Boston Comedy Interview: Dylan Moran of The Fellas

This is Part Two of my interviews with The Fellas, Tommy Tiernan and Dylan Moran, who are at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre tonight and tomorrow (read part one here). Moran is a somewhat unknown quantity in America as a stand-up comedian, although like Tiernan and Ardal O’Hanlon (who will be on the other dates as The Fellas tours the country), he is immensely popular in the U.K.

American audiences would know him best from roles in Shaun of the Dead and Run, Fatboy, Run, and while he is good on the big screen, those roles don’t hint at the depth and ferocity of Moran’s wit. When we spoke last week, he was driving in Geneva, Switzerland, and looking forward to his first shows in Boston.

How often have you played the States outside of New York?

I’ve played New York twice and I did a run in L.A. for six weeks. So this is my first time going further afield than that. Where are you calling from?

From Boston.

Yeah, that’ll be my first time in Boston. We’re going to Chicago, Baltimore, Philadelphia. So my first time out of New York and out of L.A.

I take it your doing a full tour of the United States?

I don’t know that I’d call it a full tour, Nick. It’s kind of a look-see at the moment. It’s six cities, I think, in ten days.

Is there anything in particular you’re looking forward to about the tour?

Well, yeah. I’m talking to you now from Geneva at the moment, I’m on the road here in Europe. I’m going to Sweden in a couple of days and as I’m sure you’re aware, the whole world has its eyes on America, pretty much most of the time, and never more so than at the moment with everything that’s happening right now, and everything’s that’s gone on in America before the election and since then. So it’s a massive influence in the European’s life. And there’s this permanent fascination. And of course Boston, Ireland, the whole thing is full of [inaudible]. And places like New York, Baltimore, and Chicago, as well. I know a bit about Philadelphia. These places are references in everybody’s mind, especially if you’re an Irish person.

Everyone followed the election very closely here. We’re all talking about it and all watching to see what the administration is going to do, about the biggest bit everybody’s talking about, about Israel and Iran. And that constant flood about all the economic stuff going on, it’s kind of white noise at this stage.

Are you looking forward to talking to people here about that?

Yeah! Very much so. I’m very much looking forward to getting hold of the American take on things. And you want to come in with some local knowledge, as well, about what effects people in each individual city. So comic have to do their scramble around and do some research just like any, just like people like yourself, really.

Past finding out what suburb is considered the local shithole and –

Yeah, that’s all standard issue stuff. I mean, you do that, but it depends on how far you really want to go. The thing is, you’ve got to be careful because there’s a line you’ve got to tread between – you’ve got very limited time to canvass opinions and taxi drivers and whoever else you bump into during the day about what the state of the city is, you know? I certainly do try to get a collage of opinions while I’m there and find out what’s on people’s minds.

By and large, the purpose of that is not so much to tailor it for that place, again and again I find confirmed what’s on people’s minds is pretty similar wherever you go. People are worried about the core issues of having a job and security for their family and all the rest of it. The regional variations you get, that’s the interesting stuff. Those references – like you say, finding out what the tough part of town is or whatever – that all matters because you’ve got to, it’s a mark of respect, I think, when you’re talking to people to know a little bit about what effects them.

If a big part of the job is trying to tap into some sort of universal experience, I would think that’s sort of an education.

You’re right, the experience is universal, it’s just that the names change or the big manufacturing center’s name changes or whatever it is. But the dynamics are the same wherever you go.



Are you looking forward to hearing more American stupid people?

Well, you know, America has stupid people like the rest of the world. But what makes American stupidity different to other national stupidities, it is a geographical quirk in a way, because if you live in Europe you can be bright or stupid or whatever it is, but you’ve probably come into contact, you’ve probably moved around a little bit and been other places.

In America, because America is just such a huge crucible or world culture, everybody goes there. You can kind of travel without leaving the country, insofar as you can talk to somebody from anywhere in the world. But Europeans do remark on American incuriosity about actually getting their asses out of the country. You know? We’re all a bit, sometimes are scared when they hear statistics like only seven percent of Americans have passports or whatever, you know.

I think that there’s also a lot of misinformation out there, as far as what we’re told about other countries. You read the guides – we visited Ireland a few years ago and we were told never to talk politics at all.

Well, that’s nonsense, you know. That’s absolute nonsense.

That ended pretty quickly in the first bar we visited that people actually talked to us.

