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Sparkling word-jazz from Dylan Moran, but a little too chaotic for comfort

Dylan Moran
Dylan Moran

Dylan Moran likes to compare his freewheeling comedy to jazz. A theme is introduced, then disappears under a flood of abstract riffs, re-emerging when you least expect it. The thing is, there’s a fine line between artfully controlled chaos and the sound of a man bashing keys at random.

At Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall, Moran seemed to be a man bashing keys at random. Quite literally, in fact: the Irish comic cannot play the piano and does so with gusto. He took it up months ago, yet still hasn’t learnt a single chord, and now punctuates his routines by – very amusingly – inflicting himself on an innocent keyboard.

In the context of his new touring show, We Got This, Moran’s piano-bothering seems less a hobby than a symptom. That cacophony “became the soundscape in my head”, he says, at at a time when he “went a bit funny”. He refuses to use the word that “rhymes with rocktown”, but lockdown – which, he says, he spent mostly stoned – was clearly a hard time for him. After a lament about “the same churn of psychological torture that you go through every day,” he concludes: “I personally didn’t enjoy it.”

There’s always been a rumpled, Beckettian pessimism to Moran’s humour. Though only just 50, he’s bewailed his ageing body and mortality for decades. But We Got This is bleaker still. “Death,” he tells us, “isn’t a rumour any more. It’s a building in the city you can see.” To make it through life, “You’ve got to wake up springy, full of lies.”

And he doesn’t do lies. “You’re going to die, that is it, that is the only thing to know” is Moran’s version of a pep-talk. Nonetheless, life does offer some things to look forward to: living alone and recently single after a long marriage, he’s excited by the “menu” of new genders and sexualities available.

When firing on all cylinders, Moran is the finest stand-up comedian at work in these islands. But a few cylinders weren’t firing Tuesday night. His fast-paced yet low-energy delivery meant that several good jokes skimmed by unheard, and trains of thought were derailed seemingly more by accident than design. Usually, this doesn’t matter. When his surreal phrases are so original (and there are plenty of gems here: a human is just “a little forked unit of ham”), the order they arrive in is irrelevant. But there was an insistent vagueness to several routines, an unfinished quality.

This could be due to a lack of writing time – Moran rushed into this tour straight off the back of filming Stuck, his first sitcom since the sublime Black Books two decades ago – but there could be other factors. “So look, I’m hungover,” he admitted in an encore. Teetotal until recently, he found himself wondering, “Why did I drink all those drinks? I drank some more to find out.” (This gave an excuse to dust down a very funny, but very old, routine on the personality of each tipple.)

Still, even a hungover Moran is a force to be reckoned with. At one point, forgetting where he was going, he asked a front-row punter if they were the sort of person who remembers things. They admitted they were not. His response, seemingly off-the-cuff, was word-jazz of the highest order: “You’re surfing around in your own synapses, mercury oozes from your footsteps. You’re never here for long.”


Touring until June 17: dylanmoran.com