Dylan Moran: Yeah, Yeah – Live In London

DVD review by Steve Bennett

With Dylan Moran, a joke’s not just a joke, but brutal, honest poetry. He is the most beautiful of comedians in the language he uses, with uniquely evocative phrases conjuring up the perfect images.

So while the material in Yeah, Yeah might start from the familiar standpoint of a weary middle-aged man being prevented from wallowing in his own lethargy by the demands of life in general, and family life in particular, he creates his own unique landscape from such exquisite use of words.

It’s a sort of surrealism - but not the lazy ‘badgers playing ping-pong with the eyes of a chimpanzee’ type stream-of-nonsense. When he describes a fat girl, say, as being ‘an AGM of spheres’, it’s both fantastical and wonderfully descriptive.

For all his pleas of laziness, there are few stand-up routines as dense as this, with every line either illuminatingly true, distinctively funny – or both. He calls an interval after just over half an hour, but already he’s packed in more ideas than many stand-ups could achieve in three times that running time.

A DVD lets you savour this, as well as appreciating close-up that there’s more of a glint in his eye than normal for this shambolic grouch, apparently forever on the verge of losing both his thread and his temper. Allowing himself to have a little fun on stage of the Hammersmith Apollo even stretches as far as indulging in a little chocolate cake – although speaking in public with your mouth full is surely the sort of feckless behaviour he would berate in others.

His wry eye takes in the simmering mutual resentment of long-term relationships, the delusional male psyche, a dash topical issues such as the assassination of Bin Laden – and even such potentially hackneyed subjects such as self-service checkouts. But he always rejects the obvious in favour of a more oblique approach, true to his worldview that is both unique and instantly easy to relate to.

This is another virtuoso demonstration of comic artistry that deserves a place in any stand-up DVD collection.