Exactly, yeah. [laughs] Even getting to American on a work visa is no walk in the park at the moment. Whoever you are, America is an incredible phenomenon culturally in the world. You’re inside it so you’re take on it is different, but as an outsider, you’re very much reminded when you approach America that it is the only remaining empire in the world. And it’s quite formidable. You are humbled before the eagle. That’s part of the process of getting there. You know, there’s an awful lot that you’re asked to buy into to any degree, whether you want to live there, or… I’m working there for ten days. And it’s an empire and it conducts itself as an empire, as they have done historically. You can feel quite small when you’re knocking at the door, and all you want to do is talk to people. It’s not anything more than that.

Do you think there are inherent topics for comedy in there or do you have to work for an angle?

The thing is it only really works for comedic purposes if people understand what you’re talking about. But if you haven’t been outside the city walls of the empire, you don’t know what it’s like to try and get back in, you know? There’s a lot of American citizens… E Pluribus Unum saying holds good insofar as there’s a lot of respect and loyalty. You sign up for a lot when you say, “I’m an American.” It seems to me, as an outsider.

Yeah, there’s some conflict as well if you hear people from another country taking issue with what you’re country is doing. IF you have the same issue, it’s hard to navigate that and not circle the wagons and not get defensive.

Yeah, I think it does. I think that’s no mean feat for an American to avoid coming across as defensive. I can absolutely understand that. I tell you one thing I noticed once Obama got in, is how much friendlier everybody is to Americans.

Yeah, we saw celebrations all around the world on our local news.

There’s a huge warmth that has always been there for Americans that was kind of put in the fridge for a while. That’s been defrosted and offered up again since he got in.

There are a number of people here who don’t believe that.

Well, from the European perspective, I think that is absolutely the case.

One of the arguments here on the liberal side is that the world respects us more now. Of course, that puts the conservatives on the defensive, saying that’s all nonsense.

Well, the Republican party, they’re tits up in a ditch at the moment, aren’t they? They don’t know what to do. And they know they’re in for eight years, barring a disaster, and I can’t think of any disasters that would surpass the Bush administration disasters. It would have to be a really bad response to an invasion from Mars to displace this guy. The world is in love with him. He is the modern politician, par excellence. He’s got no peers. He is out on his own in terms of performance, intelligence, command.

The other night I watched the Washington Correspondents Dinner, the national press dinner, and he was at least as good as the comics they put on. It was kind of a roast situation, isn’t it. To see him crack gags like the Cheney gag, which would have been widely reported, it’s something else.

I also watched one that was done for Bush a couple of years ago, and you see his rictus on his face, where he’s not sure if he should laugh in certain places. He looks like he’s got a harpoon in his back, for most of us.

I’m wondering if people here will be surprised that you know as much as you do about the inner workings of our politics. That was one thing that was driven home to us when we were visiting Ireland, that everybody sort of pays attention to us. Even in that bar, we told them we were from Massachusetts and the male half of the party we were talking to immediately went to, “Oh, gay people can get married there.”

Yeah, well, like I say, you guys at the stern of the world’s ship. So everybody onboard is looking to see where we’re going. Make no mistake about it. As America tilts one degree this way or that, there’s a huge wake that we’re all in. It’s serious power. There is no more serious kind of power on the planet. We’re informed because it effects us directly. You know, it’s not just kind of a spectator sport or for our own edification so we can sit around in cafe bars and finesse our arguments with one another, it’s because we’re directly effected.

How do you introduce yourself to an American audience that may not be familiar with you as a stand-up comedian?

I don’t know. I’m working on that. I’ll tell you, it’s a weird thing. I’m Switzerland now, I’m going to Sweden tomorrow, I came back from Australia last week. I played to sixty-eight and a half thousand people in Australia, so people know me in those parts. Every performer talks about breaking America. And that’s a piece of work, I’ll tell you. You’ve got to be prepared to put in the time. And you’re not going to do it in one sortie. You’re not going to do it in one raid. It just takes a lot of time. You’re such a big country, you accommodate so many different kinds of people. The diversity is total, every spectrum of humanity is represented. It’s work. I don’t know how it’s going to go, all we can do is try.

How often have you and Tommy Tiernan played together – was the British Comedy Invasion in New York the first time?

I don’t think crossed paths in New York. We were on at different times. Tommy and I know each other from way back when, went to the same school and so on. We’ve known each other a long time but we’ve very rarely gigged together. I guess we’ve done it once or twice.

What was the incentive for creating The Fellas?

That all came from a one-off gig we did in Liverpool, which has a lot of Irish associations. Ardal, who I don’t think is going to make Boston, is coming along, so there’s three of us. It was just kind of fun, to be honest, to be on the same bill together. There’s lots of people with Irish American connections, obviously, in Boston and Chicago and all these other places I’ve mentioned.

