Abstract
When Dylan Moran appears on the Vicar Street stage in Dublin as part of the Monster II tour, he gestures in various directions around the crowd, throwing out a couple of ‘hello’s’, along the way. While trying to get the microphone off the stand he proceeds to get himself caught up in the wire, swears and tells everyone he’s leaving. Behind him and upstage centre is a very large and decorative picture frame. Within the frame, Moran’s own series of sketches ebb and flow in slide show format. His entrance onto the stage may or may not be timed with the image of a torso in a pin-striped jacket, speckled shirt and patterned tie. There is a revolver where the head should be; it’s pointing at the audience, and underneath that is a caption that reads “How may I help you?”3 Images such as this help to set a certain tone to the evening. Apart from the cartoon gallery, which silently shifts and segues its way through the performance like an art instillation, the stage space, in the main, is typical of a stand-up comedy performance piece. A microphone, a stand, a square table just left of centre stage and a bar stool without a back. On the table there is a jug of water and a glass, a glass of white wine and no ashtray. (In recent years Moran has given up smoking, at least while performing.) However, in this instance the comic who should not be smoking stubs out his cigarettes on the stage floor. Nobody seems to mind.
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Notes
Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson, ‘Everybody Knows’, I’m Your Man (USA: Columbia Records, 1988).
Dylan Moran, ‘Cartoon Gallery’, Monster: Live (UK: Universal Pictures, 2004).
Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves, The Naked Jape: Uncovering The Hidden World of Jokes (London: Penguin), 2006) pp. 131–2.
Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable (Picador, London, 1979), p. 30
Simon Critchley, On Humour: Thinking in Action (Oxon: Routledge), 2002), p. 49.
Dylan Moran, ‘Image Gallery’, like, totally.(UK: Universal Studios, 2006).
Dylan Moran, What It Is: Live (UK: Universal Pictures, 2009), 32.08–37.10.
Tony Allen, Attitude: Wanna Make Something of It? The Secret of Stand-Up Comedy (Glastonbury: Gothic Image Publications), 2002) p. 42.
Karl Valentin was a famous German cabaret performer, both before and during the war years in Germany, and he numbered both Bertolt Brecht and Adolf Hitler among his fans. Wilson and Double read Valentin’s performance style for its subversive qualities and use of the Brechtian alienation effect. See Oliver Double and Michael Wilson, ‘Karl Valentin’s Illogical Subversion: Stand-up Comedy and Alienation Effect’, NTQ, 20:3 (2004), 203–15.
Peter L. Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1997), p. 207. Berger also links the comic to ideas of transcendence, which is not entirely unrelated to my discussion of Tiernan in the last chapter.
I have discussed this in Chapter 2 also. See Michael Billig, Laughter and Ridicule: Towards a Social Critique of Humour (London: Sage Publications), 2005).
Bob Monkhouse once said that an audience is ‘not a community. the comic may impose a temporary bonding but it vanishes as soon as people disperse.’ See Bob Monkhouse, Over the Limit: My Secret Diaries 1993–8 (London: Century), 1998), p. 85.
Oliver Double, Getting the Joke: The Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (UK: Methuen Drama, 2005) p. 146.
Tommy Tiernan, ‘Interview’, Tommy Tiernan: Live (UK: Universal, 2002), 3.03–4.12.
Tommy Tiernan, ‘London Interview’, Cracked: Live at Vicar Street (Galway: Mabinog), 2004).
Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps, ‘Narrating the Self’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 25 (1996), 19–43 (p. 19).
Paul Eakin cited in Catherine McLean-Hopkins, ‘Performing Autologues: Citing/Siting the Self in Autobiographic Performance’, in Monologues: Theatre, Performance, Subjectivity, ed. by Clare Wallace (Czech Republic: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), pp. 185–207 (p. 189).
Franklyn Ajaye, Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy (Los Angeles: Silman James Press, 2002), p. 36.
Lawrence E. Mintz, ‘Standup Comedy as Social and Cultural Mediation’, American Quarterly, 37 (1985), 71–80 (p. 77).
Trevor Griffiths, Comedians (London: Faber), 1976), p. 20.
Northrop Frye, ‘The Argument of Comedy’, in Comedy: Developments in Criticism, ed. by D.J. Palmer (Houndmills: Macmillan), 1984), pp. 74–84 (p.76).
The surrealist André Breton coined the term ‘humour noir’ in his Anthologie de l’humour noir, first published in 1939. Here, Breton is quoted in Patrick O’Neill, ‘The Comedy of Entropy: The Contexts of Black Humour,’ Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 10:2 (1983), 145–66 (p. 154).
Nina Witoszek and Pat Sheeran, Talking to the Dead: A Study of Irish Funerary Traditions (Amsterdam and Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 1998), p. 126.
Samuel Beckett, Watt (Calder, London, 1970), quoted in Simon Critchley, On Humour, [n.p.d.].
Bob Plant, ‘Absurdity, Incongruity and Laughter’, Philosophy, 84 (2009), 111–34, (p. 132).
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 23–4.
Richard Kearney, On Stories: Thinking in Action, ed. by Simon Critchley and Richard Kearney (London: Routledge), 2002), p. 3.
See Bert O. States, ‘The Actors’ Presence: Three Phenomenal Modes’, Theatre Journal, 35 (1983), 359–75 (p. 359). Also Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, pp 170–82 (p. 181).
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Colleary, S. (2015). Everybody Knows That The Dice Are Loaded. In: Performance and Identity in Irish Stand-Up Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137343901_5
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