original idea of Moran. The second series was televised in 2002 and the third, which aired in 2004, was greeted with great enthusiasm by critics and fans alike. But Moran stopped short of a fourth series despite the obvious financial incentives.

“We were pleased with what we did up to then — I thought it was funny — and I didn’t want to mess it up by doing something half-hearted,” he explained. “We enjoyed ourselves. We thought we were doing a good show. We made each other laugh anyway, and we didn’t want to do what a lot of people do and make another series just because people wanted one. We wanted to quit while we were ahead, basically. The financial side wasn’t a great pull to be honest. I believed in myself enough to know that I’d get another gig.”

And he was right. Later the same year Moran appeared in his first major film role, playing David in the comedy Shaun of the Dead, a snide adversary vying for the affections of Shaun’s (Pegg) girlfriend, and in 2007 was cast in comedy film Run, Fat Boy, Run, also starring Pegg. There’s no chance of Moran ditching stand-up to focus on making it in the movies, though.

“I’m grateful that I’ve been able to turn my hand to different things, but I don’t prefer one to another,” he said. “By the time you’ve finished filming something, the thought of going on the road to tour is very attractive and vice versa, so it all seems to even out.”

But he does admit life on the road has its down sides. “The worse thing is the food,” he said. “When you’ve been living on garage food for five days, eating nothing but pasties and pre-packed sandwiches it’s pretty bad. A classic tour breakfast is peanuts and chocolate because that’s all you can get from the mini bar. But when it all comes together on stage it’s great. You’re in a room with a bunch of people and they’re all laughing at something which started as an idea in your head. You can’t beat that.”

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Dylan Moran heads to the Hexagon
‘It is, of course, terrific for comedians like me that we are all so stressed harrowed and worried’
By James Rampton
5/ 2/2009
getreading.co.uk

Dylan Moran can’t wait to see you. He has been away from the live circuit for a while, but he’s champing at the bit to return. Of course, he’s a respected actor and writer, too, but you can’t help but feel that stand-up is his first love. He’s coming back to it now, and he couldn’t be happier.

He is appearing at The Hexagon on Saturday night, bringing with him his new show, What It Is. It features the comic’s customary display of virtuoso routines coupled with a scintillating use of language. Is there a stand-up alive who handles words in a more captivating way? Not for nothing has Dylan been dubbed “the Oscar Wilde of comedy”.

Unpredictable, bizarre, elegiac, sometimes cruel and misanthropic, but above all painfully funny, he dissects the highs and lows of human experience with the sensitivity and intense perspicacity of a man who himself occasionally appears to be teetering on the brink of a precipice. He’s a marvellously splenetic grumpy young man – and it’s that sensibility which invests his comedy with a rare edge. Dylan is, quite simply, a mesmerising stand-up. But don’t just take my word for it. The critics have been lining up to praise this most compelling of comedians.

The Times declared that his show was “about as perfect an evening as I can recall”. Meanwhile, The Observer noted: “Dylan Moran makes you laugh so hard, you have to put your head between your knees and gasp for air.” The Daily Telegraph put it more succinctly asserting simply that “he’s one of a kind”.

He’s not just a stand-up: soon to be seen in the movie A Film With Me In It, he has moved from his Bafta and Bronze Rose of Montreux-awards for his sitcom Black Books, to roles in memorable movies as Shaun of the Dead, The Actors, Run Fat Boy Run, Notting Hill and A Cock and Bull Story. But now, he’s focused on the preparations for his new stand-up show: the comedian, who won both Channel 4’s So You Think You’re Funny Award and the Perrier at Edinburgh Festival, is excited about returning to the stand-up arena for the first time since his sell-out 2006 tour, Like, Totally.

“I’m really looking forward to this,” beams the 36-year-old comedian, who hails from Navan in County Meath and is married with children. “I’ve been sitting alone in a room for many months now and I can’t wait to get out there and try out all this new material. It’s such a great feeling when you discover that other people are thinking about the things you’re discussing. Nothing beats it when the material really flies. At the end of his shows, Max Wall used to say to his audience, ‘Thank you, you’ve been 50 per cent’. That’s absolutely true,” continues Dylan. “Otherwise, it would just be a man or a woman talking to the wind.

