Comedy review: Dylan Moran - Drygate, Glasgow

“SO, THE news…”. Taking the opportunity to address the week’s horrific events in Paris, Dylan Moran acknowledged the sensation of assault one experiences with constant reports of global outrages, which to endure “you need a helmet!”

Dylan Moran recently wrote a US sitcom pilot about contemporary news media. Picture: Camilla Adams

Dylan Moran - Drygate, Glasgow

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Most comics would avoid mentioning such tragedies, others would proffer light and frothy stand-up as a sort of palliative.

But for the Edinburgh-based Irishman, who recently wrote a US sitcom pilot about contemporary news media, such events reinforce a grim, bemused worldview that begins by belligerently challenging God’s supposed greatness, then muses at length on the essential loneliness of existence.

Notwithstanding his countryman Michael Redmond’s droll mockery of religion and opener Kai Humphries’s instinctive cheerfulness, Moran’s uniquely Beckettian shades make him an odd booking for this shared, Friday night bill in a craft brewery-cum-cabaret venue. Admitting to not knowing where the hell he is, you believe him.

Unlike a more sincere doom-monger like Simon Amstell though, he playfully revels in such incongruity, decrying materialism as a sop distracting us from life’s emptiness, before admitting febrile addiction to inane computer games on his son’s phone.

Work-in-progress for his next big tour, which he’s been developing for several years, some routines, such as an unusually intimate masturbation reverie, don’t fully cohere yet.

Nevertheless, the existential howl of despair running through them is compelling. And the brusquely poetic way in which Moran characterises such trends as Netflix and Russell Brand is exquisite.

Seen on 09.01.15