Dylan Moran: Off The Hook (Dylan Moran: Off the Hook)

Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome to the stage

Mr Dylan Moran.

Hey!

Hello!

Thank you!

Hello,

thank you very much for coming out,

thank you for leaving your computer screens

and all the arguments you were refining at home,

I am very glad you came.

Um, now you people,

all of you here are the survivors,

as far as I am concerned. You are the people who are tough enough

to live in London.

I didn't quite make it, I tried it some time ago,

but, you know, you need a lot of grit,

a lot of gumption. You've seen people who wimp out.

They move to Kent or whatever and they still think

that they're sort of, you know, in the mix, and they're not, you know that.

They're finished, they're not even human beings.

You're glad to see them go,

that's it, you didn't have what it takes,

you couldn't handle the irony before lunch.

Jazzercise for dinner.

Didn't have that thing in you,

that makes you hungry, that gives you what you need

to live in a paper cup

at the bottom of somebody else's garden in Balham.

You gotta have that thing.

Twelve hundred pounds a month, it's a fucking bargain.

'Cause it's tough, you know it's tough here,

Iook at the faces outside.

Look, the streets are thronged with people

who look like they haven't been able to take a shit in years.

It is tough out there,

you know it.

Everybody's here, everybody. Everybody came from everywhere.

That's why all those right wing parties all over Europe,

we have one here in Britain, UKlP, telling people to stay away, people.

Going, "Stay away!"

They're never going to succeed long term anywhere, because, you know what,

everybody goes everywhere,

you may have noticed.

And we need them, we need everybody.

We need all the people that come here. We need all the people from the east,

clever, ingenious people from Eastern Europe that came over.

A lot of suspicion at first. These are ingenious people,

Iook at what they did after the second world war,

after 1989. These people didn't have a whole lot

in a lot of these countries.

Their inheritance was, you know, half a cabbage,

a rusty spoon and a cow with a cough, so...

They had to think and make it work and they did,

and now they're here and people were suspicious for superficial reasons.

You know, just because their names look like wifi codes.

It's a name, what does it matter?

Does it matter?

These people can pickle anything, of course you need them.

Nowadays, when you see a Russian

in a Hollywood movie, they're always a villain

because of one man,

because of Putin.

Everybody else is a villain all of a sudden, if you see a Russian

in a Hollywood movie, he has a scar, it starts here,

it goes over his face, over all the furniture in his apartment,

out into the street,

he doesn't have a left hand, he just has a blender or something,

and all he says is,

"Since I come to your country,

"it's very easy for me to make bomb,

"from old cereal packet and dead cat,

"ha ha ha ha ha."

You need all the voices.

You need American voices,

you need the American voices from the further west

to counteract our European attitude,

'cause those people are so positive, they're who walk around going,

"Giving it 100%, 5,000%, I'm so glad to be here.

"Are you good? Hey, how are you? Are you good?"

To us that sounds like a threat.

What is this giving it 100% stuff, we're European, we give it 11% okay, that's it.

If somebody you know is on fire in front of you,

maybe, you'll knock it up to 13, but that's it!

But we need them. Even here

within these islands people have suddenly gone all suspicious.

I live up in Scotland, okay.

You know, the other place.

It's become this weird division now,

where people are regarding each other with a lot of suspicion, and

wariness. You need all the voices of these parts.

You need Scottish voices, these people are very good to talk with and argue with,

they're very good at catching you out, they'll get you on a technicality even at 2 a.m.,

in a pub.

If you listen to them they are very, very refined in their thinking.

They'll say, (lN SCOTTlSH ACCENT) "Actually, you're talking radioactive piss."

The Welsh people, of course you need the Welsh people,

the Welsh people have sort of been side-lined

because ofwhat's going on between England and Scotland.

Wales is the traumatised child in the car being driven around by the bickering couple

Iooking out the window going, "Oh please!"

And you need

all the voices, you need Welsh voices, they have the best voice in the world

for breaking bad news gently.

