16 Dec 1996
was born in Navan, discovered comedy in Dublin, paid his dues in London and then conquered Edinburgh in 1996. Liam Mackey meets Dylan Moran, the stand-up comedian with the world at his feet.
1996 has been a vintage year for Irish comedy and no mistake, what with Father Ted swallowing awards like Fr. Jack swallows drink, and Edinburgh once more succumbing to gaels of laughter, as Tommy Tiernan and Dylan Moran made it a double triumph at this year's festival, the former being deemed 'Best Newcomer' and the latter following in Sean Hughes' footsteps by winning the prestigious Perrier Award.
What's even more remarkable is that Tiernan and Moran hail from the same town and the same school, making Navan - heretofore more famous for material to stand-on rather than material for stand-up - an unlikely candidate for the title of Comedy Capital Of The Universe.
"Bizarre, isn't it?," says 25-year-old Moran, on the eve of a homecoming tour which this week brings him to Dublin. "Tommy was either a year or two ahead of me and there was another guy in Tommy's class, called Willy Byrne, who is one of the funniest people I've ever met, just naturally gifted that way. And he's now in 'Jesus Christ Superstar' in the West End. So that school, Navan St Patrick's Classical School, obviously went through some kind of warp over that couple of years."
I take it that it was an unusually creative environment then?
"Not at all," he demurs, "and that's why it happened, I think. It was actually a classic, middle-Ireland, draconian, theocratic, bigot-riddden hell-hole - but one of the English teachers was quite into drama and drama workshops. So when you're 13, 14, 15 and you're going up to Dublin to arse around in the National Youth Theatre, and you're coming from the kind of education system where you're surrounded by people who are being forced to be dentists - it was like a glimpse of the promised land and people responded really hungrily too it. It was so refreshing and such a relief, even though we only did it a few times."
Such liberating excursions appealed, in particular, to the smartalec in Dylan Moran.
"I was always a bit of a show-off, the class clown in so far as I would be told to shut up a lot," he reflects. "I don't think I was particularly funny but I was very keen on finding new ways to waste time. In fact, I didn't go to school a lot of the time at all - I'd say I missed at least a third of my education overall. Partly that was through being ill sometimes with chronic bronchitis and partly it was using that just as an excuse not to go. I spent a lot of time in bed."
To confirm that his absenteeism had, at least, some basis in genuine medical fact, Moran proceeds to wheeze spectacularly for the benefit of the tape. "I'm a wreck," he admits, after getting his breath back and lighting up a fag. "And, no, I shouldn't smoke. But I'm not ill, I mean, it's not glamourous at all. I'm just . . . not very good at jumping."
Although naturally bright, articulate and a voracious reader, "mindsweeping everything", Moran was not academically inclined, happily bailing out of secondary school before the Leaving Cert and eventually taking his A-levels up north. Then, as pals were going off to university or entering gainful employment, he found himself faced with the realisation that his career prospects were "absolutely zero". So what else was a poor boy to do but head for the bright lights? Or, as he puts it: "I was signing on in Navan and decided to expand my global domination plan by moving to Dublin and signing on there instead."
And then, one fateful night, he discovered his destiny in the form of a small room in The International Bar on Wicklow Street. For a guy who'd spent a year drifting aimlessly, it was something in the order of a Damascean revelation. Ardal O'Hanlon, Kevin McAleer, Barry Murphy and Dermot Carmody - this was the class of person who opened his eyes and tickled his ribs.
"That place, The Comedy Cellar, should be a shrine," he says. "I went there one night, for no particular reason, and I was really impressed. I was expecting some kind of lame undergraduate revue but they were so good, so fast, so funny, so intelligent and yet so loose with it as well. I was doubled-over and I'm not a big laugher."
That was the first live comedy show Dylan Moran had ever attended. At the second one, a week later, he was up onstage himself.
"I was shitting myself but it was totally exhilarating at the same time," he says of his debut. "The thing was that I was driven, because at that point in my life, I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. So this had to work. And it did. Buzz is the wrong word. It was a real charge, a fire throughout your ego. It wasn't about building a career. It was just about trying to be really good at showing off. Saying 'look ma, no hands'. People always say that stand-up comedy is a very hard thing to do - and that's what made me want to do it."
Regular appearances at the venue ensued, giving Dylan some much-needed focus in his life.
"There was a feeling that it was important," he observes, "because, as I say I didn't have much else to do. But then, if I knew that I was going to be on next week, I didn't need much else. I wouldn't go nuts on scripting but I would polish things, try to make them as pithy as I could. And knowing you were going to do it - I can't tell you how exciting that was. Even if it was only going to be ten minutes on stage, to be that focussed when otherwise you were just buzzing around Dublin, drinking, smoking joints, staying up till 4am, shopping in the all-night shop - no cohesiveness, no parameters to your life, nothing, except a meandering existence - so to be that focused, that keyed in, iit meant that for 10 or 15 minutes you were completely in control of your destiny. However you did, it was all because of you."
Moran did very well, as it happened, but how exactly did he go about making the folks laugh?
"The only thing I can see that I did then that I still do now - and which makes me laugh - is somebody not being able to do something that they're supposed to be able to do. Whether that's fixing a plug or articulating how they feel about being alive. I don't even know that I would edify it by saying it was observation it was just . . ."
A hunch?
"(Laughs) It was exactly that. Totally instinctive. And then, as time went by, you would see someone else do something very similar to what you had done, not because they'd ripped it off, but because you hadn't properly phrased a phenomenon. Because what it's about then is not looking for something to talk about but how to put it - that's the key thing. And that is a big division, I think, between British and Irish stand-up."