How important was Ardal O’Hanlon to your becoming a comedian?

The first time I went ot a comedy club, Ardal was on. He was in this trio. I went along, I wasn’t expecting very much, I thought it was some kind of student revue and I thought it would be quite rubbish. And everybody was incredibly polished and together and very smart and very funny, and I went on the next week and did five minutes and that was it for me. I haven’t done anything else since.

I read a review of [your stand-up show] Monster where they talked about questions from the audience being a big part of the show. Is that something you do frequently?

I don’t know what night they saw. It’s not particularly interactive. I think the show that I’m doing now, I only ask one or two questions of the audience. Sometimes I don’t do it at all. But I talk to people. Sometimes in the American school of doing comedy, in the very little that I’ve seen live, it’s very much something that’s glazed and sealed and ready to go at any time. I try and be there and talk to people. It’s not a set. It’s not the same every night.

Do you think the fact that you were in some films that were fairly popular in America will help you once you get here?

I don’t know, Nick. E’s hoping. That’s all I can say, really. Anything that gets people in is all right with me. That’s the thing, if you can get people in, half the work is done already. I’m really keen for people to come along. Apart from anything else, Tommy and Ardal are really, really good comics. It’s good stuff. People should come.

Boston Comedy Interview: Tommy Tiernanof The Fellas

There’s an obvious difference between American and Irish comedians, says Tommy Tiernan, one of Ireland’s best. He says his fellow Irish comics tend to meander a bit more, in contract to the more precise, well-rehearsed Americans who cross the Atlantic to play the U.K. So it would follow that a conversation with Tiernan would meander just as much, and be just as enjoyable as his comedy.

I spoke with Tiernan this week about his shows tonight and tomorrow with Dylan Moran (interview coming soon) at the Comedy Connection Wilbur Theatre, called “The Fellas.” The show is part of a tour that will also feature Ardal O’Hanlon on other stops. Tiernan, Moran, and O’Hanlon are legendary in the U.K., but not known quite as well here. Americans would know Tiernan from last year’s Comedy Central special, Something Mental, Moran from his roles in films like Shaun of the Dead, and O’Hanlon from BBC America or PBS repeats of Father Ted.

Neither Tiernan nor Moran have been to Boston before, so the shows are a rare treat for Boston comedy fans.

How frequently have you played the States?

I started going over probably about three or four years ago. And it was more of a curiosity thing than any notion of a career move or anything like that. And I had gone over and started doing the comedy clubs in New York on Monday and Tuesday nights. I did that for a while, and then I got involved with Arnold [Engelman], the promoter who’s doing these shows. So we did runs in theaters, and did one in New York. A few in New York actually, and one in LA. And then started doing a little in comedy clubs in Nebraska and Washington, Texas. San Francisco.

How was that experience?

It was great, actually. I loved doing the comedy clubs. I thought they were fantastic. There’s an element of solitude when you’re doing theaters, one-man shows. There’s more life in the comedy clubs than there is when you’re in one theater for six weeks in New York. There’s more sort of peripheral action in the comedy clubs. I really enjoyed that. And I found the range of crowds across America fascinating.

I did Pittsburgh, and I found that they were up for anything. Didn’t matter what you were talking about, as long as it was funny. There was no holds barred in terms of political correctness or any of that kind of stuff. And then I found when I went to the clubs in San Francisco, I found those more conservative than places that you might have thought were more blue collar states. I found it really interesting that there was a kind of conservatism to the liberals that was a surprise for me. I found when I played in front of predominantly black audiences that they loved all the material about families and sex and children and all that type of stuff, but they weren’t prepared to tolerate any material about religion. They just weren’t interested in that at all.

I played a club in Washington where the owner of the club came up to me and told me not to curse as much onstage.

Do you not find that in clubs in England?

Oh god, no. I think the idea of a comedy performance in a club or in a theater is that, while that performance is happening, all rules are there to be broken. That’s the nature of the beast, that you’re there to be irresponsible. You’re there to be reckless. That’s the whole point of it. It’s kind of a sacred act of divilment, is a word we have in Ireland. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously.

It’s not a term I’m familiar with. Don’t know if it’s slang or…

No it’s slang. It’s the opposite of urban slang, it’s rural slang. So yes, all those experiences were interesting to me, that there was so much diversity over there. And they were all very enjoyable.

Have you ever been to Boston?

