It is a funny thing. When Dylan was a child, he thought slapstick was funny. He saw it on television and in cinemas, and he laughed a lot. He also thought adults were funny. He'd watch them talking with each other, and he'd think it was funny, how long, how very, very long, it took them to say hello. Hello, how are you? I am well, how are you? I am well. Before they'd sit down and drink their tea. Then the hollow, drawn-out laughs and niceties, meaning it's all right, there's nothing wrong here, I'm not going to fight you or fuck you, nothing's going to happen, we're quite safe. Pass the doily. Generations go by like that. All kids know it. They don't know what it is, but they see it. Dylan thought it was funny. He still does, only in a more ferocious way.
Something happened, Conor says, to the kids he went to school with. They saw it all, they had huge, distinctive personalities and then, somewhere around 12 or 13, it was as if they died. And you see them sometimes now, and they're adults and you wonder where their souls went. They just... packed it in. Dylan is delighted. "They are the über-dead", he cries. "They make a thing of it. They flourish!"

"Oh, it's a sly one", says Conor. "It's like a contest: you can't hurt me, I'm not taking part, I'm dead..."
"... They radiate death, they give it out and get it back and they huddle together for safety. They have to put on the dead act, belong with the über-dead, but they're still trapped inside themselves. If they come out and be themselves, they'd either be removed or marginalised... No." The little negative comes out in the same tone as the preceding, proceeding monologue of existential doom.

A strident voice has risen above the general background noise and is waxing more and more imperious as it moves closer. Then it's in your face and a woman shouts, "Did any of you order a taxi?" like her life and wellbeing depends on it. So Dylan says no, mindful, no doubt, of the social contract. At all events, the woman departs and is immediately forgotten. Except by Dylan. She was, he says, a case in point. You can see it - don't wreck my head, leave me alone, all I'm asking is about a taxi, that's all it is, that's all I want from you, don't mess me around. It's there all the time, he says. It's the fear. It's about safety. Then you get the deadness, so you won't be at risk. And then there's safety in numbers.

"My drive," says Conor, "is a fear of being dead. It's only something I have decided to embark upon. The psychoanalytic approach is only part of a sort of cop-out culture. I don't believe in the unconscious."
"All you can do is pick up a torch and say, hello, I'm here, and go over the top," says Dylan happily. "Be a brave soldier..."
"A trooper," says Conor.
"I don't have any time for anyone who's not a trooper." Dylan moves smoothly up his own gears. "No to dead. Dead goes over there. Yes to trooper. Trooper comes here."
"Life's a battlefield," he goes on, moved by his own metaphor. "And more than that. You're held hostage wherever you go. In the first world war, officers went into battle with a batman in tow, a servant to whom you were entitled, who'd make your tea and polish your shoes and fetch and carry for you. Then you'd be a hostage to your batman, hostage to all the trappings you think you deserve. Because you're combative and ambitious. Then your attainments become encumbrances. Very, very quickly you get weighed down by your own wealth, social status, fame, whatever. All that searching and climbing to the vaulted sky is going to drag you down into the mire. So it will. Ambition is deadness."

And we all thought Black Books, the Channel 4 series about a dysfunctional bookshop owner, was a flight of fancy, stuck there on a Friday night somewhere between Father Ted and Frasier. We lavished comedy awards upon it for its outlandish wit and improbable invention. When Dylan Moran (together with Graham Linehan, who co-wrote Father Ted) made up Bernard Black and then "acted" him out, glowering inside his crummy shop, repelling boarders, there wasn't a lot of fantasising going on. But if it was only black, only an exercise in nihilism, who'd have laughed?

"Being alive," Dylan says, "is about shedding. From the moment you're born, you should be shedding. I don't want any of it. Baby clothes? I don't want them. I don't want your pappy baby food. No. Let me be. Leave me to grow and develop in my own way. Repudiate and repel, that's the thing. Stuff all the hereditary shite we're all fed. Let me find my own way. In Japanese culture, in Zen, they have examples of people who are truly alive, those who are in the process of arriving at the real, true self. They have a scale of one to 10..."
"Oh yes?" asks Conor, with a mean little interrogative twist, "And where are you now?"
"I don't know where I am. I'd need a Zen master to tell me that."
"On this scale, where are you?"
"Well, to be brutally honest, I'd say I was on the cusp between four and five..."
"I wouldn't agree with that."
"Well, you're not actually a master, so you wouldn't know."
"No," Conor agrees, "but it makes me think this veil of humility, this 'look at me I'm a humble social functionary' stance is phoney, because what you're doing is probably essentially more fascist than anything anyone else is doing, because you know what you're doing."

And Dylan, unfazed as the kid who said the emperor had no clothes on, remonstrates undefensively, "I only said between four and five. Give me time. One day I'll do a proper show. All the shows I've ever done have been aiming towards the same thing. The laughter is just a prop and I admit I lean on it. I'm perfectly aware of that. But one day I will be able to go up on a stage and sit there for two hours and people will watch and understand what I'm doing..."
"Well, bloody good luck to you. I hope you'll achieve that some day."

Nothing, apart from a slight miscalculation, betrays any agitation in Dylan. "Every minute of those 75 will be absolutely real, as it happens, there. It sounds insane. I know it will work..."
Conor mocks on: "Oh, it sounds like career suicide, but I will do it because it's the right thing to do. But it's really much more stunningly manipulative than just trying to entertain people. Can you not see that levelled at you, that you are cynically manipulative..."
"Yeah, well, you might say that. That's typically western stuff..."
"I think it's gobbledegook..."
"... You can't begin to understand the complexity, the levels of civilisation, the compression, the years and years of culture and study..."
"... Just you, sitting on the stage doing nothing - that's the pinnacle of civilisation, is it?"
"... No, not the pinnacle. I'm just saying I'm part of it, not the thing itself. No, not that." And then Dylan says, brave soldier that he is, "It's only art."
"Oh!" cries Conor, "I seeeeee!" He is not being sarcastic.
"It's not like I'm saying, look at me, I'm the guy sitting on the stage," Dylan says. He stands up, presents his front. "Look at me. I'm a fool. I know I'm a fool."

If he didn't know that, he rattles on, he wouldn't get out of bed. But he does. He wakes up and thinks, well, I'm a fool, but I'm getting up, anyway. He incriminates himself. He congratulates himself on nothing. He hates his teeth, but he brushes them. Individually and back and front. He even flosses the buggers. Anger fuels him and he lets it out, bit by bit and eloquently. He doesn't palm it off, he owns it. And, as he acknowledges his own anger, he recognises Conor's. He calls it "singular". He is not going to ignore it. He will not pass the doily.

Very quietly, Conor selects four words. He says, "I am beside myself." This is neither a devastatingly bleak statement nor a comment on the companionable nature of Conor's id and ego. Among other things, it might be a bit of both. It resounds like a starting pistol and has the pair of them scampering away together, running for the hell of it, just to see where there is to arrive at.
"Accept you are getting away from yourself. That's the struggle. There are two Conors," Dylan says.
"Whoever is going to forgive me?" Conor's tone remains neutral.
"No one is going to forgive you except yourself."
"I'm consumed by my own self-absorption. But the self that is consumed is not myself. It's a perpetual struggle, like with mirrors..."
"... It is a mask looking into a mirror..."
"... a wrestling match..."
"... What's behind the mirror? What's behind the mask?"
"The mirror's behind the mask. Take away the mask and you've just got two mirrors..."
"Two mirrors looking at the mask.There's nothing in the mirror. Just refracted light."

NEXT PAGE
PREVIOUS PAGE