Dylan Moran: ‘Irish men are all beta males – brilliant negotiators and liars and deceivers’

The comedy icon Dylan Moran is wearing a red and black stripy T-shirt like Dennis the Menace. His hair is also a bit like Dennis the Menace’s hair if it had been given a slight comb. (This probably makes me, at this moment, Gnasher.) He’s drinking a pint of Guinness and telling me, apropos very little, about his youthful shoplifting escapades.
“I stole the 12-inch of Love Will Tear Us Apart [by Joy Division],” he says. “I was 15. It was like the John Dillinger movie where he’s at the traffic lights waiting to see if he’s going to get pinched. The doors of the shopping centre were opening when the hand came on my shoulder, and I was brought back burning with shame but also with that weird teenage defiance where you’re able to step into the alternate reality that’s so near to you at all times …
“I said, ‘Well, there’s been some sort of mistake. You need to look this up. This has been ordered and paid for already. Look it up in the book.’ And I think I actually tapped the desk. And they sort of sheepishly did. I acted with the 10,000 per cent confidence that the real lunatic has available to them – or somebody who’s going to go into showbiz.”
[ Dylan Moran: ‘I don’t give a f**k about PC. The decisions I take about what I say are mine’Opens in new window ]
Music and art were, in those days, Moran’s ways of pretending to be from somewhere other than Navan. “That’s what being a teenager is: rejecting every part of yourself that seems local,” he says. “The other way is you double down on it with GAA and screaming that local song – ‘We’re here. We’re not there.’ It’s always a quantum war. It’s a war between people who think that things are in fixed points and people who think everything is a process. [We were] people who want to be from nowhere. That was the thing Theresa May said: if you’re an internationalist, you’re not from anywhere. You’re not anybody.”
Moran is a fun if occasionally bamboozling person to interview. He goes on tangents. He eschews discussing the very personal details of his life, preferring to go from small biographical details such as being a teenage music snob to big philosophical truths about identity over the course of a paragraph.
“My thing is very simple, really, and if you give me away on this I’m probably out of business,” he says. “Macro-micro is my thing.”
Moments later he’s breaking down the performative psychology of an interview. “Everyone feels himself to be a pea at the end of a fork being held up to the universe,” he says. “We’re presenting ourselves to one another, going, ‘Hey, this is what Dylan’s like,’ and you’re going, ‘This is what Patrick’s like.’ We’re hoping to sell that to convince ourselves … So today is Thursday, right?”
It’s actually Friday.
“Okay. It’s that kind of Thursday.” He continues: “I don’t know what kind of week you’ve had, but you have things on your mind. You may be hoping that this encounter is a break from another one or is not as bad as you might have heard. I’ll be thinking, ‘Well, I can’t even remember why I’m doing this interview but I’d better do it. I’d better be nice about it and sell some tickets for whatever the f**k is going on … I hope he doesn’t think I’m a dick.’” (He’s actually doing this interview to promote Galway Comedy Festival, at which he is the artist-in-residence).
“The thing we’re doing is always ceremonial. It’s the nub end of what we present to the world. Underneath all that the desire is intense, the drama is hot.”
I read somewhere that he was out of school sick a lot as a child with chronic bronchitis. “I coughed a lot as a kid, but it was the 70s. We all coughed a lot.”
But he adds: “Yes, I was out of school quite a bit, so I think that probably was part and parcel of my reading a parallel syllabus … It was feral reading, completely unchecked, anything and everything. If I liked something I read all of it. I read everything that Noël Coward wrote for the stage, and everything Ibsen wrote on the stage, and everything Edward Bond wrote for the stage, and everything Pinter wrote for the stage. And if I liked somebody I read everything. I read Stanislavski. Because there was no TV. We didn’t have a TV for a while. We didn’t have a phone till I was 12.”
The Moran family had no money, he says, but they had “cultural capital”. There were books in the house. “I was really, really, really lucky with my parents, because I got two dreamers. They were of that generation whose job, generationally speaking, was to try to learn how to define what they wanted against what was offered.”
They “had the arse end of the whole Irish package of nationalist identitarian politics, completely infused, soaked, marinated, irradiated even energised by religion … The lies that [the establishment was] vomiting out that your manifest destiny was somehow aligned with the national story. They had to reject all that.
“The alternative was the IRA and dead bodies. I grew up [with] the lunchtime news telling you who was dead that day. These things that defined us, you tamp them down and you bury them and say, ‘There’s nothing there. It’s not important.’ But it’s really important. Those details sing. They sing a world.”
Why did he move to Dublin? “I came to Dublin to be a rainbow goth. That was my main job when I was a teenager.”
What’s a rainbow goth? “Being a rainbow goth meant you hated everything but you were wearing your mother’s scarf.”
One night, while a rainbow goth, he went into the Comedy Cellar, upstairs at the International Bar, and saw the sketch troupe Mr Trellis, featuring Ardal O’Hanlon, Barry Murphy and Kevin Gildea, and so discovered his comedic calling.
“It wasn’t just that they were a bit good. They were f**king incredible. They blew me away. Dublin back then was Grogans, it was brown rain, it was one bag of crisps and 13 fellas around it. But these guys were on every week and they were passionate and they were f**king so good. And I want to keep saying that. Thirty years later they still compare with anything I’ve seen anywhere in the world. And they didn’t know how good they were. They were world class.”