I took a holiday on Cape Cod once. We stopped in Boston for a night or two and the only thing I did of note was stand outside a bar called “Tiernan’s.” That’s the only thing I ever did there. I never played there. But I’m aware of its comic history and the great comics who have come out of there.

Who are the ones you’re familiar with?

People like Steven Wright and Denis Leary. I know there were people who worked there – there’s a DVD I have called When Standup Stood Out and it’s kind of a biography of Boston as an area that encouraged wildness, I suppose, in a sense. Or a particular kind of clever comedy, I suppose is the phrase.

It was definitely a great scene in the 80s. There was a point where there was a boom here, I’ve heard there was a similar sort of thing that happened across the U.K. with comedy.

In Ireland, it was different. The boom in the U.K. happened, and there was never really much of a scene in Ireland. And Irish comics would go over to London to gain recognition and to earn money and stuff like that. And from the early 90s, actually no, from the mid-90s, from ’95, ’96 onward, stages started opening all over Ireland. And that trend, a renaissance, not even a renaissance, because it didn’t exist beforeahand, that was when Irish stand-up comedy started to become a distinctive thing on its own, as opposed to just a branch of English comedy.

Was there a distinct influence coming from both American and English stand-up comedy?

No, I think the Irish sense of humor was very much… I think it was a kind of surrealism. When English comedy, like Monty Python, it has a kind of silliness to it. And the Irish stuff was more, it was kind of silly but with a bit of soul. It was kind of playing around with language looking for a beautiful phrase, rather than looking for the joke. It was less joke-based than English comedy. In comparison with American comedy, a lot of it is so precise. It’s so chiseled and Irish stuff is very meandering. It’s full of talk and it’s not the most precise thing in the world.

American acts come over here and are enjoyed because they’re a revelation to us. They’re so exact in everything and so well worked out and word-for-word and so sharp. There’s almost an aggression to a lot of it, you know. And the Irish stuff is more – I don’t know if this is a good or bad analogy – but if you imagine a man in a field shouting at cows... [laughs]

I’ve seen that. I grew up in a rural area. It’s easy for me to imagine.

In American comedy, the cows go exactly where the man wants them to, and they stand there for however long he wants them to stand there. In Irish comedy, they move slowly, they wander everywhere, but the man keeps shouting anyway. So I guess our stuff is a lot more meandering.

Have you ever read Mark Twain’s “How to Tell A Joke?” No, actually, I think it’s “How to Tell A Story.”

What’s his book, “How To Tell A Joke?”

It’s not a book, it’s an essay. He talks about how he prefers when somebody moves around the point and never quite gets to it and tells fifteen or twenty story before he gets to the point of the original story that he was going to tell.

The Mississippi must have originated in Ireland, because that would be very much what we’re like.

How did you, Dylan, and Ardal decide to make a your of the Three Fellas show?

I guess because we all come from in and around the same part of Ireland and we all have quite successful individual careers. And I’d say we’re about ten years from working with each other. You know when you’re starting off, you’re put on bills with other people. And because we’re successful on our own, we tend to work on our own. And so the opportunity to work together, almost as if we were starting out again is great. It’s as much a social thing, really, it’s the opportunity to spend some time with each other was the icing on the cake. I have great regard for them, personally and professionally. I think they’re good men and they’re fabulous comics.

Since the three of you have very high profiles in England and lower profiles in America, was that part of the consideration, that three of you might crack the American market together rather than alone.

I don’t think any of us are thinking of cracking the American market. It’s more of us thinking, well, we’re bound to get some people if the three of us go together. [laughs] Rather than a long term plan, it’s more of an immediate plan. If the three of us stick our heads above the parapet at the same time, maybe we won’t all get shot. If nobody comes to the shows, we won’t take it personally. There’s three of us there, so if nobody comes, at least we’ll have each other.

What was the six-week walking tour or Ireland mentioned in your bio? Were you playing smaller clubs?

In Ireland, the notion of clubs wouldn’t exist like it does in America. Each town doesn’t have a comedy club. There might be, in the whole country, there might be five or six comedy clubs. What happens is, there are a lot of small, little theaters where you could do a comedy show, but we wouldn’t have a regular thing of a club working two or three nights a week, ever week of the year. The walking tour was, I guess I was looking for a type of Huckleberry Finn experience of my own country.

So I spent six weeks, I plotted out a tour, and I spent six weeks walking the roads and across a few mountains, going from town to town and doing comedy. It most certainly did not live up to any expectations. I spent most of the time on roads that were far too busy for the size of them. I don’t know what you’d call them in America. There were barely, barely two lanes. And going in opposite directions. The notion of being able to walk around Ireland doesn’t exist anymore because there’s so much traffic. It actually became very stressful. But I did it anyway.

