DVD review by Steve Bennett

The most surprising thing about Dylan Moran’s DVD is where he chose to record it: not in Britain or Ireland where he might find an audience of likeminded curmudgeons, but among the upbeat optimists of Sydney. You’ll be heartened to learn the Australian sun and laid-back optimism has done nothing to lighten his bleak world-weariness, however, and What It Is finds him on cracking form.

His uniquely irascible style is far more complex than a one-dimensional grumpy old(ish) man. Although his persona remains that of the shambolic drunk, there’s a density of ideas here, all expressed with a virtuosic use of language, that belies that image. There are so many ideas fighting for space, and such beautiful comic lines, that the DVD will surely bear up to repeated viewings.

Moran hates young people with their energy and lust for life, thinks religion is a ‘ritual panic about death’, and believes the spread of pointless technology proves we’re such a worthless species that extinction can’t come soon enough. Entire philosophies, usually misanthropic, are encapsulated into a couple of eloquent sentences, often topped with a non sequitur when he gets lost for logic in his manic frustration with the world.

Only occasionally does he approach cliché with topics such as how women have a limitless memory for every past argument, but he’s quickly forgiven as he uses such a generic observations as a springboard into more distinctive routines about relationships and middle age. The tone is largely petulant, dismissing the advice of his frighteningly young doctor or refusing to get involved in any aspect of DIY. Yet those modern males who defy their years, still playing XBox at an age when most their ancestors would have been dead, also attracts his ire. No surprise, since pretty much everything he encounters elicits that reaction.

In almost every minute of this show, Moran provides evidence of why he remains a unique comic voice. Rarely is misery quite so funny.

Main feature: 77mins
Extras: The Perception, three disconcerting 2-3min sketches with Moran as some sort of public figure discussing his image with a strange adviser in a stark, anonymous office; and a gallery of his sketches
Released by Universal Pictures, November 23
Price: £19.99. Click here to buy for £12.98 from Amazon.

Published: 26 Nov 2009