Dylan Moran: New Theatre, Oxford

2:55pm Wednesday 26th November 2008

‘I was the first person to discover that if you infected a person with Marmite, he would stand up and bark at the moon.” “Everybody under the age of 35 has the intelligence of raspberry jam.” “Children can hear vegetables hiding.”

It is difficult to pass on how ecstatically such lines as these from Dylan Moran were received by his packed audience at the New Theatre on Sunday. Context, of course, is everything, and the context of Moran’s stand-up is intelligent and forceful attack. He was immediately rude to latecomers and possessors of mobile phones and went for places like Plymouth and Stoke with enthusiasm (mind you, as a pro, he’s probably been assaulting Oxford at subsequent gigs).

Moran clearly has an adoring audience, as a result of his fabulously anarchic creation Bernard in Channel 4’s Black Books series. He was already a sell-out in Oxford nearly six years ago, when I saw him performing very ordinarily and fairly drunk.

This time, he held a tighter rein on his material and did not seem overly possessed by alcohol. He did, it seemed to me, lose his place once or twice in the second half, allowing a childish smile to play across his face as he paused to re-order his brain, before picking up with an attack on Irish rugby or a comment on “the lop-sided charms” of somebody’s nipples.

Moran is better when he doesn’t try to do topical: lines about Obama and Putin were unnecessarily interruptions to his normal targets.

That said, for me the best line of the night came in a description of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – “a man so corrupt that every time he smiles, an angel gets gonorrhoea”. At that moment, context becomes irrelevant. Probably only Dara O’Briain of the current crop of stand-ups could come up with such an image.

Curtain up on Dylan Moran: 8pm; your reviewer back at home by bus at 10.10pm, inclusive of a 20-minute interval. He could have given his public just a touch more, if he had remembered it all.