“When you catch a wave with an audience, you get such a buzz. It’s not like sounding off through a megaphone. Despite appearances, it’s a genuine conversation. If you’re the lead singer, then the audience is the rhythm section. There’s nothing like it.” One of the predominant subjects in What It Is is the stress of our daily existence. “The relentlessness of modern life is a strong theme in this show,” reflects Dylan. “We have a desperate need to distract ourselves with activity all the time. But why are we all so harrowed and worried all the time?”

With a wry grin, Dylan says: “It is, of course, terrific for comedians like me that we are so stressed. If we were all sorted, I’d be out of a job! But I think that if suffering is shared, it’s OK. “We like it when people confide in us, ‘You’d have hated this, but it happened to me. You can probe me for all the details about how I lost my false teeth down the lavatory.’ We need those stories about other people’s misfortunes to cheer us up.”

The comic carries on by asking: “Was there a slight sense of disappointment in the media when Hurricane Gustav hit New Orleans and didn’t quite live up to its billing? There was a sense that it would have been great TV. Three thousand journalists were poised in New Orleans. You wouldn’t get them poised in the beautiful blossom fields of Japan. We’re all ready to tune into a disaster. That’s just the way people are. But there’s no doubt, it makes for very good comic material.”

Dylan, who also starred in Simon Nye’s sitcom, How Do You Want Me?, reckons the stressfulness of modern life is exacerbated by its dizzying pace. “The roar of the vacuum is louder than it used to be because of 24-hour media and the homogenisation of every Western country. All the chain stores in all the cities look the same and blast out the same electro-migraine all the time. There is also definitely a feeling that you have to keep up with rolling news 24 hours a day. But when on earth do you get the chance to process all that alleged information? We’re just like protons ceaselessly banging into each other. We’re all in a giant Hadron Collider all the time. It’s worth creating the Big Bang just to get a bit of peace. There is pressure on us all the time, which is diverting us from what’s really important in life. I think it’s caused by a fear of being alone. If you’re alone, you have to take responsibility for your life – and that’s scary!”

Dylan – who during the show will also range in his inimitable, magnetic fashion across such topics as politics, religion, celebrity and parenting – laughs that the only thing concerning him about the tour is the prospect of going stir-crazy in faceless hotels during the course of the mammoth five-month jaunt around the UK.

“At the moment, the tour is just a load of dates on a piece of paper,” he smiles. “But come back and see me in a couple of months – I’ll be dribbling, senile and very, very violent! I’m sure a lot of mini-bars will have been thrown out of hotel windows by then. After five months on the road, I can’t guarantee that I won’t go a bit Keith Moon!” That aside, Dylan is thrilled to be on tour once again. “I love it,” he enthuses. “It’s great when audiences seem to care about the same things as me. I keep thinking, ‘Is it just me?’ and it’s so refreshing when it emerges that it’s not!”

His great achievement is managing to remain plugged in to the same concerns as his audience. “That’s why I want to keep low profile,” Dylan muses. “If you’re too well-known, it distorts things and you’re no longer in touch. I want to stay under the radar.” Unable to resist one last cracking gag, Dylan adds: “I’m not about to launch my own range of evening gowns for the fuller-figured person. I might sell out one day, but not yet!”

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Dylan Moran has moved on from Bernard Black. Kind of.
By Sally Browne
Sunday Mail, Queensland
February 15, 2009

DYLAN Moran may have started out as a cantankerous young man, but in his old age, he's hoping to become more "beatific". "Instead of wasting my time roaring at people, I think I'll smile at them . . . and then push them down the stairs," he says in his typical curmudgeonly way. "My plan is to lose my memory as quickly as possible and smile and dribble."

The Irish comedian, who has won fans around the world with his off-beat observations and absurd lyrical ramblings, is returning to Australia next month for the What It Is tour. Moran was last in Australia in 2007, where he played 33 sell-out shows. He took to comedy early, becoming the youngest comedian to win the coveted Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival when he was 24.

Although only 37, he's one of those characters it's hard to imagine was ever young. As a kid he was "sulky, truculent, unbearable" and "snotty", he reckons. "I was a loner. I spent a lot of time kicking around by myself and refusing to do things. That's how I remember it." He likes to think he's changed since then. "Certainly, I will hear people out before I say, 'No'," he says.

