Dylan Moran Articles/Reviews

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from here : http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/e...name_page.html

Random thoughts meticulously planned
Jul 8 2005




By Paddy Hoey, Daily Post

DYLAN MORAN shambles on to the phone, "What time is it? Jesus, it's 11, oh right."

We are in Bernard Black country, in your mind's eye you can see him shaking fag ash off his overcoat, closing one eye and squinting into a red wine bottle, hoping for the dregs that will relieve a hangover.

But that's all part of the façade, behind the Irish comic's exterior and his sit-com alter-ego, there lurks a mind of extraordinary dexterity and wit. He may look like he is making it up as he goes along - that's all part of the game.

"You can get away with a lot in stand-up, at the same time you have to lay the pegs down somewhere otherwise it would be an hour and half of scat and I couldn't listen to that so I couldn't say it."

He's playing Liverpool on Sunday night at the Rawhide Royal Court as one of the headline acts at this year's Liverpool Comedy Festival.

The 33-year-old married father-of-two has made his name as the tousle-haired world-weary cynic, at odds with everything going on around him.

A Perrier award winner for his stand-up in 1996, Moran's forays in to TV sitcom have seen him plough a similar sceptical furrow with BBC2's How Do You Want Me and his self-penned Bafta award winning Black Books.

In How Do You Want Me, he was a city dweller cast as the outsider with the world passing him by when he moves with his wife to her home village in the country. As minor late night hit for the Beeb, it paved the way for his real TV success as the obtuse alcoholic book shop owner Bernard Black in three series of Channel 4's Black Books.

Subsequent high-profile roles in the monster British Zombie blockbuster Shaun of the Dead and a role opposite Michael Caine in The Actors are standing testament to his unique talents.

Despite this profile Moran's never taken the easy way out and become a media whore, a rent-a-gag funnyman for the TV panel game. While he enjoys some of it, he's disparaging of much of the genre: "I have been asked lots of times, and they are fine for what they are, which is parlour games, but it's not the real deal. I could do it in my sleep, anyone could, but you are never going to remember anything of them.

[hails]

*purrs* christ, i would tap that in a heartbeat. mrrreow.

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http://seven.com.au/news/topstories/151806

Comedian Dylan Moran not all laughs
Date: 11/03/06
By Jonathon Moran Dylan Moran might be funny but the Irish comedian certainly doesn't feel like he has to make people laugh all the time.

"I enjoy this but I don't feel like I have to be on all the time, you know," said the comedian, who will tour Australia next month.

"So if I come across as a crashing bore, that is entirely my choice."

Moran is best known for playing eccentric bookshop owner Bernard Black in the popular TV series Black Books.

Black doesn't much like people who buy his books and hates having customers.

"I would hope they (Australians) do get to see a different side of me," he said from his British home.

"Bernard Black is very much just a character, a creation. The stand-up I am going to do is just talking about everything."

The three series of Black Books also starred fellow comedians Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig.

Moran said that although he kept in touch with Bailey, the pair had no immediate plans to work together again.

"Bill is a great stand-up and comic actor," he said.

"He is always busy gigging ... I would certainly enjoy working with Bill again."

Since Black Books, Moran has focussed on stand-up comedy and also starred in a film, A Cock and Bull Story.

He has a number of projects in the works but wouldn't go any further than saying he was "working on stuff".

"That is all I will say right now," he said. "I am superstitious."

The comedian last visited Australia 10 years ago. His upcoming trip will include dates at the Melbourne Comedy Festival, as well as shows in Sydney.

"I am still writing it," he said of the show.

"To be honest I don't really know, I am still writing it."

Asked what made him laugh, Moran said he had two general inspirations.

"People are always the most reliable source of what is funny," he said when asked what he found amusing.

"The world is also a very good bet. Apart from that, I limit myself to those two fields."

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertain...e#contentSwap1
Grumpy young man
By Stephanie Bunbury
April 1, 2006

Dylan Moran doesn't want to do stand-up forever. So get in quick.
'Panic," says Dylan Moran, "is the shark in the water." We are talking about the stagecraft of stand-up. There are times, he says, when you forget what you're going to say next. The last thing you want is to let panic get its teeth into you; when you feel it start to swirl around, you have to drive it away.



