"When somebody gets very drunk, or if they have a drink problem, they will say things that nobody else is saying. Everybody in this country knows an alcoholic and most people will know an alcoholic quite well, because they could be a close friend or a member of the family. A lot of it is bound up with the individual's relationship with alcohol in the two countries. I think in England some people use alcohol as an amnesia-inducing thing from working very hard. And in Ireland people tend to use it as that, too, but it's more complicated - people use it as another place they go to, to get away from whatever it is they want to escape." Dylan Moran

Dylan Moran

'Real life is fine, but you can only take so much of it.'

'When I say real life, what I am referring to is the channel that is broadcast every morning in your head when you wake up - the fugue of images and noise that is always a bit different but comes from the same place every day, and you need to either be a very blissed-out individual, or you need to apprehend it and shape it into something that is more tolerable to yourself if you are going to get around and stay erect all day. I don't know what else to do. It does come from necessity, not in a calculated way. It serves a function. How do I explain the world to myself, how do I make excuses for myself, how do I excuse the fact that I am alive? A lot of the time I think everybody feels that they are capable of processing so much more than what's actually going on around them at the time, and that's what any picture, any song, any poem, any "made" thing does - it gives you more to process in a shorter time, if you look at it in a very mechanistic way: here's a thing - absorb it. And then if it's a really good thing, you can come back to it several times and you know you won't have exhausted all its seams.

A lot of the desire to make people laugh arises out of boredom. I'm bored listening to myself now. Some people at this stage would take their dick out and draw on it or something. I'm not of that particular school, but you do get absolutely exasperated with yourself because you sound so prosaic all the time. It happens to everybody, for most of their lives. It's very therapeutic and gratifying to have an opportunity to escape that, and that's what being a comedian is like. Because you are a different person when you are on stage; you've got a set of pressures on you that you don't experience in everyday life. You've got a thousand people who want to laugh, and you're their main opportunity. So something happens with you - you become a conduit, you can access paarts of yourself, parts of your brain that are probably relevant to everybody but aren't known until you are in that situation. Something comes into play that you can't access otherwise.'

Dylan Moran's imaginative, meandering material seems rootless, but his impetuous style is distinctly Irish. Highly intelligent and lyrical, handsome in an untidy, dissipated way, he started his career at the Comedy Cellar, went on to win the Perrier Ward in 1996 and now lives in Edinburgh. For a while he wrote a column for the Irish Times which was uniquely his own but nodded towards Beachcomber (J. B Morton), the former Daily Express surreal humourist, whom he reveres. Moran's material often focuses on his supposedly ramshackle lifestyle in a self-deprecatory way - 'What am I? A random bag of tits. A duvet that smokes and drinks' - and his performance style is languid, almost slurry.

While his stage persona retains a slightly inebriated air - 'drinking features in every live performance except ballet, but a comedy club always seemed to me to be an extension of the pub, so there was never any reason not to have a drink in your hand' - in person he has a fluent articulacy and a breadth of reference, discussing various other unusual personal icons and influences, such as Michael Frayn, Damon Runyon and Max Wall. In any case, the facts speak for themselves: nobody as unstable as Moran affects to be could have accomplished so much - brilliant, ever-changing material; excellent journalism; a starring part in a highly praised BBC TV series - in so short and meteoric a career. His conversation is effortlessly witty and his manner louche, rich in careless, fluid gestures as he observes you from under arched eyebrows with amiable cynicism. He is sometimes a difficult interviewee, either taking the piss, or more usually, disdainfully rambling off the point for his own amusement. 'Talking to Dylan,' observes his friend Tommy Tiernan, 'is like trying to catch fog.'

"You tend to lie a lot as an adult. It's part of your means of getting around. You know, when you're late and you arrive and say: 'I'm so sorry. Traffic. Traffic was terrible. And there was a fire as well. A small boy - I had to give him an eye operation and all I had was a spatula and a banana.' You should just tell the truth. You should just walk in and say: 'I knew you were here. I knew you were waiting. I was at home and do you know what I did? I had a bun. And it was delicious. Because I knew you were waiting. I'll have a glass of wine - thank you very much.' And people do that as well when they break up. People always try and bullshit one another. 'I'm leaving you because you're such a nice person. Because you're such a good person. I'm not worthy. I have to go and live under a bridge.' Just tell the truth. Grab them by the teeth, hold them to you and say: 'I'm leaving you because you are the most boring fucker I've ever met in my whole life. I hate you so much it gives me energy. You remember that crazy sound you used to hear when you were going to sleep? That was me, chewing the bed.' " From Dylan Moran's stand-up act

He is the most writerly of Ireland's comedians - more so even than those who have already published fiction - and his flights of fancy often soar intto the stratosphere. No one but Dylan Moran would describe the early days of the Comedy Cellar (basically a bunch of penniless embryo comics struggling to find their voices) thus: 'It was like Berlin cabaret in the 1930's. Someone would go up and sing a song and kill a swan; somebody else would go up and play a chocolate piano.'