Now he has his own kids to draw inspiration from – a boy, Simon, and a girl, Siobhan – to his wife of 11 years. "The great thing about watching children is they don't care," Moran says. "The way they just feed on a moment, or call you a name, or are laughing at you, or not doing what you asked them to do. They're so completely inhabiting that moment, that's what we've forgotten to do as taller people."

Moran has made a career of being a loveable grump. His most famous character is the hard-drinking, couch-sleeping misanthrope Bernard Black from his hit series, Black Books – but don't take that as a genuine likeness. The thing they have most in common is their scruffy hair. "The thing is as far as that show went Bernard is mentally ill as far as I'm concerned," says his creator. "That's very clear, certainly increasingly clear to me the more distance between me and him as time goes by. I think I was probably a bit nutty when I was doing the show anyway because there was a lot of pressure and so on. I think lots of comedians are quite nuts. All I can say is I don't feel quite so worked up as I did."

In his stand-up shows, Moran prefers to look at the big picture of humanity through its fine details, rather than current topics. The room where this creative mad genius happens is "a very ordinary room with lots of books and some rattan chairs and clothes thrown everywhere". It's here he'll sit with a pen and paper and try to make himself laugh.

"For months. That's what I do," he expounds. "I get worried when it doesn't happen. I also get worried when it does happen, because I think, 'I'm alone in a room, I've been here for months, I'm already half mad, this probably isn't funny to any other human being on Earth'. But I don't worry about it too much because I know I'll get out and I'll get to say it and I'll find out pretty quickly."

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Dylan Moran
Lenny Ann Low
April 17, 2009
smh.com.au

IF THERE is anyone who is unimpressed with recent advances in communication devices it is Dylan Moran. The 37-year-old Irish comedian, long disconcerted by aspects of modern living, cannot understand the current technological obsession with enhanced speed and accessibility.

"I'm amazed because it's the same stuff but quicker," he says on the eve of touring What It Is, his fourth live show in Australia. "All that's going to be at the end of the line is another bozo and you can just reach them quicker. Or they can reach you quicker. And they can reach you through your ear, you can wear it on your head, you can have it on your back pocket and in your bath. Just lying down [means it] takes a picture of you. It's the same thing, it's just going laterally now, it doesn't seem to be going forward. It's just: 'Where can we put the computer chip? Put it in the cat.' And you feel like whatever it is, there would be a queue for it. You could get some kind of electrified cow-pat and people would get in a queue to buy it."

During Moran's successful career, as an award-winning stand-up comedian, as the well-loved character Bernard Black in the hit television series Black Books and in roles in films such as Notting Hill, Shaun Of The Dead, Run Fatboy Run and coming Irish black comedy A Film With Me In It, he has regularly been described as a disgruntled, shambling miserabilist but hilarious with plenty of charm and a lot of intelligence. The intelligence may explain Moran's general dislike of explaining his comedy, of years of being asked, "How did you get to be so funny?" and "Where do you get your ideas?" (one extra on his stand-up DVD Monster features Moran in a mock backstage interview reacting to this question).

He reckons he has, however, stopped avoiding queries about his passion for performing live. "I do, I do love it," he says. "It took me years to realise that if I don't do it regularly, every year or so I get very odd. I start wandering around the house with a lost expression on my face opening cupboards and staring into them."

What need is satisfied by performing?

"I have no idea. To a certain extent, you know, you don't mess with the mysteries. I don't think I even want to know. It probably says something really clinically terrible about my character that I need to get up on a stage and go 'Ra ra ra' in front of people. Years ago I would have tried to put some spin on it and said it was just for me to know. You know: 'I can't talk about it, it's very personal.' Or say it means nothing. One extreme or another. But the truth is, it is all about that laugh, that feeling of release. Because I get off on it just as much as anybody who's enjoying it."

This is a good thing, as, with each new tour, his season dates extend further due to popular demand. Moran's previous Australian tour, featuring nearly 40 shows, played to more than 65,000 people. He has been "bingeing on Australiana", finding out all the news and talking points.

"This tall-poppy syndrome is a real thing isn't it, still? That's a really big part of the culture, that if anybody seems to be getting above themselves, you cut them down to size really quick. It's very similar in Ireland. The old saying there was that it was the only place in the world where somebody would spend 20 minutes crossing a crowded room to come over and tell you you were a cunt."

