Scotland on Sunday, August 16, 1998
Do or Die
DYLAN Moran isstanding outside a pub in Kilkenny, waiting for his wife. This entails gazing atevery female figure walking up the street, declaring "ah, that'sher", then, when they get to about 15 yards away realising it isn't:"No. I'm blind."
Dylan Moran carriesaround this air of intangible strangeness, of unpredictability. It's what makeshis stand-up shows a calculated risk, veering from rambling, shamblingdigressions, to moments of inspired insight, occasionally within the samesentence.
The previousevening, an eagerly-anticipated performance at the Kilkenny comedy festival inthe Irish town's largest venue, had been a characteristic battle againstself-inflicted adversity. He'd turned up 45 minutes late (sleeping in after anafternoon in the pub), to face an aggrieved audience. For a while he hadteetered on the edge of disaster, before dragging himself back, hitting a rolland getting away with, well a draw at least. On stage at times he looked almostin pain grasping for the right word, the right combinations, the right gesturesWhen they came, the relief was palpable "I find it a struggle at times” hesays. "You really have to fight to not let yourself be bepetrified by the whole thing. That talent, to not be dead." A couple ofyears ago, Moran, all Perrier Award marketable image, could, had hewanted, have stepped up into the premier leagueof stand-ups, with the lucrative theatre tours the West End runs and the TVappearances All he needed to do was tighten up his sets, get serious and builda career Never really an option "No, I'm in control because I don't carethat much," he says "I've never been that ambitious. I can't livelike that, I'm not prepared to. I mean that. I feel like an old horsesometimes; I'm hot stuff now and then. But I couldn't do that, or I could, butvery badly. I couldn't sustain it. To say the same words every night is atotally different set of skills from the ones I have. The deadening thing isthat sense of 'how can I bear to say that again?'"
Instead he flirtswith disaster on a nightly basis, following his flights of fancy onto planeswhere his audience can always follow. From time to time he dies."Obviously. Whenever I died it was due to my bloody-mindedness and acertain amount of kamikaze instinct. But the great thing that staves offboredom is that it is mysterious Recently I've had this phrase in my head andpissed myself laughing every time I thought about it. Somebody wastalking about going to see their doctor and asking about a diet, and being toldto subsist on fronds. I can't get that image out of my mind, this image of aman eating fronds. I can't tell you where that comes from." A kind ofgifted madness perhaps some psychological tripwire that turns a word likefronds into comedy? "Well, the really good people are freaks. I'm not afreak. I can always come back to myself. It's so singular in every sense.You're on your own, you've created it, you are the whole show. It's me, meme all the time, which is an odd position to be in."
Moran's talent isan instinctive understanding of the essential comedy in certain words, in usingthe felicitous phrase that tips a situation over into the absurd . "A lotof it's about it’s about being accurate," he says. "That's the graftpart putting in the colour, the identity of the thing. That's the work. Youhave to fill in those details, the bits that please you. You'reworking in a very small area on a very small surface. It's a lyric thing,like song writing or poetry, you don't have the scope to go in-depth , it's aget-in-get-out thing, fast" For a comedian whose success has come fromcreating his own world, which obeys few of the rules of the real one, youwouldn't expect him to excel in a sitcom, to dance to another writer'stune . Perversely, in Simon Nye's misanthropic TV comedy How Do You Want Me heexcelled, using his own world-weariness to flesh out Nye's writing with anarray of sighs and gestures. "It was an experiment," he says."I'd never acted before. You'll enjoy anything where you're doing so muchlearning on the hoof. I've written my own sitcom , it's called Black Books,about this guy who owns a bookshop. I say I've written it, but, butthere's a certain amount of resistance about actually saying yes I'm doinga sitcom. It's not really writing , it's just assailing a genre."Eddie Izzard is the classic example of a stand -up comedian demonstrating the potential disasters awaiting someone trying their hand at thehalf-hour television sitcom. "There are all sorts of traps,"acknowledges. "But cliché is a neutral thing. It's not necessarily bad.Cliché is cliché for a reason. It has value. What neuters a cliché is the factthat it washes over you if the thing is tired. But there's no point runningaway from a stock situation because they matter, it's just how you treatthem." Writing a sitcom inevitably meant corralling Moran’s moreextravagant flourishes into a more disciplined form.
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