Dylan Moran will perform at The Big Chill 2009.
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Dylan Moran - Biography
Irish comedian Dylan Moran was born in Navan, County Meath in 1971. Leaving school without any qualifications aged 16, Moran quickly became attracted to stand-up comedy and debuted in 1992 at a comedy club in Dublin, The Comedy Cellar. A year later, he won the Channel Four comedy newcomer’s So You Think You’re Funny award at the Edinburgh Festival, and began developing his comedy routines into a one-man show, Gurgling for Money, for which he won the prestigious Perrier Comedy Award in 1996, and which he subsequently took to a nationwide tour of the UK. His exposure at the Edinburgh Festival also led to him getting programmed at international stand-up comedy festivals worldwide.

Subsequently, Moran took to writing and performing for British television. He has starred in the BBC sitcom How Do You Want Me? (1998) and, more importantly, in 2000 he was commissioned by Channel Four for the sitcom ‘Black Books’ (2000). He wrote and starred in three, 6 episode series of this comedy. Co-starring popular British stand-up Bill Bailey, who was nominated for the Perrier Award the year Moran won, Black Books (2000) sees Moran play a character close to his stand-up comedy persona: an unsociable misanthrope, reminiscent of the John Cleese sitcom character Basil Fawlty, that shares a great love of wine with one of razor-sharp put-downs of all things human. Also, his character Bernard Black’s often surreal views on everyday things and on human behavior is close to his stand-up persona’s dealing with them.

The same year the first series of Black Books aired Moran took his one-man show Ready, Steady, Cough on a UK tour, followed two years later by ‘Dylan Moran: Monster’ (2004). This was followed by ‘Monster II’ in 2004.

In the late 1990’s, Moran also moved from doing stand-up to working on a film acting CV. He played opposite Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Notting Hill (1999) , co-starred with Michael Caine in ‘The Actors’ (2003) and had parts in the Simon Pegg comedy ‘Shaun Of The Dead’ (2004) and the Michael Winterbottom film ‘A Cock And Bull Story’ (2005).

Moran’s live stand-up comedy is unique in that it merges two strands of stand-up that seemed incompatible for a long time: sharp observational humor, and surreal and fantastical language-based absurdity. On the one hand, he has a clear influence from what could be called an American school of stand-up comedy that is heavily observational. On the other, Moran’s comedy is characterized by a use of language similar to the stand-up comedy of Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble : surreal associative leaps between on the one side observations and on the other fantasies, verbally painting bizarre and absurd worlds, often through a use of stream-of-consciousness narration. His language is often highly poetic, resembling a James Joyce that has had one too many.

Moran is very reluctant to give interviews on his personal life and even on his career, a fact parodied in a staged interview inter-cut with the recording of his live stand-up show Monster on its DVD release.

Dylan Moran will perform at The Big Chill 2009.
A-Z line-up | Buy tickets

Tags: black books, dylan moran, perrier award, shaun of the dead
Posted in Artists 2009, Festival | 16,438 views |

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