More recently he has turned to acting and writing for TV, although he remains defiantly himself whatever part he is required to play, then he starred in the first series of BBC2's offbeat comedy How Do You Want Me? in 1998, for which he won a British Comedy Award, he played a London-Irish comedian turned photographer feebly trying to come to terms with life in the English countryside after marrying the daughter (Charlotte Coleman) of a rich farmer (Frank Finlay), and he had the audacity and confidence to change the lines written for him by Simon Nye, of Men Behaving Badly fame. 'Simon was very generous and gave me a free hand with customizing the lines, and because I didn't know much about TV I didn't realise how generous it was at the time.' The second series was made in 1999.

He deals with his success by mostly ignoring it. 'What you're really talking about is money. More suits with heftier pens poised over creamier chequebooks. It's not a pressure to me because I don't give a flying fuck about it.'

Moran, who has a great comedy career whether he likes it or not, loftily dismisses the very notion of comedy as a career. 'If you look at a comic like Jackie Mason - that's someone with natural ability, but the approach to the whole thing is very careerist, cravenly so, in fact - because that is the environment in America, where if you don't make it you're dead. You've got to make it big or you are nobody, and there is all this pressure about profile and things that are tangential to what's funny. Maintaining a career and that kind of thing, which I think is always detrimental to being "a laugh". It's bad for comedy in general, whether it's Irish comedy or not, because the whole point of comedy is that it's an interruption, it's a rebellion, and for it to be structured is a nonsense and a betrayal of the principles of why you do it in the first place.

And you don't even have a principle when you do it in the first place - it's like a growl or howl against what's around you. Like when somebody's drunk and they say "Ah fuck off".
It's the same impulse, the same intolerance to decorum. The point where your absorbency for the conventions of getting around during the day escapes you and you have to suddenly…it's quite primal, a sort of scream. Any art is. I've just said comedy's art, and I don't mean to, but everything you make is generally a statement on what's around you. But I never usually do interviews about this. I always want to not talk about it: that's what I want to do. Now, serious and sincere thought is all very well, but comedy is not really that at all. Somebody interviewed me for an English paper and they were talking about analyzing comedy and I told them it was like vivisecting a fairy.'

Nevertheless, he can be coaxed into a certain amount of analysis, for example on the subject of the differences between comedy in England and Ireland. 'Comedians have become a medium for social interaction in pubs in England. You are a shaman and you can say anything because there's a lot of things certain people won't be saying on the night in their own groups, or between couples. So you are the man who has a licence to say anything, which acts as an ice-breaker for everybody in the room within their own evenings and what they're going to do later on. That's not needed in Ireland because when, for example, somebody in Ireland says "Oh, he's a real character", often what they mean is that he's a congenital drunk and that he will say things nobody else is saying. I think people are more used to that kind of explosive quality in social situations in Irish pubs and in Irish families - that somebody will suddenly go: "You're all talking shite and I'm going to tell you why. For the next hour." They do it all the time. And that doesn't happen so much in England.

There's a wonderful joke Kevin McAleer does about going out and looking at the stars, taking a walk in a quiet country lane and wondering who he is and where he's from and all this stuff and then a British Army patrol stops him and asks him exactly the same questions. The word surreal is bandied about, but it doesn't really describe what is going on. What Kevin is doing there is opening something up - a philosophical realisation or an epiphany or some huge question, and then bringing it right down to the most basic political and personal situation, and marrying the two and making it funny because they never really come together in real life.

But, then again, explications and examinations of humour always sound as dull as fucking ditchwater because the working comic does not, if he or she has any sense, get too involved in all that. It takes the mystery out and it takes the attraction of the thing away for the comedian. It's not like playing a harpsichord, where you know what key you are in and what note you are going to end on - you want to find out what you are doing as you are doing it. With Irish comedians there's not necessarily an end to the whole thing.

When I was young, there were old relatives who would tell me stories and they might be funny or they might bore the arse off me. There's a danger of romanticising these things. The thing you see in Ireland is that there's great tolerance of "the character". People say "Ah, don't mind Jimmy - he always wears a bag on his head." And in England these people are anathema, they're pariahs, you cross to the other side of the street because they get in the way of your day and fuck it up. But here there is that tolerance for people talking, for people expressing themselves in their own very individual ways.'