"It's a self-created shark," he goes on, warming to the theme. "You either inflate it or deflate it. An inflatable shark that does bite." A pause. "Although that might be a metaphor too far." And he allows himself a very small smile.

Moran was 20 when he first took the mike in a five-minute slot at a pub comedy night in Dublin. It was one week after he saw a revue with Ardal O'Hanlon in that venue; the show was, he says, sharp and funny and something else too, "something you might associate with music". He wanted what they were having, so he asked if he could have a shot at it the next week.

That was it. He had never had an ordinary job and, he said a few years ago, never intends to have one. "I've got work, but I don't want a job. I can't do them - the turning up, the walking into the building, the staying in the building, the not leaving. I can't do it." He can, however, keep the sharks at bay. He also has a great, rippling way with language and a boundless imagination that together allow him to redraw the world. And he's hilarious.

At 24 he won the Perrier, stand-up's ultimate accolade, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Since then he has had straight-ish television and film roles, including playing opposite Michael Caine in what was effectively a two-hander comedy, The Actors. With Graham Lineman, who co-wrote Father Ted, he wrote three series of the brilliant Black Books sitcom that, in my view, constitutes one of the few good arguments for having a television set.

In Black Books, Moran plays the eponymous character Bernard Black, a second-hand book dealer whose general misanthropy and weakness for a tipple are a continuation of Moran's curmudgeonly stand-up stage persona. How much is this Moran himself? "That's very hard for me to answer," he told Elle magazine during the second series. "It's obviously based on some part of you. I think a lot of the time you just parody yourself."

Certainly other interviewers have described him with a drink to hand, although he sticks to coffee when we meet in Edinburgh, where he lives with his wife and two small children. This could be because his next appointment is a driving lesson. He can't drive? I can't drive, either. "Well, I'm learning," he says, irritably. "I'm a learner. I'm in between, OK?"


It's no surprise that driving passed him by. Moran seems to have been born at odds with the modern world. On stage and off, he rails against the shallowness of celebrity culture, eschews new-fangled devices such as mobile phones and professes himself aghast at the awful piercings and cacophonous music those scary young people - this, at 34 - seem to like so much.

Moran doesn't approve of television, either. "For me," he wrote in a column not long ago, "watching television these days is like being in a tepid bath the whole time. You want to get out of it but you're too tired. That's the feeling I have after two minutes, so I don't watch it."

People love Moran at least partly because they love hearing their own discomforts described just as they feel them, but with wit and brilliance. Critics, on the other hand, have occasionally marked him down for rummaging through subjects hackneyed even by stand-up's generous standards. "If there's one thing less funny than the differences between men and women, it's stand-up comics who reflect on them," growled veteran reviewer Brian Logan in The Guardian two years ago.

Moran says he talks about what he thinks about, which means he talks about different things at 34 than he did at 24 but much the same things, he supposes, as anyone else. "What does [Logan] think people talk about, for God's sake, when they sit around in pubs and cafes or in the park? What do you talk about? You talk about life and death, love, worry, children, family, money, sex, food, meaning, groceries, tooth loss. You know, whatever. You work your way down the list, obviously. But it's not what you're discussing; it's what you say and how you say it - always, that is important. Nobody says 'why is Rembrandt painting another nude?' The subject is irrelevant."

Audiences, of course, make their own decisions. He never thinks of the audience as rabble; even if sometimes they are collectively drunk, jeering and "vomiting into their own running shoes", he says he works on the principle that the people out there are at least as smart as he is. "You know, the audience has a personality and that can vary on the night; all you can do is try to navigate, but you don't know what's round the next barrier. Or the next reef. An audience is a sophisticated creature."

Sometimes he feels people beating him to the joke. "You sometimes realise that you should have been a little quicker to the mark, that you should have feinted and turned and surprised them." Surprise is crucial. Reviews of Moran's shows routinely reiterate that he doesn't do political humour, even suggesting that he is a real reactionary as well as grumpy. This is rubbish, of course. But the problem with political humour is that, in general, everyone knows what the punchline will be. Comedy, he told the Observer newspaper, "should be unexpected and annoying, and something that's got a message [is] never going to be that".


