Most standups ease you in to their gigs gently. Tonight, Dylan Moran repeats a trick patented in his 2011 show Yeah, Yeah [http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/jun/15/dylan-moran-review], swapping preamble for a hits-you-between-the-eyes state-of-the-nation clarion call. “It’s a very busy time for everybody,” he begins. “Which crisis are you in?” There follows an urgent exhortation concerning the immigrant threat (they’re coming here to make musical instruments out of our marmalade, apparently), the rampant nationalism of the Scots and the forlorn inadequacy of our politics – not least all those Tories with “their squeaky, paddling-pool faces”.
It’s a brilliantly slippery address, playfully scrambling where Moran’s own loyalties lie as he depicts a nation supremely ill-at-ease with itself – and in need, perhaps, of a wine-bibbing Irish prophet. Certainly, the soothsaying air is maintained throughout Off the Hook, a top-drawer standup set that, even when its concerns are domestic, views human behaviour through a very long lens.
A kaleidoscopic one, too, through which the boundaries that divide real life from Moran’s imagination are forever being reconfigured. His impressionistic take on midlife man’s travails fires very effectively here, as he recounts his battle of the bulge, parenting dilemmas and the sense of being sidelined from life and subjected to hipster scorn when you’re 43, poorly dressed and resembling nothing more than a “jelly baby with money”.
This isn’t novel standup territory, and in the past Moran hasn’t always distinguished himself from the grumpy-old-man herd. But tonight, the quality control is strict. Moran finds new angles on familiar subjects, and brings them to memorable life – through the idiosyncracy of the images he puts in your head (Strictly Come Dancing reimagined as cocktail sausages stuffed into Christmas decorations and rattled on a tray), and through his highly quotable brand of crackpot lyricism. Then there’s his deliciously beady manner, requiring us to come to him for the joke – and indeed to work out whether he’s joking at all.
At its best, his comedy takes on an existential dimension, as tubby, nicotine-starved, emasculated Moran comes to represent the struggles we all wage for meaning and connection. Middle age is seen mainly in terms of its burgeoning fear of death. Life is reduced to only four stages: Child, Failure, Old and Dead. “You’re just a little pink thing, wriggling on a rock, stabbed by the sunlight,” he says, cheerfully. Tonight, he makes this particular corner of that rock a very enjoyable place to wriggle.
• At Brighton Dome on Thursday 2 April. Box office: 01273 709709. Venue: Brighton Dome. Then touring.
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