Dylan Moran, a cult comedy masterclass
January 3, 2010 by Such Small Portions
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"A lot of you have jobs", muses Dylan Moran at one stage during this firecracker of a performance. "I read about that."
The Brixton Academy audience probably did have jobs, mainly - although it was Brixton, so there's no guarantee - but they were all privileged to be watching someone who is very, very good at his. This was an object lesson in standup, in the old-fashioned comic virtues of making us see the ordinary details of life through a different filter.
That's not to say he stuck rigidly to his comfort zones, the familiar and the everyday. He was happy to wander further afield for material, into politics and satire and elsewhere. Who could disagree with the description of Silvio Berlusconi as so crooked he sleeps on a spiral staircase?
He discussed science - he was the first to study the effects of injecting bees with marmite, apparently - and faith: in fact his take on the religious was a thing of beauty ("So you believe in a fairy. Good for you; go on, have a biscuit. Just don't try to tell me how to see the fairy").
But while he is excellent even when off on these topics, back on his favoured, homely territory he is a force of nature, a sight to behold when in full flow.
Some of his best stuff is on youth and age, men and women - despite only being 37, he expresses bafflement at the young and their handshakes "that take three-quarters of an hour". Men are only interested in sex, women only interested in curtains - so nature, in its wisdom, gives them children, which ruin both.
Many comics do flights of surrealist fancy or observation, many trade in misanthropy and faux confusion. All Moran is doing is using familiar parts in a new way.
But that is far from a criticism, because he does it so well. He infuses it all with a shabby charm that is utterly disarming - if all men wanted to be James Bond, and all women wanted to bed him, all men want to have a pint with Moran and all women want to pick out a set of matching quilt covers with him.
Throwing the inane and the mundane together with gleeful abandon ("Is it always bad to have chunks of ham in your urine?" he inquires of his GP), he creates something unlike any comedian working today.
More than that, and at the risk of hyperbole, it might just be better than any comedian working today as well.
Tom Chivers
(Original review, December 2008)
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