He doesn't want to do stand-up forever, though. All those little rooms in different towns can feel like a mouse's wheel after a while. He would like to collaborate with more writers, perhaps direct something, almost certainly write fiction.

He began with comedy because he thought he would be good at it and he needed to make a living. If he were starting out again, he muses, perhaps he would go for "straight stuff" as well. "But even the straight fiction I admire most is infused with humour, because good fiction always is, or nearly always is, because that's a prerequisite of a full life," he says. "And if somebody is presenting that in fiction, they are going to use it, you know. Even in Patrick White there is humour, because of the way he presents snobbery, the fears and aspirations of petit-bourgeois suburbia. It's just there, inextricable from the whole body."

He has been to Australia only once, but has a surprising collection of favourite Australians. He says he adored the Oceania pictures of Sidney Nolan and is "a big fan of Robert Hughes". And is he, I venture, one of his fraternity of curmudgeons? "He's great fun to watch, yes."

Moran is used to the curmudgeon tag, but thinks perhaps it is no longer the right label for his baggage. "I don't really want that, I suppose. I don't feel like that any more. I think I did for a while and it came across in the work, but that attitude is never more than a bulwark against what you might imagine to be a threat."

When he started out, he reflects, he was in combative mood. There is plenty of camaraderie behind the stage doors of the comedy circuit, but it can be competitive. He used to try to compete, another bit of young man's foolery. "People are competitive about getting the room, for sure. Nobody wants to die." Die meaning that nobody laughs, which is as bad as it gets on stage. "And, of course, all that is a hothouse for neurosis, which [can be] very wearing after a while. The thing is not to be affected by it. Which takes us back to the inflatable shark."

Dylan Moran performs seven shows in Sydney from Friday.

[Laney]

huh 7 shows?!?!

there are 3 that i know of run through the big laugh comedy festival.
are there 4 others that i don't know of?!

[awaywithfairies]

Originally Posted by Laney

huh 7 shows?!?!
there are 3 that i know of run through the big laugh comedy festival.
are there 4 others that i don't know of?!

That was my initial reaction too. However, looking at the advert later in the same section of the SMH provided the answers. Looks like there are two shows at the Seymour Centre, two at the Riverside Theatre, one at the Enmore Theatre and two at the State Theatre. They're all sold out except for the last State Theatre show on Friday 28 April.

[Laney]

oooh i didn't even know there were shows on at the state theatre.

the last show isn't sold out?! this is GOLD!

[awaywithfairies]

Originally Posted by Laney

the last show isn't sold out?! this is GOLD!

Presumably you won't be in Melbourne then. The last three Sydney shows are slap bang in the middle of Comfest.

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yeah i went woooo i can go, except thats the day i fly to melbourne

[Laney]

funny, but not as funny as i'd hoped.
i couldn't make out a fair few things he was saying cause of his accent.

[Leishpod]

I don't think there was anything i didn't understand, and i LOVED the show. not pee your pants, tears in your eyes funny, but very much rib-tickling and a good consistant laugh going the whole way through. his 'encore' was, i think, some of his best material for the night, and i was just sitting there staring at him going 'he is so bernard right now'

yaaayy.. prettyyyyy I finally got to see Dylan Moran! woot!

[op shop girl]

Originally Posted by Leishpod

I don't think there was anything i didn't understand, and i LOVED the show. not pee your pants, tears in your eyes funny, but very much rib-tickling and a good consistant laugh going the whole way through. his 'encore' was, i think, some of his best material for the night, and i was just sitting there staring at him going 'he is so bernard right now'

yaaayy.. prettyyyyy I finally got to see Dylan Moran! woot!

Ditto.

I also found it amusing that there were a few Manny look-a-likes in the audience

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http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,...8a1860,00.html

A serious chat with comedian Dylan Moran

11 April 2006
Margaret Agnew has a rather serious chat with comedian Dylan Moran.




If you've never interviewed a comedian, you may be forgiven for thinking it must be the most fun a journalist can have. Oh, it'll be just like a private comedy show for one, you're probably thinking. It won't be anything at all like pulling teeth. Well, you think wrong.

