Dr Cosmos will see you now or will he? Dylan Moran is Zooming from his Edinburgh home before his show of that name streams this weekend. Can I ask you to move an inch the other way? he asks. I adjust in my seat, but hes still not happy. My photo is right on your face, and I dont know how to take it off-screen. For five minutes he fusses with his camera, obscuring his face, so I find myself interrogating an indistinct patch of grey. Im so ignorant of tech, he grumbles.
This wont surprise followers of the Irish comedians career, which includes his role as the grouchy bookshop owner Bernard in the sitcom Black Books. In his standup he has long traded in curmudgeonliness, albeit elevated by philosophical insight and lyricism. The blend was never more potent than in Dr Cosmos, which premiered at Edinburgh three years ago. Like all Morans stage work since he won the career-making Perrier award, in 1996, it had no theme, give or take Morans promise to offer all the answers to the problem of life. But it had potency, and big laughs, as a newly teetotal Moran addressed mental health, midlife and Brexit, and considered modernity in light of the simpler world in which he grew up.
If youre happy with what youre doing, you should be able to talk about it in childlike terms with anybody
The streamed version, filmed in 2019 in Brisbane, retains for posterity a show that took the temperature of a world at a moment of crisis little knowing a bigger crisis lurked around the corner. Its pre-Covid says Moran, then realises: Thats a selling point: I dont mention the virus! At all! If youre getting the impression of a man not skilled in the art of salesmanship, youre correct. When I ask him what the thinking is behind the digital release, Moran replies laconically: Theres no thinking. Or, if there is, its nothing to do with me: Im not the thinking department.
Not true: Morans standup is marked by deeper thinking than most, as is todays conversation, although the 49-year-old is loath to expound too much on the art of his standup. I get nervous when people are glorying in the jargon of their profession. That to me points towards an insecurity. If youre happy with what youre doing, you should be able to talk about it in childlike terms with anybody. He laughs off the idea that he has any objectives when constructing a show, other than to connect, he says. And to illumine what it might be like to be alive. He pauses. Thats enough to be getting on with.
Neither is there any great method to the phrase-making that distinguishes his standup. You go through phases where you and language are in love with one another, he says. You can pick each other up and know exactly how to treat each other, you know? And theres other days where the umbrellas wet and upside down and you cant find your shoes and have toothache, and you just cannot articulate what it is like. But, even then, words are all weve got, as Beckett says.
Dylan Moran: You go through phases where you and language are in love with one another. Photograph: Bryan Thomas/New York Times
He spares few of them on my questions about the censorious atmosphere around modern comedy. This is a great time to be doing comedy, he says, because theres a lot of social tension around. Everybodys getting on each others tits. Were still in that post-2016 moment, he says, where its like watching somebody pull a Snickers bar apart very slowly. There are all these old ties, these skeins of connection, some breaking and some of them holding as we reset. Theres a massive realignment happening, a sense of This is enough. This wont do any more.
But the social tension does not affect how he creates his comedy. I dont give a f**k about PC, Moran says. It wouldnt enter my mind. Im not going to take any directives from anybody. The decisions I take about what I say are mine. And Ive got it wrong, and offended people, and I regret it, and Ill probably do it again. But thats destiny; thats human existence. I dont think any movement or social awareness is going to change that. You have to accept that. If you dont, its just a sign of your immaturity.
Its an immaturity that flourishes, he argues, in an age of tech dependency which may explain why hes kept Covid-era Zoom comedy at an arms length. The trouble with watching standup online is that, marooned alone with your screen, he says, you never deliquesce; you never melt into everybody else any more. The incursion of all this tech into our lives has emphasised what humanness is, he says. And thats the stuff I go into the room to talk about as well. Next to these machines weve been obsessed by for the last 20 years, humanness is just incomparably more interesting. Guardian
Dr Cosmos streams on Dice.fm tomorrow and Sunday at 8pm