"Well, it just sort of exploded you see, it just,

"it was fine one moment, we were there and now we don't go near it, it's just..."

You need,

you need English voices, of course, you need English voices.

They are very reliable voices for explaining why nothing works.

"It's never worked, it's always been like that,

"it's fine we like it, don't touch it."

And you need,

you need voices from the Republic of lreland,

of course, 'cause they're the best excusers in the world.

The most carefully crafted excuses that ever existed.

People say, (lN lRlSH ACCENT) "Oh well, now we would have had it,

"but my brother gets wet very easily."

You need voices from Ulster because...

I wasn't actually doing this thinking everybody would be here,

but you are, that's okay.

You need that really amazing voice from there

because that just sounds like a brain talking to itself,

you don't know what's going to come out next, it's like a Van Morrison song.

"l was just there alone with my grapefruit, you know,

"so I put it on a piece of wood, I like it in a box.

"l go synchronised swimming by myself, you know it saves on the cost.

"l haven't slept in 17 years..."

The point is, you need all these people,

because people are always blaming other people

for the crisis and you are constantly told there is a crisis,

we're in a major crisis all the time, because of the rolling news culture we live in,

financial crisis, the collapse happened in all the fun countries,

places where you go to have a good time, Portugal, lreland, Greece, Spain, you know.

Places where people run around in front of you and go, "It's nice, I make!

"You sit, eat, drink, it's nice!"

West of lreland, very dependant on tourism, and, um...

The...

You need everybody.

The thing is you know, the crisis come and go

and you blame this person or that group of people,

but the ultimate crisis

never changes, it's always the same.

You know, and that's that we're all going to die.

We're all going to die, all of us.

Yeah, I'm sorry that's a spoiler, but we are, we're all going to die,

and people hate it when you say it out loud.

Most of the time they hate it,

especially ifyou're having sex.

Ifyou're afflicted with that condition that makes you go,

"We are all going to die!" every time you cum, it's very

hard to get the mood back.

But we are, and we are all,

you know, there's no point blaming everybody else

'cause we're all ultimately alone, as well.

Here we are, hot fleas in the gulping dark.

We are alone.

'Cause people don't really have religion any more, you know.

You don't really have religion in this country anywhere, I mean, you know,

the Christian religion doesn't really exist in a big way here.

You never really had it, to be honest.

We had it in lreland, that was religion.

What you had was a dressing up box with some cardigans with holes in the elbows,

everybody would meet up and have some ginger nuts

and sing a few tunes and go home, we had religion.

The thing that makes you feel bad from the moment you're awake

with God squatting on the end ofyour bed

with his fist pressed between your eyes going, "Wake up, shit bag!"

That's religion.

Now that was a very confusing

time for a lot of people.

I grew up in the '70s in lreland and it was intense,

the religiosity of the whole country, you know, it was confusing if you were young.

I remember saying to my granny,

"Granny, how many priests do you have to blow to get into heaven?"

And of course,

she was an older person, she didn't want to talk about these things.

She would go, "Oh, stop it now, eat your tea,"

but I was persistent, "Come on, Granny, how many?"

And she would go, "Oh, I hate putting a number on these things

"about 40! Now come on, eat!"

But that's not really around, so much, any more.

Religion, people are very pleased that religion doesn't exist.

Secular people are delighted, they are thrilled with themselves,

their material view of everything, congratulating themselves

in the queue outside the Apple shop,

which lights up the street the way churches used to,

filling in there, feeling the shame, shuffling in because they have the old phone.

They go in there to be told how to be liberated

by the high priest who are all dressed in black with their piercings and ponytails

who explain how the new pocket altar

will release them from their earthly burdens.

"Now it's fox, pinker and humptown,

"you can upwind monkey fuck on trickle back."

"Oh, great!

"l didn't know what I was doing there for a while,

"you've completely set me free, thank you so much."

That's the new religion. My son comes in, he's completely,

excited, you know, he's 1 2 and everything,

that whole generation is excited about all this technology

but he's kind of ambiguous about it, as well.

He knows it's not real fun a lot of the time,