Dylan Moran: Like Totally… Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 2006
Dylan Moran: Yeah, Yeah… Hammersmith Apollo, London, 2011
Best of The Fest: Assembly Hall on the Mound, Edinburgh, 2013
Dylan Moran: Dr Cosmos: The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh, 2018
Dylan Moran and Friends: The Clapham Grand, Clapham, London, 2023
I first saw Irish comedian Dylan Moran play the enormous Usher Hall at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006. His show Like Totally… featured bleak observations including American Starbucks-led empire building to how children make you realise how little you know. Dylan seemed natural and confident as though the material has been spoken for the first time considering the size of the venue.
I didn’t see him live again until 2011 for his show Yeah, Yeah… at the Hammersmith Apollo in London. I hadn’t planned to go and bought a ticket on the off-chance. However, again I was pleasantly surprised as Dylan well-known, cluttered charm shone through on stage. This time, subjects involving religion, relationships and ageing combined with the general absurdities of life were delivered and proved very funny with the packed audience.
In 2013, he performed as the headline act for the Best of the Fest showcase at the Edinburgh Fringe. I was very tired after a long day watching other shows; but he still managed to make me continuously laugh with his curmudgeonly views on existence. Moran is an inspired comedian who is always entertaining, extremely funny and is one of the finest comedians of his generation.
I saw Moran’s new show Dr Cosmos at the Edinburgh Fringe in August 2018. The show featured musings on love, politics, misery and the everyday absurdities of life but was delivered with such fair and confidence that the audience could not fail to enjoy the performance. Moran likened the modern disheartening state of the world to his recollections of growing up in Ireland in the seventies. He admitted that he no longer watched the news or had time to go to trendy new restaurants with one-word names. Instead, his time was taken up with being a middle-aged father of teenagers who goes to dinner parties and thinks about the realities of his own demise. All morose material, but his muddled, chaotic delivery was sharp, observational, and relentlessly funny which made for an extremely entertaining hour of comedy.
Headlining Dylan Moran and Friends at the Clapham Grand in June 2023, he appeared on stag with a piano which he had played in lockdown. He interspersed playing the piano with wonderful shambolic routines attempting to get the nation back to a happy place and for his time on stage, greatly succeeding.