Dylan Moran Articles/Reviews

[awaywithfairies]

There's a Dylan Moran special being screened on the ABC next week. Details below.

Monster By Dylan Moran
8:35pm Wednesday, 24 Jan 2007

Monster is a 90 minute stand-up comedy special from the star of Black Books, Dylan Moran. Recorded in Dublin, Moran's musings cover the way we live, the amount of time we spend eating and the virtues of living well. He discusses all manner of issues - from getting older to the meaning of life - all with his unique brand of dry humour. At the age of 24, Dylan Moran was the youngest person ever to receive the Perrier Award for Comedy. He's since written and starred in his own BAFTA award-winning TV sitcom Black Books, and starred in the critically acclaimed films The Actors with Michael Caine, and Notting Hill with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts.

http://tinyurl.com/2yysc4

[unfrufru]

http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts-revi...761325405.htmlPreview
Dylan Moran says things you may have been thinking but thought it prudent not to share with the class for fear of being seen as, well, rude. Or drunk. Or just plain misanthropic.
The Irishman, who lives in Scotland and is most famous as the star and writer of the acerbic and absurdist British sitcom Black Books, has a well-developed, well-lubricated even, persona as a man permanently puzzled/annoyed by and always rebelling against the utter stupidities of the world around him.
Yet here he comes again to a country where, despite our self-perpetuated reputation for being rebels resistant to authority, we are amazingly compliant. Visitors are often surprised to find how many rules and regulations we live by, how the beaches, restaurants, venues and streets are full of signs telling us what we can't do.
"I noticed that, not so much from signage around town, but there was a general feel of it, an air of civil obedience," Moran says in his familiar, mostly wearied, slightly amused tone. "You do get an impression of a tidy, polite people a lot of the time but I'm sure that projects its own ogres under the bed. But I did notice what you described in an even more vivid form in New Zealand. I think we saw three different newspaper hoardings along the street saying things like people aren't brushing their teeth enough. I couldn't get over it. Jesus, these people are terrified of going outside."
Is this conformity one reason we enjoy someone like 35-year-old Moran, who is prepared to be many of the things we are warned against: a drinker, a smoker, a swearer, an angry man? Are we getting our little frisson of having our hidden thoughts said aloud?
"I wasn't aware of that really until recently but sure, sure," says Moran, who is happily married with two children who don't always think he's funny. "At the same time you can't think of it that consciously, can't absorb that, or you would end up doing an impersonation of yourself."
And once there you could get into this cycle where the only way to top the previous performance is to get angrier, more offensive, more outrageous.
"You could turn into a nuclear reactor of bile really," he says. "I think you would shorten your life considerably. I have days as well where I am as content as a cat in sunshine and blissfully unaware of everything that's wrong in the world."
We just don't want to know about that.
"Yes, exactly."

Seriously though, that's why a show built around a single idea, that of grumpy old men/grumpy old women railing against the world, which has latterly moved from television to the stage, seems to miss the point of the original joke.
"Yes, that's a terrible way to make it all safe, to completely neuter a function of legitimate anger, what I would call the store of righteous human indignation."
It would be dangerous though to make the mistake of seeing Moran as a comedian whose only schtick is anger. There's whimsy, mockery and sparkling silliness too.
"I would be very disappointed if people came out thinking I was a one-item menu. I wouldn't relish the idea of going on stage every night to fulminate. I'm just here to talk about what's going on and how it is, or what it is."
It's good to be reminded at a Moran show of the fact that one of the great things in life is its absurdities. The things that don't work and can't be explained. "I don't think that's in immediate danger of being done away with. I don't think there's ever got to be a shortage of absurdities," Moran says drolly. "I think what you're getting at is much more the idea of what's lost in people who follow the herd all the time and are happy to be corralled."
And usually they are told it's for the greater good.
"It is forever being described as for the common good," he says. "Bullshit is always ushered in under the rubric of being for the common good, for 'The People', not for people. The individual will be ground down by the progressive social machine as a way of getting the society's thinking done for it."
But as we know from science, you can suppress things somewhere but those energies are not lost, they have to come out somewhere.
"Of course it will, of course it will. It does every day." Probably on stage with Dylan Moran.