Dylan Moran is an only child, born in Navan, Co Meath, in 1972. His father was a carpenter (which may be why Dylan sometimes gives the impression that he thinks he can walk on water) and his mother wrote poetry. There were always books in the house, and his parents fostered the imagination and love of words that have won him such acclaim. He often seems mildly irritated, but one subject galvanises him into something like rage: his schooldays in Navan. 'I was very unhappy at school and tremendously unacademic and depressed by the priestly omnipresence. I'm still quite angry about all of that, because not only did they not have any imagination, they resented anything resembling imagination from anybody else. They resented any single voice saying anything, so you see - laughter comes out of tension, and that was the tension. These people were saying "stop it, don't, put it down, sit down, be quiet." If you are not homogenised, you are dirt. Unless you are getting good academic results, they were saying your career options were "You could be a mugger. Or you could be a drug dealer. It's up to you." That's the kind of perspective they had. I have infinite pity for those people. They weren't all priests. Some of them were respectable pillars of the community, and they did untold damage to generations of Irish schoolchildren. My school was not unique; it was just a leader in its field.'

It was while he was at school that he discovered Beachcomber - whose 'By the Way' column is acknowledged to have influenced Flann O'Brien's 'Cruiskeen Lawn' column in the Irish Times - whom Moran describes as 'the comic writer of the century, appallingly unrecognised. Most of his work is out of print. He wrote a column for the Daily Express that hardly any of the readers ever understood. Beaverbrook tried to fire him several times. He wrote in longhand and he would give it to this particular woman on the Express who would type it up for him. It ran six days a week for 50 years. He was a friend of Hilaire Belloc. His stuff is absolutely, transcendentally funny. It's the presupposition of an insane thing being entirely normal. There's a running series he called 'Trousers over Africa', which is this colonial figure called Carstairs, who is some kind of minor attaché or military figure constantly waiting for dinner trousers to be flown over and dropped so that he could go to dinner. And this goes on for weeks, and he comes down in converted hammocks and things, and everybody stops and stares at him and he has to go away again. It's insane! But it's delivered with this air of there-you-areness. It's very solemn, and that prefigures Milligan and the Goons and Python by a long way. That, and Damon Runyon - they are my heroes, not so much actual working comics, although I have great respect for a lot of them - Billy Connolly, for example - but they are the business as far as I am concerned. And Michael Frayn did great stuff for the Guardian in the 1960's. I am a bit of an anorak about that kind of thing.'

"First I awoke as usual at the crack of noon with no unlit cigarettes in my mouth. So I had to get up. Exercise before meditation always throws my system into revolt; I stood at the head of the stairs facing backwards and propelled myself with a single cough. I was scanning the kitchen frantically for fags when I saw the wasp. Now autumn wasps, as you all know, are the most dangerous, delirious and resentful now that all the children have gone back to school. My usual technique for dealing with nature creeping into my home is to tackle the matter head-on and move to another flat. Since this was not possible on Friday, I stared at it for an hour or so, deciding to whom I should distribute my worldly effects…
…Stuffing your face is relatively virtuous when you compare what the food fetishists get up to. Their weird menus fill you with fear. Teeny woodland animal's hearts blowtorched in front of their families in dolphin's eye sauce. Or make you feel ignorant; Gratin of frimpet simmered in borridge and masle, on a bed of micklebrush, kuppies and shuntynuts. May contain small bones.

So here are some foolproof recipes for those of you who understand the true function of food.

BEAN TREAT

Gingerly pour four fluid ounces of beans or something into a jug. Cry. Eat the beans from the jug and pour the rest from the can down your throat. N.B These taste better if they belong to somebody else in your house.

PAIN AU DUNK

Fists of bread, rent from the loaf and dunked in into anything runnier than bread. Should eat at least six of these because…you should. Don't toast the bread, Toast is cookery."
From Dylan Moran's column in the 'Irish Times', 19 October 1996

He was asked to leave school when he was 16 and his worried parents sent him to a college in Newcastle, Co. Down, to sit A-level exams. It was not a happy time.

'I remember as a kid thinking I might be an actor, or a painter. I drew cartoons for a long time and seriously wanted to be a cartoonist when I was 13, 14, 15 and doing them all the time. I just knew that I wanted to make stuff. But instead I smoked dope. I smoked dope on many levels.'

