St David's Hall

Ricky Gervais archly responded to a journalist noting the similarity between himself and David Brent by pointing out that, yes, they did indeed share the same body and face. Dylan Moran's similarity with Black Book's vituperative Bernard Black arguably goes further (as, in fairness, does Gervais and Brent's) than being housed in the same body. Moran's sardonic, bitter humour - lacerating the shortcomings of the modern world and those idiotic enough to dare exist in it without a permanent pose of detached revulsion - is pure Black.

A theme of Moran's obliquely titled "What It Is" tour is the definingly human search for something to believe in. Religion barely gets a look in: "'I got through a very difficult time because of my fairy'". Really? "Well done; have a biscuit". Cosmetic surgery is similarly assailed: how lacking in self-worth do we have to be to pay surgeons to rebuild us and swaddle our painfully engorged appendages in bandages?

What we can believe in, is laughter in the dark. Moran's stock-in-trade is the finely honed, writerly aphorism that exposes and makes fun of the ridiculous in the barest number of words. "Be realistic", he notes, recounting the foibles of relationships, "really means 'see reality my way or die'". On the topic of men's ridiculousness, needing as they do women to restrain 'the Beast' that ceaselessly marauds on a quest for pleasure he recounts that he "wanted to be a woman until I realised I'd never be able to remember which of my 12,000 best friends I despised". Moran writes bumper slogans for the people least likely to buy them.

Too often, though, Moran aims for the easy target. Religion is a placebo that assuages our fear of death. Really? Men and women are different, and their relationships thus complex power struggles riddled with compromise and deceit. Well, blow me down. And although done with his trademark - and very funny - combination of world-weary pessimism and choice phrasing, his skit on the funny way young people talk nowadays does smack a little of something Bill Cosby might reject in favour of some more outre material.

The unoriginality of this content wouldn't be a problem were it not for the startling originality of much of Moran's language. You yearn for him to apply it to similarly original subject matter; perhaps somewhere along the line Moran confused the universal with the banal.

words by Robin Wilkinson