It is a truth, universally acknowledged among entertainment writers, that when you interview a comedian, they're likely to be the dullest, least funny person you've ever talked to. Maybe it's because they're paid to make people laugh, so they try not to do it for free. Maybe they're worried there's a limited number of jokes in the world and they'd better not waste them. Maybe they don't want to be typecast.

There are exceptions to the rule. Billy Connolly, whom I've interviewed twice, could probably get laughs out of a corpse, and the acid-witted American comedian Greg Proops makes a point of being funny in interviews, albeit an ill-tempered, intellectually snooty point, precisely because he knows the majority of comedians aren't.

I was looking forward to talking to Dylan Moran, the creator and star of the hilarious British series Black Books. His irascible, drunk Irish bookshop owner, Bernard Black, is a great character – repulsive and loveable at the same time. Moran's turn as a peevish, bespectacled victim of British zombies in the hit comedy-horror Shaun of the Dead was also nicely played (especially the death scene).

To quote his own press release, the Observer said "Dylan Moran makes you laugh so hard you have to put your head between your knees and gasp for air" – on stage, that is. On the phone, at first, what you get is huge sighs, long pauses and yes or no answers.

Yes, it'll be his first visit to New Zealand. Yes, he'll be bringing his family. No, there won't be a fourth series of Black Books.

Dylan is at home in Edinburgh with his wife of nine years, Elaine, and their two young children. Maybe he's distracted, but the interview is taking place at 9.30pm, and surely the kids are tucked up in bed.

Finally, he manages to string a sentence (of sorts) together when I ask about his comedian co-star on Black Books, Bill Bailey.

"He's every bit as, ah, talented as he appears on the screen and he's (cough) highly intelligent, and, er, the kind, er, of individual, who (huge intake of breath) you sort of think has, er, died out. Um, he's a lovely man."

It's an extremely hesitant speech pattern which successfully disrupts any attempts to get a flow of conversation going.

He plans to have a look around New Zealand while he's touring here, as a sort of posh working holiday. "It's a big draw for us ... to gad about, fling the children all over the place and let them run around in the undergrowth."

He's been described as the scruffy Irish comedian the ladies can't resist, a grumpy young man with a timeless, poetic-looking face, and potato-like –and that's all in the same breathless women's mag article.

What does Moran think of the accidental heart-throb tag? "I don't think that's applicable to myself. I don't really have anything to say about that. For somebody else it might be appropriate, not for me."

So, what first drew Moran to stand-up, back when he was in his early 20s?

"You, ah, didn't have to, ah, sit any four-hour exams, that's probably part of it. No, ah, it was, I just, it was totally casual. I didn't mean to get involved in it really. I just went to a club and some people were doing it and I, ah, (long intake of breath), I was really impressed and said `Can I do it next week?' and that was it."

On the Dylan Moran Rules fansite, it says he left school at 16 with no qualifications and spent four jobless years "drinking and writing bad poetry". How accurate is that description?

"Oh, that's not entirely accurate. I didn't write at all. No, er, I, ah, I can't remember, it was such a long time ago. Who cares?"

He says the people who make him laugh most are "my family: my wife and children, they make me laugh, and a couple of friends".

Has becoming a father changed his comedy? "No."

OK, let's try a different tack. Has his style of comedy evolved over the years? "Hopefully you're not talking about yourself quite so much. That would be the advancement there, I would hope, with anybody, whatever they're doing. Any young person necessarily talks about themselves. They don't know anything else, do they?"

By necessity, comedians have to have a certain amount of ego and confidence to be able to take the stage. "Yeah, you do, but it shouldn't be rooted in anything else other than your ability to observe, really. I know this all sounds a bit ... ", he trails off.

So is he more comfortable writing comedy or performing? "Writing anything is ... you're putting it under more scrutiny than you are if you're just sitting around blathering. Um, yeah, I would say you do pay more attention to the written word, in one way. I would prefer to be writing."

At this point in our conversation, there's a horrendous amount of background noise, where previously there'd been rustling of paper and the occasional sound of Moran taking a drink (not red wine like Bernard, he assures me), and mid-reply he suddenly says, apropos of nothing, "I'm feeding a rabbit". It sounds more like he's put the rabbit in a blender. "There you go, rabbit."

