Comedian Dylan Moran: ‘The panel show circuit is a rigged game’

‘Ask me something specific about that and I’ll tell you,” says Dylan Moran. “But I won’t waffle.” The man once described by Le Monde as “the greatest comedian, living or dead” says that last word as if it gives him physical pain, leaning back into the banquette in the restaurant in Dublin where we’re having lunch.

His gaze is locked on mine, a challenge in his eyes, a little like someone saying “Go on then” before blows are thrown. I’ve suggested only that it’s a “strange time to be a comedian”. Go on then…

What did he think of Jimmy Carr’s joke about the Holocaust? “Jimmy’s joke isn’t funny. Next.”

The same stare. Does he worry about saying the wrong thing? “I don’t worry about s---. What am I going to say that I’m going to regret? What is it that I’m going to say?”

Well, he may not know.

“Am I worried that I’m going to be misinterpreted? Is that what you mean?”

Well, Graham Linehan, with whom Moran co-wrote the first series of the cult early 2000s sitcom Black Books, has been suspended from Twitter for writing that “men are not women” (among other comments about transgender people).

“Graham’s free to say whatever he wants, obviously. He’s also free to be in the consequences of that. We all are.”

And in his own most recent stand-up show, 2018’s Dr Cosmos – “Go ahead and ask me something. Go ahead” – Moran tells a lovingly developed joke about growing up in Co Meath at a time before “words like trans and intersex or cis” existed – “Sex, identity, forget about it – there was none available. The only ones anybody had ever heard of were ‘boys’ and ‘girls’, and if you went somewhere fancy, like Dublin, you might see ‘Kevin with the shoes’, but that was it.” He nods. “Culturally speaking, these things were not talked about.”

So, in writing his new show, We Got This, for a major UK tour that begins in Norwich this March, did he think “I’m not going anywhere near that (potentially career-detonating) topic now?”

“No, I’m going into everything. I’m going to knit all the subjects. I’m going to talk about them all. No worries. It’s really more important than ever to talk about everything. And I’m going to do that.”

Is he relying on his essential goodness as a human being to get him through this cultural moment?

“No. Tell me something to worry me. Worry me.”

I mention how far a star can fall. Louis CK, for instance, who went from most popular comedian in America to pariah, almost overnight.

“The thing about this is… here’s the thing, right? Just go with me. Let’s say we’re talking about champion knitters, and you know, for the knitter, it’s the world knitting finals coming up. Now, he hasn’t dropped a stitch. And then, all of a sudden, he takes his d--- out in front of the other knitters, you know.”

The slightest of pauses.

“How do you think that’s gonna play out for his career?”

That does it. The effort to keep a straight face as this scenario develops defeats me. The last line is delivered like most of his payoffs: deadpan, quickly, in a light, fluting tone. And then it defeats Moran, too, for a time. His point, though, is the reason why Louis CK’s reputation took a nosedive: “It’s got nothing to do with comedy.”

This might be a good moment to say that nothing can quite prepare you for Moran in person. He’s so intensely, physically present in an unavoidable way; loose, scruffy, constantly moving, stretching his neck, arms, walking off to stretch his whole body, shedding jumpers, putting jumpers back on. Even the way he drinks coffee is dramatic. He orders a double espresso, takes an oat milk carton from a rucksack, sloshes the cup full, stirs it, spills it. Calls a waiter over and orders an iced oat milk. Ladles in ice cubes and dollops of milk. More ice cubes.

He’s on a zig-zag journey back from Belfast, where he’s been shooting a new self-written sitcom, Stuck – his first for nearly 20 years – for BBC Two, but he’s just been home to see his father, Richard, who drove him here and dropped him outside. He’s en route to Edinburgh, where he has lived for many years with his wife Elaine and their two children, Beth, 23, and Max, 19. He doesn’t like talking about them in interviews, but he often riffs on family life in his stand-up. “Family is maybe the number one thing in life… after snacks and non-bunchy underwear… it’s gotta be in the top eight,” he’ll say, or, of his own inconsequence as a parent, “I’m a rumour in shoes in my own home.”

It’s the poetry of his comedy that makes it so special, though darkness is clearly visible: there’s a horror of the human body, a sense of futility and something close to an obsession with ageing and death (“That’s passed,” he assures me). Still, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien would recognise him as one of their own.

His sitcom Stuck – with Moran and Morgana Robinson playing a couple in a stagnant relationship – will, he hopes, over its five 15-minute episodes, portray a quality that he thinks is under threat – “the value of ordinary, awkward human intimacy for its own sake”. How humanity came to this pass is sure to be a significant element in his tour, too. Moran has seen the internet age and he doesn’t like it.