After the tour, Moran is keen to further his writing projects and is interested in writing a film. His most recent big-screen experience, A Film With Me In It, written by and co-starring award-winning Irish playwright Mark Doherty, he describes as the film he is "most proud of ever". "We had no money, we were shooting in Dublin in the dark for most of it and we were using Mark's actual flat as the set. That's how little money we had. It was like we were able to do a dinner for 12 with a stock cube and a bun."

But Moran is the last to herald his film career as a burgeoning wonder. "My film career is based on this. I get a phone call once every 18 months from some mad person who wants me to do something for less than no money and they give me about a week's notice. That's my film career, most of the time."

click here to watch the whole of Black Books
or here to watch Dylan's live show 'Like Totally'

[btaylo24]

I went to see him live last week. He was good, but sure he was pissed out of his head! Is he a booze head?

He did a few shows in melb and sydney and they sold out weeks before the live date... I'd never heard of him and the black books stuff before that point (somebody brought me a ticket)

barry

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If you watched Black Blooks your questions about his drinking should be answered - haha

I'm surprised he went on stage pissed for a big gig like that though - still, if he did the job that's all that matters!

[btaylo24]

Yeah, he was very good. Must watch those blackbooks....
Are they any good?

barry

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It's just brilliant - co-written by Mr Moran and one of the guys who wrote Father Ted. I'm sure you'll also enjoy The IT Crowd if you've not seen that

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'I am a bit of a bumbling man, as you can tell...'
Despite his trademark moroseness, it seems that Dylan Moran may not be quite the crank he's cracked himself up to be
By Christina Patterson
16 October 2009

For a curmudgeon, Dylan Moran is doing quite well. He's had a long chat in the street with a guy he clearly knows – extremely long, actually, I can feel our precious time ticking away – and now he's got us both coffees, and he's sitting in front of me, all wide-eyed attention and tousled Irish charm. He has, unfortunately, insisted that we sit outside, what with the chain smoking etc, and although a Soho pavement cafe sounds like the perfect place to muse on life and literature and Don DeLillo, as we do, it is, in practice, a bit like sitting at the intersection between the North Circular and the M25, and so we have to shout over juggernauts, and passing nutters, and sirens.

And the gentle, ambling style of his responses doesn't lend itself to shouting. If Dylan Moran is a curmudgeon, he's not a shouty one. He's a quiet, mumbly, muttering-into-your-drink kind of one. But he's not a curmudgeon, of course. To say he was would be to say that Ian McKellen is remarkably like a wizard, and Alison Steadman like a drunken, suburban housewife, and Michael Sheen like a New Labour politician. Because the thing Moran does, in Black Books, the TV series that brought him to a mass audience, which he co-wrote and starred in, is this thing called acting, and the thing he does in his stand-up, which sometimes bears an uncanny resemblance to the doom-laden bookseller who won the heart of a nation (or at least of a discerning sector of it) is also a kind of acting. Because the figure that wanders onto the stage, clutching a drink and a fag, and looking a bit dishevelled, is not (although everyone seems to think he is) Dylan Moran, but a carefully crafted version of him.

Anyway, Moran doesn't clutch the drink and the fag any more. "It goes back to being 19," he explains, "and trying to get on a stage for the first time, and it was in a pub and there was no lamp-stand handy to walk on with, so you took a drink. I used to smoke on stage, too, and I couldn't believe how stupid that was, because it just interrupts the rhythm. When you see a Noël Coward, they just pick it up and go "really" and then sort of store it away again, and that's all written into it. It's a very long answer," he adds (and I've missed out most of it). "You're going to get a lot of those."

But this, it turns out, is just the start of it. There's much, much more on cigarettes, and props, and timing, and the old acting style of a Richardson or a Gielgud versus the ubiquitous documentary style of reality TV, and there's a great disquisition on Pinter's No Man's Land, and how to manipulate timing, and inflections, and the "huge armoury of mannerisms they have at their disposal", and several things are instantly apparent. One is that Dylan Moran is hugely thoughtful, another is that he is hugely intelligent and another is that he is very, very different to the floundering figure on stage. "I am a bit of a bumbling man, as you can tell," he says. No, actually, Dylan, I can't. "Well," he says, "I'm organised in some ways, but not in others. Years ago," he adds, "when I went on stage, somebody shouted out 'Big Issue!'. But then," he admits, "that was useful to me, because that set certain expectations that I can knock down like skittles whenever I want."

