It's not easy trying to get Dylan Moran's utterances down in writing because, well, his points are measured, thoughtful and detailed. Really detailed. So pithy quotes are not really a thing with him. When he spoke to Dermot Whelan – sitting in for Oliver Callan – they touched on when the comedian first started going to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. At that time, he was just one of many young comedians vying for attention at the giant performing arts event.
"We were all furiously engaged with the whole thing. It was really, really exciting. It was like a lot of atoms banging around in a collider. It was brilliant. And of course, you find out you can survive for a month on just lager."
Dermot told Dylan that he remembers his great excitement the first time he went to the Cat Laughs Festival in Kilkenny – our own Edinburgh, as he calls it – because he was going to see Dylan Moran live for the first time. what was it, he asked, about his upbringing that made Dylan gravitate towards the surreal in his comedy? Dylan says he was watching the same stuff as everyone else in Ireland at the time. He read a lot as well and he loved the US comedian Richard Prior:
"He was massive then and everybody knew him. Stand-up was in its infancy as a form here, you know, you had Billy Connolly, Richard Prior, that was really all people knew. And I liked Billy Connolly as well, I thought he was very funny. You know, people who could hold the stage and tell a story and you felt like you knew them, you know, that was the thing, more than the, like, you’re saying surreal, but I think that’s kind of, you know, the surrealism movement is not actually that old and its roots are in things much, much older and Irish people have been doing that for a long, long time. Irish people have been surrealists for many, many hundreds of years."
Like a lot of Irish comedians of his generation, Dylan started off in the Comedy Cellar, upstairs in the International Bar in Dublin and he remembers it fondly:
"My main memory of it – and it’ll sound sentimental – but my main memory of it was actually how kind the other young comics were. You know, you’re obviously very nervous in that environment, you’re exposing yourself and you’re trying something out for the first time in front of your peers and you’re young and it really matters."
Dylan credits the comedians who started the Comedy Cellar with creating an outlet for young comics to get seen, something that hadn’t existed in Dublin before then.
Dermot brought up the phrase "dolla ho," which Dylan has been using and asked the Meathman to explain what it means and why he’s been using it so much – it's also the name of his new stand-up show, which he’s bringing to Ireland in October. It’s something that he’s heard in hip hop, and it makes him smile:
"Dolla ho is an Americanism, I mean, you know, you’ll hear it in rap songs or something, I guess, but to me, I guess, the phrase made me smile and laugh just because it’s so abbreviated, it’s that everyone wants everything to be quicker, it says a lot, the two little words."
Does that tell us what it means? Not too sure about that. But the phrase stuck in his head, he says, because he was looking around at everyone with their heads stuck in their devices at a time when the news is uniformly awful – "pioneering new forms of misery," as Dylan put it – and it struck him that people are living very small lives when they don’t have to:
"It’s a complete con. We’ve conned ourselves. I’m not even blaming the tech companies or governments or anybody. I’m blaming us. I think we’ve done the most extraordinary switcheroo on ourselves and swapped out a really, really roomy way of looking at the universe and everything for an incredibly constrained, frightened, small, petty viewpoint."
Does this mean, Dermot wants to know, that comedy if more important than ever? Only if it’s the real deal, says Dylan. If it’s someone just trying to get a hysterical laugh from a room full of scared people, then it’s not worthwhile.
"That’s really boring. It’s the laughter of denial. You know, you want a roomful of people who are shaking because you’ve actually hit it because you’ve described what life feels like right now."
And that, presumably, is what you’ll get if you’re in the audience for Dylan’s Dolla Ho tour, which is touring around Ireland for 25 September. Details from dylanmoran.com. You can hear Dermot’s full conversation with Dylan by tapping or clicking above.