Comedy review: Dylan Moran, Inverness

WHEN railing against one’s own mortality and flailing against the onward march of civilisation are your default settings, even a spluttering work in progress from a comic as gifted as Dylan Moran is richly entertaining.

Eden Court

****

This is early days for his next touring show and routines segued into one another with little logic or reason, beyond the Irishman’s existential dread of a void, the abyss, the horror that we are all truly alone.

His belligerence and hatred towards the young continues to intensify. But his lovely way with a simile, delivered as if it’s just occurred to him still stuns with its ludicrous beauty, even if the highlight of this evening was an atypically considered, scripted spoof of Fifty Shades of Grey. A subject oft-covered by middle-aged male comics, often with barely concealed bitterness at a cultural phenomenon not aimed at them, Moran nevertheless hijacks it for a surreal vignette of crazed eroticism, making it his own.

Even proclaiming his conservatism on the issue of gay marriage, prompting restless unease in the audience, he pulls the rug away so deftly and with a measure of incontestable common sense, that you feel he ought to be given last word on the matter.

Less sure-footed on the topic of Scottish nationalism and political oratory, there is at least the kernel of a fine routine there. And when he can tie it into America’s love affair with the gun and his general disquiet at rampant consumerism and consumption, this will surely be a hugely compelling show.