Writing for a laugh

Writing for a laugh
(Filed: 11/07/1998)

Dylan Moran makes no great claims for comedy - it's not high art, he says, it's just about jokes. The award-winning stand-up talks to Stephen Pile about writing his first sitcom

SIX years ago Dylan Moran was absolutely nowhere. He had left school at 16 without many qualifications and spent the next four jobless years drinking a lot and writing very bad poetry. 'If hormones could talk they would sound like my poetry. It was like verbal anthrax. It could kill at 50 feet.'

Today, at the age of 26, he is an award-winning comedian who had a much praised straight acting debut and has written his first sitcom, entitled Black Books, which is being staged at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, West London, this week as part of Channel 4's annual sitcom festival. He is also writing a novel and was described by the Guardian as 'perhaps the finest writer among stand-ups'. So how did it happen?

Meeting him to find out was not easy. First, he went to Ireland and disappeared into a time-free zone and then, when he returned, it transpired that he was not on the phone at his London address.

Eventually our man arrived at the Riverside's café in denims and a T-shirt. We broke the ice discussing the inspiration for his sitcom about Bernard Black, a suicidal bookseller. As a self-confessed idler, Moran spends hours loafing in second-hand bookshops and here he spotted a recurrent comic situation. 'You get mad, lonely people desperate for conversation gabbling away in a book-lined room to a bookseller behind a desk who doesn't want to talk and can't tell them to **** off.'

The situation lingered, and crazed characters formed in his imagination, until one day his agent said, 'Why don't you write something for telly?' His account of it is typically downbeat. 'I said, 'Oh all right.' '

Moran is completely dismissive of his own success. 'I don't understand why there is any fuss whatsoever about what I am up to. I'm just horsing around.'

He won several prizes for his stand-up work, including the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival, but it means nothing to him ('Prizes are of absolutely no value'). Simon Nye wanted him to be in the American version of Men Behaving Badly, but he declined the offer. ('That would have been a journeyman move. It's important not to do things for mercenary reasons.') He wrote a humorous column in the Irish Times that was much admired, but he thought it was 'a lot of twaddle'.

Friends say that in his first straight acting role (as Ian in Nye's comedy-drama series How Do You Want Me?) he was just being himself, but this is not quite true. Ian moved to his wife's country village, where he brought a witty, urban eye to its relentless Pony Club parochiality. In that role, Moran was wonderfully hapless. In the flesh he can also be very funny and he can look at you with the same languidly bored eyes, but he seems much angrier with the world.

He was not happy at school in Ireland. 'I was a noisy, disruptive, bored child with two moods: either not talking to anyone or disrupting everybody else.'

What transformed his life was a visit to The Cavern comedy club in Dublin. While watching Ardal O'Hanlon he suddenly found his vocation. He was 20. 'I thought, 'I fancy that.' I just got up and did five minutes. It was like the stand-up I do now. It did not have a beginning or an end. I start in the middle and end in the middle.' He was asked back the next week.

Before long he left for 'the shark tank' of London, a city he loathes. 'London is a constant war. There was always some bugger ringing me up telling me that I'm late for some meeting with some drone talking to me in television language about some project that could be really exciting. It's a dreadful, cut-throat industry that's full of shysters. It's so trivial, it's a miracle that any work of any value happens.'

He has now moved back to Dublin, for the peace. He describes his typical day there as 'shameful', which conjures up a vision of late nights, lost afternoons and the possibility of alcohol. 'I don't think work should become like work. I think that's fair enough.'

Fluent yet unrevealing, charming yet potentially truculent, he will not talk about his family or his novel, or comedy in general. 'Talking about humour is like trying to vivisect a fairy or engrave on a soap bubble. A lot of it is born out of a kind of impatience with the pace of things. It's like someone says, 'It's nice weather today', and the first person replies, 'Yes, it's nice weather and it was nice the day before and the day before that'. The second person says, 'Yes it is nice, but I would much prefer it if you were dead.' '

He rates sitcom merely on a par with a New Yorker magazine cartoon or a catchy song. 'No higher. It's just an opportunity to make a load of jokes. I don't give a s*** about anything, except hoping it's funny.'

For him, comedy is, surprisingly, a lesser form. In sitcom and stand-up you are amusing yourself, he argues. 'But that's all you are doing. What is the value of these forms? As time goes by you want to have a crack at the more challenging ones.' His plan is to remain his own man and eventually to write a stage play that aims for more than just laughs.

'There is pressure on you from every corner to please, and that leads to mediocrity. You have to not care to get anywhere,' he says. As he leaves to watch the rehearsals, he gets to the heart of the problem, 'The thing about the modern world is that it's far too easy to communicate. There'll be a video screen in the lavatory bowl next. It's too easy to talk, and too easy to contact people.' This is where we came in.

21 February 1998: (archive report)