Bye bye Bernard
From The Times
April 22, 2006
Bye bye Bernard
The world-weary drunk of Black Books is no more. Dylan Moran wants to care and share, he tells Dominic Maxwell
It is hard not to feel a bit like Bill Bailey when you talk to Dylan Moran. Which is not to say that the 34-year-old Irishman is the same dyspeptic dipsomaniac who merrily battered Bailey’s character Manny in three seasons of Black Books. On the contrary: he is quietly charming, surprisingly sober- minded, and reassuringly slow to violence. But what he shares with the dreadful Bernard Black — and what makes him, at his best, such a thrilling stand-up — is his impatience with slack thinking. Talk ideas and he is with you all the way. Play the showbiz inquisitor — will there be any more Black Books? (no) What was it like going on the David Letterman show? (nothing special) — and he won’t butter your toast. Even when he is watching comedy, he wants things to be kept in focus. “I have limited time for wiggy, wiggly, jazzy extemporising,” he says with soft-spoken insistence. “I have limited time unless I know this person’s really, really good at it. I’d much rather listen to Jackie Mason doing what he knows back to front, upside down, from every possible angle. Because I know he knows more about it than I do. I don’t want to watch somebody fail. I don’t want to watch somebody ‘tackle’ something they’re not sure of, or ‘ explore’ an issue with an audience. You want to feel that the person you’re watching is ahead of you. And that’s not easy.”
The problem of assembling a fully operational stand-up show is something that Moran — who pronounces his name to rhyme with “sporran” — is all too keenly aware of. His last live show, Monster II, was a masterclass of comic charisma: swinging from topic to topic in a manner seemingly spontaneous but actually tightly organised, sniping at everything from hooded youth to religious believers (“people talking to you, at length, about their imaginary friend”).
Now, though, he has a new show. Or he will once he gets on stage and finds out what it is. Not for him the low-key try-out gig: “If you do that then you’re questioning it in the first place, you’re trying it out on the cat.” So instead he is using this month’s tour of Australia and New Zealand as an extended warm-up? “Absolutely,” he says. “It’s my lab for the month. ‘Hello, bush people who I have never met and will never see again, thank you for coming, let’s work this thing out!’ ” He won’t be drawn on how much his act has changed since he was last Down Under ten years ago, the year he won the Perrier Award — “There’s a level of self-consciousness that’s useful and there’s a level that’s totally corrosive.” But he admits that, for all that he tuts at other acts’ meanderings, he is happy to let his own shows attain coherence as he tours them. And be warned, comedy consumers of Australasia, this takes a bit of time.
What he will not do, he insists, is create laughs by amping up a pissed-off persona. “That really would be boring to me,” he says firmly. “That would be an act. That would be shtick. And that’s dull. I would much rather people felt it was like a good talk at the kitchen table at one in the morning. One of the better ones of those that you’ve had in your life. Where you walk out with the illusion that you said half of those things yourself.”
Moran talks about his craft with the precision that a Jesuit might use to talk about the Holy Ghost. On stage, he gleans laughs from everything. Here, analysing what he does, he would no more try to be funny than the Jesuit would try to appear holy. A comic’s relationship with his audience, he says, sucking on a Marlboro Light, “is all about faith”. But his own Catholic education — St Patrick’s in Navan, where the fellow Perrier winner Tommy Tiernan was also a pupil — was curtailed at the age of 16. He later described Navan as “a classic, middle-Ireland, draconian, theocratic, bigotridden hell-hole”.
His spirit of inquiry only got its full release four years later, in 1992, when he visited the Comedy Cellar in Dublin. He went along one night and liked what he saw. The next week he performed himself — and found his vocation. “It was very short,” he says, “I was very nervous. But I did get an instant hit. A very big hit. It was absolutely narcotic. It was a sensory experience.”
As with all narcotics, it gets harder to get the same hit again. In the years that followed, his onstage stance of drunken disdain wasn’t always feigned. Did the Perrier change things? He looks weary. “It probably helped my career. It was nothing much to do with me.” There were times, post-Perrier, where he performed worse for wear. “I’ve done crap shows, yeah,” he admits. “Years ago now. There were a couple of years where I did specialise in inconsistency.”
Was it a question of “where do I go now?” “At the time it was more a question of ‘where’s the stage, am I in the right room?’ It was not about some career trajectory. I was probably just bored.” Does he get easily bored? “No. Not now. Boredom is a failure of the imagination most of the time.”