He has, in fact, been knocking down skittles for quite a long time. He started at school, in County Meath, but then left at 16 with a leaving certificate and little else. After four jobless years, "drinking and writing bad poetry" – this, after all, was pre-Celtic Tiger and pre-Celtic Tiger collapse – he saw Ardal O'Hanlon perform at Dublin's Comedy Cellar, and decided to have a go himself. A year later, in 1993, he won the So You Think You're Funny award at the Edinburgh Festival. Three years after that, he became the youngest person ever to win the Perrier Award. (He said it should have gone to Bill Bailey, later his co-star in Black Books, and a man who describes him as "a real, old-fashioned wit in the Swiftian mode".) He did his first major tour, Gurgling for Money, in 1997.

The following year, he took his first TV role, in the BBC2 sitcom How Do You Want Me? The year after that, he had a cameo part in Notting Hill, and the year after that he grouched on to the small screen as Bernard in Black Books. It won two BAFTAS, and a cult following, but he decided to kill it, after three series, in 2004. That year, he also starred in the zombie rom-com Shaun of the Dead and it began to look as though acting might take over from comedy. For whatever reasons, it hasn't. Moran's stand-up tours – Monster I, Monster II, Like, Totally and now What It Is – are hugely popular. In 2006, he was ranked by a Channel 4 poll as the 17th Greatest Stand-Up. In 2007, Le Monde named him "the greatest comedian, living or dead".

That, to be honest, might be pushing it, but what Moran does have in performance is an acute eye for the universal and a linguistic precision that verges on the poetic. He is, as the late Miles Kington once said in this paper, "all charm and word magic". Charm, word magic, artful dishevelment – and, well, art. Because that's what it is, isn't it? A kind of art? "Well, you know," says Moran, in full, Irish mode, "I wouldn't run away to the hills with that entirely, because I have hours and hours of material that I've written and some of that I know is good to go, and some of it is not. It's like an endless stew, or compost. I am constantly shovelling new bits in and then old bits get displaced. That way," he says, taking another deep drag of his cigarette, "I don't get bored."

It seems to me, I say, a bit like putting together a poetry collection, where some poems fit and some, you find, don't. Not like writing a TV sitcom, or a novel, where structure is all. And, by the way, he's said he's writing a novel. Is he? "Somebody asked," he says, "and I foolishly admitted it. It was silly. I don't know if there's any point in talking about it." Salman Rushdie, I tell him, once said that "writers are people who finish books". Moran laughs. "But no," he says, "I am publishing a novel, next year". Oh right! So, he has finished it? "No, I haven't." What's it about? "Well," he says, "I'm not sure which one I'll do." Gosh. So not all of this laid back languor is affectation.

"I think," he says, clearly wanting to get off the subject of the novel, "that the thing a stand-up show probably resembles best is a conversation." Hmm. But it's a monologue! "Yes, I know," he says, "but if it's working, you don't feel like that. If you're used to one person talking, you can have a conversation with somebody's reactions and expectations to what you've just said." Well, of course he comes from a nation of storytellers, raconteurs and poets, a country where everyone, it seems, is Seamus Heaney's cousin. You can sit in a pub in the middle of nowhere, as I've done, and meet someone who doesn't just read poetry, but publish it. And the talk! And the charm!

"Charm is interesting," he says. "My wife said 'it's just people lying to you'. I think in Ireland, you're talking about people who all enjoy talk. Subject matter can come down very low in the list of priorities. People style their talk. They work on it." He too grew up in "a very talky atmosphere", one in which books played "a big part". He wasn't too hot on school attendance ("either sick or pretending to be sick") but he devoured the children's classics, "thousands of comics" and a lot of plays. He's still an obsessive reader. So who does he really love?

