THIS week has been all about Dylan, but it was another one, Moran not Bob, who was the wizard with the words in York, the master of social commentary, domestic detail and political putdown like the venerable Mr Zimmerman.
The bumbling ranting Irish charm hasn’t changed since your reviewer last saw Moran in his Like, Totally? show in June 2006 – since when he has visited York twice with What It Is in 2008 and 2009 – but as the trademark grumpiness settles around the middle-age spread, the searing intelligence and Wildean wit has hit a new peak.
He is even his own support act, accompanying his performance with a series of sketchy Moran cartoons on the screen behind him.
Comedians can irritate by being parochial, unduly coarse, too young, too in your face, too now, too T-shirt and jeans, but Moran is everything you could want in a stand-up.
He’s an Irishman living in Scotland, making him double the outsider but still he has the inside track; he has the ear for a phrase of a novelist, a poet and a songwriter rolled into one; and he has an opinion on absolutely everything that has you agreeing him with him pretty much all the time, no matter your religious, culinary, sexual or political persuasion.
On the nonchalant surface he comes across as woolly as his still boyish hair, but when it counts he has an economy of words and imagery that nails his target. David Cameron’s earnest hand movements when discussing the big society will never be the same again after Moran’s description of his carrying an invisible “cube of air”.
Ridicule is his political tool, swatting Cameron, Ed Miliband (coughing up a cat, not just a fur ball), the Lib Dems and Green Party alike.
Part of his skill is in never labouring a point; he is full of lethal jabs and dazzling combinations of punchy putdowns and his victims fall quickly.
A little sentimentality, but self-deprecation too, slips into his family stories of his wife always organising the dinner parties and inviting people he has never met and his child’s talking toy being the only one in the house to converse with him on fall-out days.
The second half is the more free-roaming and erratic but still the perceptive comments piled up, on matters weighty or light, absurd or alarming, be it American and British foreign policy, heavy metal, dishy Professor Bran Cox or his love of cheese. Glass of wine and chocolate in hand, he is utterly relaxed yet worked up, his eloquent scoffing and misanthropic observations the most wonderfully spun from Ireland since the peerless Dave Allen.
• If you missed his York gig, Dylan Moran has Yorkshire shows to come at Leeds Grand Theatre on June 26 and Sheffield City Hall on July 1 and 2. Box office: Leeds, 0844 842706; Sheffield, 01142 789789.
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