“Flesh and blood engagement is going to seem more and more and more alien to us. If you really engage with another human being, it’s actually quite something. It can be too much. It can be overwhelming. As well as liberating, wonderful and illuminating – but that’s what people are actually scared of.”

It’s not AI we should be worried about, he believes. The machines are already changing us. “It’s coming at me like a tsunami, and I can’t believe everybody else is just standing around on their phones. There’s going to be a mass movement to the fields, everyone will f--- off and decouple from all this nonsense.”

Words flow from him constantly as though he is reaching for golden coins out of the air, and scattering them across the table, certain they will always be there for him. He’s the son of a poet, Lynda Moran, who died last year. “My mother was an incredible user of words. She was amazing.” He’s suddenly, briefly, very emotional. “And she was very funny. She wouldn’t have three words together without a joke in there somewhere, you know.”

He remembers her kicking his bed as a teenager, telling him to get up because Brendan Behan’s widow, Beatrice, had come to visit. Writers, not religion, were revered in their house. “Words were living things to me, growing up,” he says. “They’re like creatures, organisms. They’re not man-made things. They’re like beings.”

He became the second youngest ever winner of the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1996, aged just 24 – and he knows well what the absence of the Festival for the past two years has meant for young comedians. “It’s a great place for learning, because you cannot stay in control of whatever jalopy you’re riding for three weeks. There was a place when I started, they called it ‘the bear pit’ – a lot of people throwing plastic glasses.” He compares it to “jumping off a platform with a vine around my ankle”.

He’s just turned 50. It doesn’t faze him, he says, although “you get to a certain number on the chart and everything becomes about the body, which is why the great secret of having friends as you age is learning how to complain with jokes. How do you suffer entertainingly? It’s the only thing you have to do.”

His shows are always live, he says, because he can’t remember a show from beginning to end these days anyway. So every show is unique. He gave up alcohol a few years ago, leaving behind a half-cut persona that he had been curating for the best part of three decades.

“The thing is, booze is only interesting when it’s a problem,” he says. “When it’s so-and-so turned up at four in the morning with a bag of apples wearing a cowboy hat.

“I actually had some drinks recently, and that was really interesting,” he adds. “Alcohol is amazing stuff. I haven’t had it in years. That’s a trapdoor to the dark. You can even land into specific rooms [within your mind], if you know which drinks and what order to do them in.”

He went into school drunk a couple of times, he tells me. “Obviously, I was trying to be as much of a pain in the ass as possible to signal my general disapproval of the surroundings.” Back then, he hoots wistfully, he was a “rainbow goth”. “I had a knee-length, rainbow-coloured chiffon scarf that belonged to my mother, a very long black cardigan, an almost as long red cardigan. I wore both with the scarf and red brothel creepers. And I had huge hair that went up like this…”

He got a few desultory GCSEs. “I didn’t care about staying there. And when I got booted out, I went up north – I was also kind of chasing my girlfriend at the time who was a student at Queens up in Belfast – so I went up there and pretended to do some A-levels.” After that, “when I was 19 and everybody I knew was at university and I wasn’t, I was going, ‘What the f--- am I doing?’ But I was already writing by then.”

Famously, seeing Ardal O’Hanlon perform at a comedy club in Dublin when he was 20 convinced Moran that he could do that, too. “All I knew was I didn’t want a job.” But it was arriving in London and seeing comedy clubs springing up everywhere that changed his life. He was performing every night of the week. “It was like being allowed to be a professional footballer.” Fame soon followed: Black Books, with Moran playing rumpled, contrary bookshop owner Bernard Black opposite Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig; then a memorably gory role in zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead; global stand-up tours.

He has conspicuously avoided the panel show circuit, though. “It’s a rigged game,” he says. “It creates a style of comedy, I would argue. It’s very masculine. It’s very gag heavy. And I just find it desperately insecure. It makes me a bit sad. It’s like somebody making a very loud noise every few minutes to state that they’re alive.”

Would it be a fair assumption that he won’t be following Bailey onto Strictly Come Dancing? A head cock suggests I’ve got this wildly wrong (nb Strictly bookers). “I do like dancing. A lot. I don’t know about the whole thing of, like, waiting to be judged and everything. I’d probably get in a fight with the judges pretty quick. ‘What do you mean, it’s only a seven? Come here, I’m going to make you eat your sequins, you p----.’”

He gets out a sheet of paper and asks me what I want from comedy. “I want a lot,” he says, “I want redemption. I want to be saved. I want to be told everything’s going to be alright.” He starts drawing what looks like a big top. So what do I want from comedy? I feel like a kid being asked what I want for Christmas. The answer’s obvious: a surprise! And with Moran, there’s no danger of anything else.

Dylan Moran’s UK tour ‘We Got This’ starts March 6 (dylanmoran.com).‘Stuck’ is on BBC Two later this year