“I’m talkin’ about what it’s like to alive now. I’m talkin’ about what you talk about around your kitchen table with people who are closest to you. I’m talking about what keeps you awake at night,” says Dylan Moran. “I’m talking about things that happened half an hour ago and things that happened 50,000 years ago. It’s all happening in the same theatre. Whatever’s wrong with you, it might not cure you, but it’ll help you forget about it.”
Moran visits the Rebecca Cohn on June 5 as part of his Grumbling Mustard Tour, which has been wandering the globe since last year. Moran himself has been wandering the globe for a quarter-century as a professional comedian. “It feels like a lot longer. I’ve been around awhile,” he says from his home in Edinburgh. “It’s amazing to me that I’ve been around this long, it’s extraordinary.”
He’s not a set-up/punchline-style comic; Moran tells observational stories and riffs on life in his amiable Irish cadence. “Jokes were never my big thing, I was never very good at jokes,” he says. “The only good thing to be said about jokes as far as I’m concerned is with any luck they’re short. I’m all for things being short. I’d rather have a bunch of short things than a couple of long things. I figure your chances of not being bored out of your mind have gotta be better, right?”
When not on the road—this Canadian tour wraps up June 21; he’ll begin a massive European jaunt in September that will close out his year—Moran appears in films (Shaun of the Dead, Run Fatboy Run) and television (he starred in the series Black Books and appeared in last year’s Uncles). “I like mixing it up. I do a few things. I’m happy about that. I do what I can do,” he says. “There’s nothing that I can do that I’m keeping back. I’m not secretly a great mandolin player.”