"There's always," he says, lighting another cigarette, "a host of voices you're inspired by. I love Don DeLillo, and I love Isaac Bashevis Singer, and I love Beckett, and I love Pinter. He's one of the funniest voices in English literature since Dickens. I read The Homecoming again recently, and it's a savage, shocking play." Yes. There's great darkness, in fact, in all the writers he's mentioned. Is he ever tempted to go a little darker in his own work?

"There's darkness in there!" he says, I think a little affronted, "but there's only a certain amount of deliberation that you can successfully carry off, because the light changes, the weather changes. If you're watching a film by Michael Haneke, you feel not just dislocated, but afraid in a way you haven't since you were a child. That's very powerful stuff, and you wouldn't want to be sprinkling that all over your show."

No, perhaps not, but maybe a little bit more wouldn't go amiss. But now he's off again, on S J Perelman, the writer at the New Yorker, and his "great marriage of high and low", and H L Mencken, whose description of Baltimore in the 1880s includes a reference to men with "shoulders like the Parthenon", and Chesterton, who "can be really funny", and Flaubert, and Orwell. It's dizzying stuff – intoxicating, actually – and I find myself wishing that more of this made it into the shows, which sparkle, they really sparkle, but they don't sparkle with this.

I stare at this clever, charming man, with a brain that's a cross between a steam train and a butterfly, and a silver tongue that's been dipped in speed, and piercingly intelligent eyes, and (artfully?) uncoiffed hair, and wonder how on earth he keeps himself stimulated, how on earth he sets himself new challenges. "Well, actually," he says, "there's another Irish theme, that you have to be ashamed if you work for anything, but I worked like a bastard on this show for many months, and looking back on it now, there's less words, and more physicality, because that's an important part of conversation as well."

It's rather hard to imagine Dylan Moran with "less words". Actually, I wouldn't want to. Because it's rare to meet someone who turns a conversation in a café (with juggernauts and sirens) into an art, and who turns conversation on a stage into an art, and who turns random, butterfly musings into an art, and who will no sooner raise a point than argue against it. "I'm fascinated," he says, "by how you'll change your position so many times over a lifetime, but really what you're doing is occupying a series of positions on a landscape."

For some reason, I think of Easter Island. And then Easter. And then the Catholic Church. And then Ireland without a Catholic Church. But that's the thing about Dylan Moran. Once you've heard him talking, you can't switch your brain off.

'What It Is' is at the Apollo Theatre, London W1, from 26 October to 5 December (www.nimaxtheatres.com ). The live DVD is released on 23 November

[faceless]

Dylan Moran interview
Stand-up comedian and Black Books creator Mr Dylan Moran talks about his new DVD, comedy, and Miles Davis...
Simon Brew
denofgeek.com
Dec 1, 2009

As he releases his latest stand-up DVD, What It Is, Mr Dylan Moran spared us some time for a rare interview…

I’ve watched your DVD a couple of times now, and I’m wondering: why did you go to Sydney to do it?

I shot it here with some excellent people, actually, who did a fantastic job, but when I looked at it again, I didn’t like my performance. It wasn’t varied enough. It was kind of like in one vein. It wasn’t a bad show. I just did it a particular way and it felt a bit like one song over and over. I wanted more variety in it, and then I had a chance to do it again in Sydney. The thing was being taped anyway as they were putting it in cinemas [over there]. It was an opportunity to shoot it again, and I was happier with my performance. There was nothing wrong with the way the thing was made in Britain. It was just my performance. That’s why.

You take your tours all over the world. Do you end up tailoring it much to different international audiences?

You know, you just learn the Swedish for grandmother! It is like that, that’s what you do. Audiences are audiences, but there are surprises, still surprises. I’ve got this show now in the West End: quite a few have come from Sweden, quite a few from Germany, quite a few from Estonia. Those people are fantastic linguists anyway, and they’re wonderful audiences.

Do you prefer playing a six week residency as you are doing in the West End now, to travelling around?

There are definite pros and cons. The obvious advantage is that you’re not moving around all the time which is a pain in the ass. You do get a bit stare-y and wall-eyed going into one place and saying the same thing all the time, as you think that you only said it five minutes ago. You’ve got to keep yourself on your toes by changing it around a little bit. Because otherwise you may as well phone it in, and I don’t want to do that.

When it comes to putting a DVD together, you seem to get very involved. Your discs in the past have been very, very tightly edited. Are you very hands-on with it?