Moran asked could he perform the next week. A few years later he won the Perrier comedy award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and by the end of the decade he was the star and co-writer of the Channel 4 sitcom Black Books. I ask what he thinks was different about Irish and British comedy in the 1990s and he ends up giving a sort of treatise on the two countries.
He lives in Brighton now – he previously lived with his two children and his ex-wife in Edinburgh – but he wants to return to Ireland.
“Ireland is amazing, and it’s famously amazing as an underdog. England’s an overdog and always was … This absurdly small centre of the largest empire the world has ever known. I mean, it’s ridiculous. Their whole empire is a conjuring act. Ben Macintyre has written fantastic books about spies during World War II, and there’s great stories of deception – making an airfield look like it’s full of planes. I think that conjuring has been a big part of English history, knowing that we all have a great desire in us, and a great fear within us, and to play with that fear.”
And the Irish? “I think we have a traumatised culture. We’re the beta partner. It’s the same with Canadian men or Kiwi men. We’re all beta males, historically, politically. We’ve always had to be, so you’re talking about a class of people who are going to be brilliant negotiators and liars and deceivers … They have to traffic in the tolerable and the acceptable and the gettable, not what they want. The alpha goes for what he wants. He goes for the steak.
“The other part in that relationship is reactive. We’ve been described by the victors for such a long time. We have heard so many different things about ourselves that we can compare them to how we are inside. And I think a lot of music, poetry, comedy, literature comes out of that gap … You grow up invaded. So you don’t think about what you can do to another entity; you think about what it’s like to have things done to you. It sends you into a depth of interiority.
“It’s about hearing those echoes and then interpreting those echoes. Look at Beckett’s later poems: they’re all echoes. They’re all about a being that’s trying to endure itself and its own noises.”
A bit like Moran’s stand-up? He laughs. “That’s a good observation.”
In answer to my original question about British and Irish comedic styles, he thinks that Irish comedians tap into a comedic magical thinking that’s innate to Irish conversation while British comedians have to learn how to do this from scratch. He likens it to the potion in the Asterix comics. “Obelix fell in the magic potion as a baby. He never needs to drink it. Asterix needs to drink it all the time. Ireland is Obelix. Britain is Asterix.”
How has stand-up changed for him? “It totally changes. We’re in midlife. The rocket goes up and [in midlife] the rocket knows something has changed and goes, ‘Oh, hang on, we’re going down now.’ It’s no less interesting a journey, by the way … It’s very humbling. It’s all about being humbled. So how do you want to be humbled? How do you want to handle your own humbling as you come back to the ground?”
His current show, A Work in Progress Wander, is, as the title suggests, a less conventional stand-up show than he’s done previously. Each night is improvisatory and contains elements of his music and visual art. (He recently had an exhibition of his art at Two Kats and a Cow gallery in Brighton.)
“It’s deliberately very messy. I’ve got musical instruments up there. I’m going from town to town. It’s a bit like this conversation. I’m trying to draw things out of people, trying to get them to say what they think about where we are, what the town is. I’m quite suspicious of all art forms that just dump on people. Terrible American stand-up.” He does an American accent: “‘You people wanted some jokes? Well, here’s some jokes.’”
He is looking for some sort of real engagement. He likens it to the conspiratorial intimacy of Irish conversation. I tell him about how, when I go to cover things like the Rose of Tralee, after several conversations with fans I succumb to the collective mindset I find there. He finds this very funny. “There should be a word for that. The slow process of corruption.”
He talks about how a group of people can work on a consensual reality. “If we work on it together it will be true … Like the mayor in Jaws.” He laughs.
Are these gigs scary? “Yeah. That’s the whole point.”
So do some shows go well and others go badly? “You can swap out the words ‘well’ or ‘badly’ for ‘connected’ and ‘disconnected’. When everybody’s there it’s going great.”
Several interviews with Moran start with a variety of, “I’ve heard he’s very difficult but he’s not actually difficult.” Why does he think that is? He laughs uproariously. “I used to get that so much. All I know is, from the age of five, people would say to me, ‘Cheer up: it may not happen.’ I walked into a hotel in Sweden a few years ago and the desk clerk looked up and said, ‘Rough night?’ What it tells you more than anything is that people are nervous, not of me but of being hurt. And I’m sympathetic.”
He points at my phone. “Everybody now is in a boiling froth of panic the whole time, talking about time and doom and how we’re all f*cked and the planet’s burning and everything else. We’ve completely regressed, because we have no chance as a civilisation of enjoying speculative, consecutive thought again unless we decouple from the agitation that we have signed up to. We’re not sophisticated enough as organisms to be able to counteract the effects of [our phones] in real time … I’m completely overwhelmed by that thing.”
Moran seems very sensitive to human vulnerability. He doesn’t think the virtual, algorithmic world can properly reckon with the messiness of humanity.
“I’m on the side of the individual. That’s my position, because I think that that is under attack from all sides – from tech, from capitalism, from what we have agreed are the demands of modern living … The human being is inherently offensive. They’re smelly, they age, they get sick, they die. They make demands. They want things. They’re very afraid of other things. They love you. They hate you. They’re going to write you a poem and then not talk to you on Thursday. What do you do with that? I’ll tell you what you don’t do: you don’t give it to a machine to run.”
Galway Comedy Festival runs from Tuesday, October 22nd, to Monday, October 28th. Tickets are on sale from 10am on Tuesday, September 10th