Moving right along ...

You're unlikely to have noticed it but Dylan Moran had a cameo in the movie Notting Hill as a shoplifter in Hugh Grant's bookshop, coincidentally, at the same time as he was writing Black Books.

"Well, that was pure coincidence. I'd already started, I had been working on that (script) when the tiny part in the movie came up. I told the writer that I was doing this at the time and he was intrigued so he came along to a performance."

I should pause here to tell you that Moran is ever so subtly name-dropping. The writer of Notting Hill is, of course, Richard Curtis, renowned creator of numerous British comedies, including Blackadder, Mr Bean, Four Weddings and A Funeral, and the writer/ director of Love, Actually. It was such a subtle name-drop (without the actual name), that I didn't pick up on it until after the interview.

I don't think Moran was being a tosser. He has also worked with such big names as Michael Caine and Michael Gambon in the film The Actors, so he could certainly have dropped bigger names.

Michael Gambon, says Moran, is "a wonderful, wonderful performer. He's really at the top of his game. It was an education (working with Gambon and Caine) – what else would it be? And they were both very patient and, and, and, Michael Gambon didn't give much in the way of advice, although he didn't need to – you just had to watch him."

So which career would he prefer – comedian or serious actor? "I don't think there is such a thing as a serious actor. I don't think the two words go together. I think acting is, most of the time, a frivolous occupation, yeah."

Isn't stand-up a form of acting, though?

"Yeah, ultimately it is all being a character. You have to be because if I went on stage now, I'd just look like somebody who'd come round to fix the phone. You have to go on with a certain kind of vibration of intensity that you don't normally use. Because if you used it all the time, you'd be a raving lunatic."

Moran has toured Britain and the United States with his stand-up show, and, like many comedians, he alters his material to allow for cultural differences.

"It does vary wildly. You can go one place and you can talk rather than perform and people are into it – it's more of a folk or jazz performance. And then other places you go, it's got to be techno in its delivery."

Moran sounds world-weary. "Whoever said I was excited? How do you remain excited about the work you do? You've got to be engaged with what it is, (but) it can't be like that all the time or there really would be nothing left of you. These people who are `on' all the time, who always seem to be working – I get tired just looking at them. They're working something out for themselves all the time, and that's kind of exhausting."

I wonder out loud if talking to journalists is the most tedious part of his job.

"Are you getting that, Margaret?"

It turns out I'm only the second interview he's had that day. "I'm relatively fresh. No, listen, sorry if I sound as if I'm ... (something unintelligible) it is just because I'm a little tired, that's all. Sometimes I go at interviews in a funny way because I suppose I'd rather have a conversation than have a set list of answers. It's an odd conversation, and generally speaking, people ask the same questions. You know, `how'd you start?' and so on and `what are your influences?' and all that kind of thing. They're kind of funny questions because I don't think anyone walks around thinking `My influences are this, this and this' all the time anyway. There are certain things that are undeniably influences, you know, but the things that are important to me are things that I'd imagine are important to nearly everybody, you know?"

Such as?

"Well, I think we're all interested in and motivated by the same stuff. It's just a question of how you go at it or why you go at it in a particular way. Everybody knows you've got to work to live, and most people want to be with the person they love, and you're concerned about the state of the world, and you try and be a human being in what sometimes looks like an extraordinarily hostile environment as well as being a very beautiful environment. The main thing is observation – that's the job. And sometimes it takes a bit longer than other times, do you know what I mean?"

Moran admits he does sometimes use stock answers to the more predictable interview questions. "Yeah, one interview in your lifetime is probably a genuine interview, but it seems just unnatural to do it hundreds of times. Obviously people are trying to publicise their thing, but the thing is the thing – I don't even know what the thing is exactly until I get there, because we're going to have a look round and see what it is and that'll tell us what the thing is."

Right.

Back to the stock questions: up next he's touring. "I'm touring with you people, and we're going to do our trip. Then we're back and I'm touring the UK for two months."

Moran says he's looking forward to travelling with his family, even with the long- haul flight.

He finishes our conversation promising that when he's on stage in Christchurch: "I'll talk an awful lot faster than this."



Dylan Moran performs in Auckland on April 19 and 20, Wellington on April 22 and Christchurch on April 23.