Well, yeah. The editing is really important, you know. There wasn’t a whole lot to cut out of the current tour, because I’d deliberately edited it beforehand. I worked on this show more before, so I pretty much knew what I was going to deliver. But yeah, I don’t want to watch loads of reaction shots of audiences laughing, and then the guy and the girl up there with her hands on her hips smiling. I don’t want to see that.

There’s an emerging formula to stand-up DVDs, which yours doesn’t seem to fit. The bit that got me was you included a bit near the end where you give short shrift to someone taking photos of you with their camera phone?

Yeah! [Laughs] Well, yeah, it’s live! That’s the whole point of it. It’s what you were saying before about how it’s become more formulaic, although I can’t say I watch a whole lot of them. It can look like a light entertainment programme on TV. I don’t want to see that anyway.

There are lots of live DVDs that seem to take the live elements out of it, that somehow seems to defeat the object?

Well, yeah, that’s what I think. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, because I want the thing to be live, I want it to be a bit dirty!

Do you miss the anonymity of the earlier parts of your career, where you could walk onto a stage and people wouldn’t be expecting the guy from Black Books, or someone they’ve seen on a DVD? That you could just hit it all again from fresh?

Yeah, well there’s a certain rapture in that, all right, because people didn’t know what was coming. I remember once standing up there in my coat, I was doing a gig at a club in London, and people started shouting out “Big Issue” before I’d even opened my mouth! I was glad that they considered me to be strange and possibly a bit weird, down on my luck or whatever. Because it means you can mess with people’s expectations.

That’s something that comes across with your stand-up: that you present an image, but when you really look at what you’re talking about, it often tends to be important stuff. You don’t talk about trivia for the hell of it?

Well, no. I talk about whatever’s on my mind, what strikes me, what I’m thinking about, you know? I think that you want to get the man. People have a very biographical focus on people now, on people who make things or do something. They want to know where you’re from, what was your childhood like and all that shit. But the thing is, if somebody’s work is worthwhile, you’ll get what’s important, and you’ll get their view. I’d much rather know what somebody’s view is.

But the thing is, when you’re making something that’s a challenge for yourself and a reward for anybody’s who’s going to enjoy it, is what’s your tech, what’s your approach, what’s your method?

Because that’s where the fun and enjoyment and the pleasure of the thing is. The difference between Miles Davis playing a trumpet and anybody else playing a trumpet, you know? So you listen to Miles Davis, and you get a pretty good idea of how he feels about certain things, I think. Certainly, the subtlety of what he feels. And what he feels and what he thinks is not going to be different to what a lot of other people feel and think. It’s just that he’s got the tech, as I’m calling it, to put it out onto the air.

On a similar point, what do you think about lots of the rubbish that follows modern day comedy now? If we take it by the book, I’m supposed to ask you about lots of personal things, blah blah blah, you’re supposed to tell us about the horrible things in life that have got you to this point. Do you just feel that people want to know too much rather than just turn up for a comedy gig?

I think they’re just looking in the wrong direction. If I tell you that my kitten died when I was 8 or that one time I got lost in the park, or I realised at 21 that my life was going in the wrong direction, or whatever it is, it’s not important. Because the thing is what is important is what’s in the work, what’s coming across in the work. That answers all those questions before they’re asked.

You’re inevitably talking to people about who you are. You try and talk about the world, but people are always putting themselves in between themselves and the world. What you try to describe is what’s common to everybody. But being human, you inevitably end up describing your view of it, more than the world. You know what I mean?

Absolutely. And yet we have magazines that are inevitability trivialising people down to 20 words…

Yeah! It’s a sausage machine. You’re going to get sausages out of it, but nothing else. It’s like when people say “Well, if you want my opinion”, as if they actually ever give you anything else!

Comedy has got much bigger business over the past five to ten years. There are panel games, there’s Live At The Apollo, and yet you’ve steadfastly stuck to pure stand-up. You’re not interested in the other stuff that much?

No, I’m not. That’s the short answer, but there you go! I’m just not. I don’t want light entertainment. I want heavy entertainment.

By the fact that you can do six weeks in one venue, and keep filling it, you’re finding that when you get down to it, that’s what audiences want too?

