Dylan Moran: What it is Review

Dylan Moran: What it is

Usually eating cheese and onion crisps, Dylan Moran spends much of his time wandering around Morningside looking lost. It’s an area of ‘hand crumbled organic pheasant’ fed Chiwawas and polite middle class ladies, tearing around in their Toyota Hiroshimas. It’s an area of English visitors in search of the obligatory ‘ironic deep fried mars bar’ for their Scottish experience – but only after they’ve drank ‘seven ironic pints’ of Edinburgh’s finest.

From this font of French patisseries, card shops and pursed lips Dylan Moran once more stumbles onto stage. His confused glances, wild eyes and irate character merge with some brilliantly executed comedy. As his flailing body meanders across the floor, he often seems shocked at the waves of brilliantly crafted jokes that explode from his mouth.

It’s not going too far to say that Moran’s material is insightful, and he occasionally produces phrases verging on the poetic. As with most comedians, observation is central to much of the humour, yet Moran’s musings are far more cutting and incisive than most.  

Edinburgh, for example, is the profound, often pompous start of a wedding. Glasgow is, on the other hand, the messy, blurred ending where someone you don’t know is trying to write their number on your leg with mascara. Moran also despairs at English attitudes to pleasure - ‘It’s not as if I’m offering them Flamenco testicles flashed fried in Orchid  Oil’  he cries.

It rarely happens when you are attempting to marshal the ideas from a performance and objectively dissect them that you actually start laughing out loud at the quotes you’ve taken down. Dylan Moran is the sort of comedian who has the audience almost continuously laughing, and can effortlessly slur a joke starting in metaphysics and ending in ‘half a pie’. Where can I buy a transcript of this show? Can someone force Moran to hurry up and get a book published?

‘It doesn’t matter if you agree with me’ Moran notes. ‘I just have to get it out of my system.’ Hopefully whatever’s in his system will stay there for a long time. Absolutely hilarious.

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