Review: Dylan Moran, Colston Hall

“I wasn’t going to mention the H-word,” he says at one point late on in the set, “but let’s just say there were a lot of men who looked like Edwardian cricketers.”

He wasn’t talking about his audience, though he might as well have been.

See, the great paradox of Dylan Moran, an Irish stand-up comedian who insinuated his way into British consciousness with a few TV and film bit-parts and the cult sitcom Black Books, is that he is one of the oldest people in the room.

Many in his audience tonight probably first got to know him because the misadventures of bibulous misanthrope Bernard Black was the first grown-up comedy they were allowed to stay up and watch by their parents. And they love him, they absolutely love him. Even the heckles are protestations of admiration, or attempts to feed him easy lines.

“What’s the number?” yells one punter while Moran is going off on some improvised-sounding riff on sexy women that’s starting to sound like a chatline advert.

“Come see me after the show and I’ll share it with you. Actually, it’s me in a wig …” and he’s off again, ending up muttering something about murdering his customers in the back of his van.

This darkness is never too far below the surface. The world is a terrible place, and the present political situation holds no promise of salvation. They spent a lot of money on David Cameron but don’t really know what to do with him, while Ed Milliband looks like “a scientific experiment that escaped just as the man in the white coat was turning to give him the really important injection.” Nigel Farage “looks like something out of a 1970s TV sitcom called Where’s My Weasel?”

Much of this touring season’s act, like the last few, is all about the awfulness of middle age. Of how romance settles into marriage, of the arrival of kids to whom you have to explain that Mummy and Daddy love each other and hate each other at the same time. Pets? They’re necessary in order to get kids used to the idea of bereavement.

“There are four ages of man: child, failure, old and dead. That’s it.”

Occasionally there are flashes of Moran turning into the greatest Irish stage comedian of a previous generation, Dave Allen: the same frequent sips from a glass, the same forays into wailing despair at the injustice of it all, delivered in more of a brogue than usual.

But would that be so terrible? For all his mid-life anxieties, he can carry on doing this stuff for decades to come, scattering out clever and surreal one-liners to an audience who will ruefully appreciate all that stuff about marriage, children and pets all the more when they’ve experienced it themselves.

Dylan Moran played the Colston Hall on Wednesday, March 11. For more Colston Hall comedy line-ups, visit www.colstonhall.org/whats-on/comedy