Since that time Moran has settled down in Edinburgh with his Scottish wife, Elaine, and their two children. He has also become a famous face, thanks to his starring role in Simon Nye’s townie-moves-to-the-country sitcom How Do You Want Me?, then roles in films such as The Actors and Shaun of the Dead. But Black Books, the sitcom he co-created (with Graham Linehan) and starred in, remains what he is best known for.
Do people still expect him to be Bernard? A sigh. “Yeah. To a degree. People react like that to their televisions.” But while he reveals his vulnerable side in his stand-up — “I’m a liberal, I’m scared of everybody” — it remains tempting to see the real Moran as the romantic you find if you scratch the cynical Bernard. Tempting, but wrongheaded . . . “I have very little time for either view, really. If somebody could say of themselves, ‘I’m a cynic’ or ‘I’m a romantic’, you’d begin to worry about them, wouldn’t you? You’d certainly be less interested in what they said next.” But there was something curdled about Bernard, wasn’t there? “Oh yeah, he was a sociopath.”
He and Elaine might write a film together — other than that, he says, he wouldn’t co-write again. “You want to be solely responsible, so it’s up to you if it flies or dies.” He has been working on a comic novel and will do another TV comedy sometime, he says. “I’ve got a lot of stuff written. But I don’t think about it that much, the work will happen or it won’t.”
In the meantime, there’s a show to put on — one that, by the time it opens over here on May 3, will have grown in reach and rigour in its three weeks Down Under. What does he find funny these days? “The mechanical, that’s what I find funny. The machine, the human machine. Repetition. Denial. Wilful stupidity. Compulsion. All very old stuff. Everything that’s not being filtered through reason, everything that’s not properly volitional. That’s what’s funny. That’s why you get endless jokes about poos and wees. And sex. And death. Anything that’s out of your control is funny.”
Can he still get passionate about dissecting these things on stage? “It’s still a very exciting phenomenon,” he says. “It’s incredibly Haight-Ashbury to say it, but it’s about sharing, it’s that shared excitement about being able to remark on this or that perception or phenomenon, to say That Happens, We Do That. Really, it’s just a very ill-disciplined 90 minutes of anthropology.”
Like, Totally . . . Dylan Moran opens on May 3 at the Buxton Opera House (0845 1272190), then tours to June 28 (www.mickperrin.com)
April 22, 2006
Bye bye Bernard
The world-weary drunk of Black Books is no more. Dylan Moran wants to care and share, he tells Dominic Maxwell
It is hard not to feel a bit like Bill Bailey when you talk to Dylan Moran. Which is not to say that the 34-year-old Irishman is the same dyspeptic dipsomaniac who merrily battered Bailey’s character Manny in three seasons of Black Books. On the contrary: he is quietly charming, surprisingly sober- minded, and reassuringly slow to violence. But what he shares with the dreadful Bernard Black — and what makes him, at his best, such a thrilling stand-up — is his impatience with slack thinking. Talk ideas and he is with you all the way. Play the showbiz inquisitor — will there be any more Black Books? (no) What was it like going on the David Letterman show? (nothing special) — and he won’t butter your toast. Even when he is watching comedy, he wants things to be kept in focus. “I have limited time for wiggy, wiggly, jazzy extemporising,” he says with soft-spoken insistence. “I have limited time unless I know this person’s really, really good at it. I’d much rather listen to Jackie Mason doing what he knows back to front, upside down, from every possible angle. Because I know he knows more about it than I do. I don’t want to watch somebody fail. I don’t want to watch somebody ‘tackle’ something they’re not sure of, or ‘ explore’ an issue with an audience. You want to feel that the person you’re watching is ahead of you. And that’s not easy.”
The problem of assembling a fully operational stand-up show is something that Moran — who pronounces his name to rhyme with “sporran” — is all too keenly aware of. His last live show, Monster II, was a masterclass of comic charisma: swinging from topic to topic in a manner seemingly spontaneous but actually tightly organised, sniping at everything from hooded youth to religious believers (“people talking to you, at length, about their imaginary friend”).
Now, though, he has a new show. Or he will once he gets on stage and finds out what it is. Not for him the low-key try-out gig: “If you do that then you’re questioning it in the first place, you’re trying it out on the cat.” So instead he is using this month’s tour of Australia and New Zealand as an extended warm-up? “Absolutely,” he says. “It’s my lab for the month. ‘Hello, bush people who I have never met and will never see again, thank you for coming, let’s work this thing out!’ ” He won’t be drawn on how much his act has changed since he was last Down Under ten years ago, the year he won the Perrier Award — “There’s a level of self-consciousness that’s useful and there’s a level that’s totally corrosive.” But he admits that, for all that he tuts at other acts’ meanderings, he is happy to let his own shows attain coherence as he tours them. And be warned, comedy consumers of Australasia, this takes a bit of time.