Yeah. That’s the flipside of people knowing who you are, and not knowing who you are. I guess that's why people come along, and a lot of them will be people coming back from other times when I’ve been out. There are a lot of people out there, so not everybody wants this dusted down, sanitised TV form. They want to hear somebody doing it for real.

One thing that’s always struck me about your work is your terrific mastery of language and vocabulary. Have you ever considered writing a book?

Well, yeah. I write all the time, but you just want to be careful what you put out. That’s all. You want to have the confidence that you’ve done what you need to do to it, because otherwise it’s an exercise in vanity. You just have to be careful about it, so that’s why I’m being slow about it.

Is it more TV stuff that you’re writing at the moment?

There are a couple of things I’ve messed around with. There are sketches on the disc that I’m considering doing more with, but I want to see how they go.

I like that you didn’t present them on the disc in any context whatsoever!

Well, we shot it in one afternoon, everybody did it for free. It was just some friends, we painted a couple of walls and we got a table. I don’t know what’s going to happen with that. I wrote something that began a long story about this character who finds himself as a transitional head of state, a microstate, unnamed in and around Europe. But yeah, I’m working on a few things!

I won’t go through all the usual Black Books questions, as I suspect you got those a lot…

I do get asked a lot! It’s great, because people obviously enjoyed it. God, I’m amazed! It was just a TV comedy, and people do remember. I am amazed after all this time people are still saying when you’re doing the next one.

I do want to finish on one utterly trivial question, going against everything we’ve talked about so far. Which is what’s your favourite cake?

Oh, well, that’s a good one! Let’s see. It’s so complex! There are so many levels. I’m actually thinking about it now! There’s a lot to be said for a nice pecan pie.

You’ve been watching When Harry Met Sally?

No, I haven’t! Is it in there?

Yeah.

Well, I think that it’s a much-underrated cake!

Dylan Moran, thank you very much.

[faceless]

What am I looking forward to? Incontinence and memory loss
Britain's favourite miserabilist comedian sounds off about getting old, religious unbelief and explains how he became a curmudgeonly grump
Nosheen Iqbal
guardian.co.uk,
22 December 2009

You've developed a reputation for being a curmudgeonly grump. Aren't you a bit young?

Hang on a minute there, we have to examine this closely. What is the national designated age for the transformation of a well-balanced human being into curmudgeonly grump?

But 38 isn't old, is it?

The thing is, you have to look for a commonality when you're writing about anything and nothing is more universal than lifespan. I'm just playing with the idea of lifespan, my place in it and the resentment that I've left the goodies behind.

Are you looking forward to anything?

I'm not being perverse about this, but it's not about looking forward. You just have to keep staring ahead, and what's approaching is incontinence and memory loss. Yes, I'm doing it because I think it's funny. But it helps when people watch the show that they don't know that.

You're able to evoke vivid imagery with just a few words. Did you ever consider a career in writing rather than standup?

I've been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I'm concerned, I am a writer – whether my writing's spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.

What propelled you towards standup, then?

When I was a child, I wanted to watch things that made me laugh. It's attacking boredom, as simple as that. I was 19 when I first when to a comedy club – I wanted to do it, so I gave it a try and that was it. I found my office.

How was the tour for What It Is? You were on the road for 14 months, which must have been quite gruelling.

Oh, I was knackered, absolutely out of it. I was away from home for far too long and wanted it to be over, that's the truth. But while I'm doing the shows, I've got to do the best I can.

Do you change the material to keep it interesting?

I don't change much, because you get to the point where it's working and you don't want to derail it. It assumes a definitive form and you realise: "Well, that's pretty much there. Anything else I do is just drawing a moustache and glasses on top of it." There isn't a secret to it: I don't have any rabbits I stroke or crème de menthe I put behind my ears before going on. I just try to make sure I can find the building.

You talk a lot about science, religion and belief in the show. What do you believe in?

I didn't have a whole lot of religious belief to begin with: we were the only family on the street who didn't go to church. But it was a big part of Irish society. When I was born, something like 96% of Ireland went to mass every week. It's not like that now, partially because the church has collapsed. I do think it's perfectly natural and human to want to invest belief in something. It's just a facet of who we are. What do I believe in? I believe in the obvious things. The people I'm close to and my work – it's not complicated.