DYLAN MORAN will play his first shows in Galway in four years when he headlines this October’s Galway Comedy Festival 2022. With the Tuesday night sold out, Friday and Saturday performances have been added to meet the public demand.
Given all that has gone on in the world since he was last in Galway, there are no shortage of subjects for the Meath man to cast his brilliant, cynical, eye over.
"The world is particularly fruity right now," Dylan has said, “so it's a very good time to be out. It just feels good for the audience, and for me as a performer, to be doing it. I think we all need it – it's doing us all good."
We Got This
Dylan has plenty to get off his chest - about life, about comedy, about the world. The result is his new show, We Got This, which the BAFTA and Perrier award winner will perform at #GCF22.
“I’ve got lots to say,” Dylan told oxinabox.co.uk “It’s still coming together though. I mean, I’ve got masses and masses of material…it’s just a river of stuff.”
That stuff promises to be a joyously furious romp through the frustration and folly of modern day life. In the show, Dylan will examine the dynamics of families, and how a person lives within it - sometimes as an individual, at other times an equal, and at different times, just a part of a larger whole.
He will ask, how can it be that you have spent a whole ten minutes staring at a banana? Why do you always do stuff like that? Why do you never do the other really great things where it’s much, much better - and afterwards you don’t want to saw off your own face and post it back to yourself with not quite enough stamps?
We Got This will also see Dylan teach Galway audiences how to make breakfast while not even knowing they are out of bed; diagnose the mirror; reason with mice; boil yoghurt blindfolded; enjoy the fruits of hurtling cognitive decline and the neighbour’s sprawling ghastliness.
These times have not been easy, but rather than just bemoan the absurdity, Dylan’s comedy will provide solidarity. as The Guardian said, his comedy essentially “comes to represent the struggles we all wage for meaning and connection”.
‘The greatest’
Dylan Moran was born in Navan, Co Meath, the same town which has also produced Pierce Brosnan, Tommy Tiernan, and Hector Ó hEochagáin, among others. He began his comedy career in the early 1990s and became the second youngest person to win the Perrier Comedy Award, aged just 24, at the 1996 Edinburgh Festival.
His fame increased after appearing in Black Books, the Channel 4 comedy series which ran from 2000 to 2004, in which he played the professionally nonplussed Bernard, winning two BAFTA awards.
His stand-up comedy has been among the very best to come out of Ireland in the past 25 years and he has won enormous acclaim abroad. The Evening Standard declared him “spellbinding”, while The Daily Telegraph said the “world suddenly seems a better place” for having someone like Dylan in it. Indeed, French newspaper Le Monde went as far as to call him, “the greatest comedian, living or dead”.
Dylan has returned to TV screens with his new comedy-drama Stuck on BBC2, playing Dan, an advertising executive who has just been fired and who is listless and adrift in his marriage.
He will also be on the forthcoming Netflix series, The Witcher: Blood Origin, playing the wonderfully named Uthrok One-Nut, alongside Michelle Yeoh and Lenny Henry.
Touring though, is Dylan’s focus right now, and he is very much looking forward to stepping onto stages again.
"A tour is like one huge walk across a ballroom where you stop and chat to various individuals along the way,” he told The Irish News. "A lot of it depends on how interested you are in other people. The more interested you can be in the world around you, the more interesting the world is going to be – and not just for you. Because, if you're an interested party in it, you're going to be more interesting to talk to.”
Dylan Moran performs We Got This at Leisureland, Salthill, on Friday October 28 and Saturday 29. The Tuesday October 25 show is sold out. Tickets are on sale via www.galwaycomedyfestival.ie