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http://blogs.theage.com.au/entertain...gh_dyla_1.html

Last Laugh: Dylan Moran - grumpy young man






Dylan Moran, that dishevelled, grumpy Irish star of TV series Black Books, opened at the Capitol Theatre last night for a short run of shows. Due to demand, he's moving to the Town Hall for the next three performances and then returning on April 25 for two shows at Hamer Hall (it's all sold out).



Half an hour before show time the queue already stretched down Swanston Street, around the corner and down Collins Street. Despite Black Books being a cult, rather than mainstream, phenomenon (plenty of people I know have never heard of it), it seems Moran has plenty of fans here.



The show started late, but the audience was patient. There were some hardcore fans in the crowd. Aside from guys with similar haircuts and fashion sense to Moran, there was a girl who had gone to the trouble of making a jacket out of receipts and wearing it (which is what Moran's character does in a Black Books episode as an alternative to doing his tax return). That's devotion. It's also a little sad and slightly creepy.



Finally Moran made his entrance. On stage he had a high stool, a low table and four beverages - water, tea, wine and beer. He drank from all four throughout the set, mainly going for the tea (which may disappoint fans who may have been expecting him to swig from an expensive bottle of wine).



He took a while to get warmed up. Moran's material consists mostly of that tried and true comedy fodder - the differences between men and women. That might seem a bit passe, but it's Moran's colourful use of language that lifts his performance. I'm not talking about swearing (though there is a bit) but rather his turns of phrase. He describes a lovey-dovey couple in a restaurant as "the sort of people that make you want to vomit in a box and send it over to them."



Moran improved in the second half of the show, when his grumpiness and dark sense of humour became more overt and he took on topics like religion, fancy restaurants, old age, Germans, self-improvement and death (including the difficulty of doing two things at the same time - living and dying).

It was Moran's first show here and the slow beginning may disappear from later performances. It's a solid, enjoyable show that fans of Black Books are likely to love. But is it likely to be the most brilliant hour of stand-up at the festival? Probably not.

Did you see Dylan Moran? Did he live up to your expectations? Post a comment and let us know.


Craig Platt
April 14, 2006 11:49 AM

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half an article on dylan moran. the other half was on David Campbell (Barnesy jnr) so i cut it out

http://www.smh.com.au/news/arts/smoo...e#contentSwap1

Dylan Moran, Seymour Centre, April 7

Two years ago the Irish comedian Dylan Moran said that he had become frustrated with the unpredictability of stand-up and intended to write a novel instead. "The things you can do easily, you have no respect for," he told The Sunday Times. "The things you can't do, you love."

No news on the novel but Moran, midway through a month-long Australian tour, and facing two more months touring Britain, hasn't tossed in the microphone yet. He has, however, made it possible to control his live material by honing a rock-hard stand-up character: the shambling, rambling pessimist who, sometimes languidly, sometimes furiously, tonight reveals oodles of charm, wit and intelligence.

Moran's stage rants and ruminations do not mirror Bernard Black, his belligerent, wine-soaked and misanthropic character from the successful TV series Black Books. The packed theatre suggested many hoped they would.

Moran does offer a hilarious line in embittered, detailed vitriol. Just like Black, he doesn't like young people, travelling, health fanatics, rap music, war or religion generally. He abhors pretension, the complexities of social interaction and the developed world's narcissistic leanings. He finds entire countries pointless.

All this loathing is tempered by a charming complicity and the sense he is actually enjoying himself on stage rather than wishing everyone would just disappear and leave him to his unsocial despair.

He harangues humanity and its many ludicrous qualities with a splendid, almost poetic use of language. Children are "infant fascists" while age signals the arrival of "a duvet of tit".

It takes a while for Moran to wind himself up into an exquisite, wordy and bewildered thirtysomething grump on stage - a process that includes wine, water, something in a coffee cup and lots of cigarettes. When he is sufficiently wound-up Moran spins great arcs of brilliantly surreal and sparkling thinking.

Moran's stand-up is a handsomely composed performance despite his patter appearing so haphazard and without a topic. After 14 years appearing as an irritated man in a ramshackle style, it is no surprise he's finding it easy.