What he will not do, he insists, is create laughs by amping up a pissed-off persona. “That really would be boring to me,” he says firmly. “That would be an act. That would be shtick. And that’s dull. I would much rather people felt it was like a good talk at the kitchen table at one in the morning. One of the better ones of those that you’ve had in your life. Where you walk out with the illusion that you said half of those things yourself.”
Moran talks about his craft with the precision that a Jesuit might use to talk about the Holy Ghost. On stage, he gleans laughs from everything. Here, analysing what he does, he would no more try to be funny than the Jesuit would try to appear holy. A comic’s relationship with his audience, he says, sucking on a Marlboro Light, “is all about faith”. But his own Catholic education — St Patrick’s in Navan, where the fellow Perrier winner Tommy Tiernan was also a pupil — was curtailed at the age of 16. He later described Navan as “a classic, middle-Ireland, draconian, theocratic, bigotridden hell-hole”.
His spirit of inquiry only got its full release four years later, in 1992, when he visited the Comedy Cellar in Dublin. He went along one night and liked what he saw. The next week he performed himself — and found his vocation. “It was very short,” he says, “I was very nervous. But I did get an instant hit. A very big hit. It was absolutely narcotic. It was a sensory experience.”
As with all narcotics, it gets harder to get the same hit again. In the years that followed, his onstage stance of drunken disdain wasn’t always feigned. Did the Perrier change things? He looks weary. “It probably helped my career. It was nothing much to do with me.” There were times, post-Perrier, where he performed worse for wear. “I’ve done crap shows, yeah,” he admits. “Years ago now. There were a couple of years where I did specialise in inconsistency.”
Was it a question of “where do I go now?” “At the time it was more a question of ‘where’s the stage, am I in the right room?’ It was not about some career trajectory. I was probably just bored.” Does he get easily bored? “No. Not now. Boredom is a failure of the imagination most of the time.”
Since that time Moran has settled down in Edinburgh with his Scottish wife, Elaine, and their two children. He has also become a famous face, thanks to his starring role in Simon Nye’s townie-moves-to-the-country sitcom How Do You Want Me?, then roles in films such as The Actors and Shaun of the Dead. But Black Books, the sitcom he co-created (with Graham Linehan) and starred in, remains what he is best known for.
Do people still expect him to be Bernard? A sigh. “Yeah. To a degree. People react like that to their televisions.” But while he reveals his vulnerable side in his stand-up — “I’m a liberal, I’m scared of everybody” — it remains tempting to see the real Moran as the romantic you find if you scratch the cynical Bernard. Tempting, but wrongheaded . . . “I have very little time for either view, really. If somebody could say of themselves, ‘I’m a cynic’ or ‘I’m a romantic’, you’d begin to worry about them, wouldn’t you? You’d certainly be less interested in what they said next.” But there was something curdled about Bernard, wasn’t there? “Oh yeah, he was a sociopath.”
He and Elaine might write a film together — other than that, he says, he wouldn’t co-write again. “You want to be solely responsible, so it’s up to you if it flies or dies.” He has been working on a comic novel and will do another TV comedy sometime, he says. “I’ve got a lot of stuff written. But I don’t think about it that much, the work will happen or it won’t.”
In the meantime, there’s a show to put on — one that, by the time it opens over here on May 3, will have grown in reach and rigour in its three weeks Down Under. What does he find funny these days? “The mechanical, that’s what I find funny. The machine, the human machine. Repetition. Denial. Wilful stupidity. Compulsion. All very old stuff. Everything that’s not being filtered through reason, everything that’s not properly volitional. That’s what’s funny. That’s why you get endless jokes about poos and wees. And sex. And death. Anything that’s out of your control is funny.”
Can he still get passionate about dissecting these things on stage? “It’s still a very exciting phenomenon,” he says. “It’s incredibly Haight-Ashbury to say it, but it’s about sharing, it’s that shared excitement about being able to remark on this or that perception or phenomenon, to say That Happens, We Do That. Really, it’s just a very ill-disciplined 90 minutes of anthropology.”
Like, Totally . . . Dylan Moran opens on May 3 at the Buxton Opera House (0845 1272190), then tours to June 28 (www.mickperrin.com)