Who influenced you to start comedy?

I guess people like Lenny Bruce, would be the main guy, really. I would have got into him through being a Bob Dylan fan, and then from Bob Dylan, into the beats, and from the beats, into Lenny Bruce. So even before I had heard his material, I like the idea of him. I’d heard about this taboo-breaking, improvising genius.

I managed to find a tape, which was his live at Carnegie Hall show, and I just listened to that over and over and over again for years. I didn’t understand a lot of the references and his style of comedy wouldn’t, it’s just me, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I’m a lot more energetic, sort of wilder onstage. But I think I fell in love with the idea of stand-up comedy because of him, and how serious it could be, and how dramatic it could be, as well as how funny.

And once I actually started doing it, it was all the usual suspects. I would be a big fan of Bill Cosby, Bill Hicks, Denis Leary would have been doing it, all of them were heroes of mine starting our. And a lot of American comedy now that I really, really like. People like Patton Oswalt and Dave Attell and Demetri Martin. They’re all guys that I really like.

How was the recent David Letterman appearance?

I’d done it about two or three weeks ago. It was fine. I’ve been doing stand-up now about thirteen years, and I’m going to be forty in a couple of weeks. So I know no one individual thing really makes that much of a difference. So it was just another night to me.

One of the curious things was, that was the third time I’d done it, and it was a learning experience, first of all, in terms of what you’re able to do as a comedian. I had just, two weeks prior to that, I had just done a show that was thirty-six hours long. I did continuous stand-up comedy for thirty-six hours. And at the end of that thirty-six hours, I realized that I probably only had about four minutes that was suitable for American television. So that was what I performed.

You know, you can kind of get into a comfort zone. Especially, I would be very well-known in Ireland, I would be very well-liked. So in a sense a lot of the work is done before I come onstage. And people are already on my side before I start to speak. And that can seduce you a little bit, I think. And maybe you can get a bit lazy, or maybe you aren’t as sharp as when you were starting out. And you might think, oh, I can do this. Look at how they’re reacting. And to go from that and then to put yourself in a situation where you’ve only got four minutes in front of people who don’t know who you are in a highly pressurized situation, it’s fantastic to see how you react to that. You actually get very, very nervous again. I actually don’t know that much at all, really. I’m not the expert that I thought I was. And from that point of view, it’s fantastic to do.

But it’s always a learning thing as well in terms of language. I had a line in a piece about, I talked about once where I shaved my sideburns off, and I shaved them that inch too far and I had crossed the thin line between punk and psychiatric patient, was the lines I had. And they told me I can’t say “psychiatric patient” on American network television because people will complain and write in. The second time I was on I had a line about fat lesbians. I wasn’t talking about women in particular, it was an image that I had, I said, “outside the house there were a bunch of fat lesbians with machine guns” was the line. And they told me that the lesbians can’t be fat. It’s always curious to encounter that.

On Irish television, you can curse. You can say “fuck” on Irish television and it’s okay. And then to go over to America and experience those types of things, it’s always interesting.

What were the circumstances under which you were doing thirty-six hours of straight stand-up?

I wanted to mark Easter. So the show started at three o’clock on Good Friday and went until dawn on Easter Sunday.

Where was this show?

It was a show in Galway, where I live in a theater called Nuns Island. It’s the world’s longest solo stand-up comedy show.

Since Dane Cook and Dave Chappelle were battling here over seven hours versus eight hours, I’m sure they’re both going to be severely disappointed.

Let’s put those guys to bed right now. Yeah, thirty-six hours.

How did you manage to do that? Were there breaks?

I set the gig up, and we were looking for a structure for it. How were we going to do it? So we said, why don’t we contact the Guinness Book of World Records and see what kind of rules they might impose. And they said for every hour of an endurance event, you’re entitled to a five-minute break. That’s what I did, I did an hour an took a five-minute break.

Was there somebody from Guinness there?

Absolutely, yeah. They were making sure the breaks were only five minutes long, they were making sure there were always ten people in the audience at any one time, none of whom could be connected to the show or asleep. We had a huge team of people working on the show to make sure we had crowds coming in at three, four, five o’clock in the morning. It was a community event, and I had a lot of people helping. It was a good thing to have done. I’m glad I did it.

Did anybody stay for the whole –

No. If anybody had stayed for the entire thirty-six hours, they would have held the endurance record, not me.