When he left school, he became interested in comedy through, as he puts it, ' a mixture of unemployment and getting bored with dope'; a visit to the Comedy Cellar opened his eyes to another world. 'I never wanted to be a comedian really. When I saw the Cellar, there were Barry Murphy and Ardal O'Hanlon and Kevin Gildea and Dermot Carmody, and maybe Alex Lyons and Morgan Jones and so on, and I remember walking in and thinking "this will be shit; this will be like a student revue, some kind of sub-Pythonesque thing" and sitting down, an aggressive, defensive young man - "come on, then", like a typical bastard punter, and I laughed my arse off. I couldn't believe it - I was doubled up, I was crying. I didn't know that my peers could be so funny and be organized about it. Before that it was always on a Friday night, when you were coming home from the pub and you fell down, or broke into a shop and stole a deer, or whatever, all that stuff, but to see people who actually knew what they were doing was wonderful. And they were young and they didn't have anybody telling them what to do and they just decided to do it. A year passed - that was the year I wanted to do it, although I didn't sit in a room for a year and plot. And when I did go up on stage at the Cellar, if you had seen it written down on paper you would say "What the fuck is this?" It was like a fax from one asylum to another. But I went again.

It was great. I remember some of what I said, and it was pure nonsense. You cannot even begin to explain it. I've got a lot of respect for good jokes, and I didn't have anything that resembled a joke. In retrospect, it seemed like an exercise in timing. That's what it was. I understood there was a certain tension needed to make people laugh, so I created the tension and built it to a point at which they laughed and then I went down and did it again and they laughed and I knew instinctively, not consciously at all, that's what happened. But it wasn't the material. That was a load of old piss, but it worked.

I couldn't even begin to describe the feeling of making that room laugh and knowing you were going to do it and them doing it. It's like an ego looking at itself in the mirror, and the mirror is specially lit to see it in its own best light, and you know it's going to happen. It's the anticipation, the foreknowledge of what's going to happen, and the knowledge while it's going on that you are absolutely right and that nothing can go wrong. It is heaven. And it's also infantile in the sense that the infant is completely happy in its own universe and, if it falls, somebody is going to catch it, so nothing can go wrong for this lucky infant.'

After a couple of years in Dublin, earning a growing reputation as an exciting, if unpredictable, new talent, Moran moved to London. 'I had to make some money, I had to earn a living. So I thought "I've been having a great time playing with mud pies, but will anybody buy them?" And that's why I went to London. And it was pretty grim for a young Irish boy - the shock of London; I mean it's an age-old story, as old as the times when people started to go to London to look for work. And a lot of the people who were my peers when I went over are still doing the circuit, and that's hard. That's not because they are bad; it's something to do with their lack of ability to perceive what is going on around them. I gave myself a deadline - if it wasn't working on a certain level by so-and-so, I'm out of here. I wasn't going to end up in my 40s doing the clubs. I'd be a fucked-up human being. I knew that I'd have to keep moving all the time, had to not have to do things I didn't want to do. It had to gather a pace as it went, and it did.'

After he won the So You Think You're Funny? competition in Edinburgh in 1993, Moran began the slog of travelling the length and breadth of Britain doing shows.

'When I was doing the circuit, people would say to me "you must have an unbearably fascinating life" and the reality was that it felt like total drudgery at the time - you were going up to Northampton and back to London and then to Scunthorpe or wherever.'

Tommy Tiernan recalls Dylan's days on the circuit: 'I think he drank his way through it! He was oblivious to the actual parameters. He has a special talent. He also has the ability to ignore things he doesn't want to do.'

The Perrier Award in 1996 changed all that, enabling him to fill big theatres and to headline at top clubs. 'In the beginning you are firing on you don't know what; you don't know where it's coming from, you don't know what it is. Then you turn pro, and you walk into the Olympia and it's full and you think "Well, all the lights have to work tonight. I have to work. The thing has to be turned on and everybody has to go home happy, otherwise I've fucked up a thousand people's evenings." And you can't do that and walk away with a good conscience. Nobody can do that. You have to work; the show has to happen. But, psychologically, people have paid their money and gone into a theatre - and as far as they are concerned they've had half a good time already. All you have to do is give the second half. Somebody has got a babysitter or put the alarm on, left the house, travelled into town, so you have to do quite a lot of work to fuck that up. That's why it's such a bad thing when you do fuck up, because I've done it. That's why it's a big deal. That's why you get a bad review - and why the bad reviews are the only ones you keep. I saw some clippings over the past year and they were generally more negative than they have ever been before and that wasn't really news to me because I had a need to go away and write a new show.' He said, just before moving to Edinburgh in January 1999, 'I need to go away and harvest something and bring it back again. You can only get by in your old jalopy for so long before it starts to fall apart.'

When Moran is on form, he is brilliant. But there is, indeed, another side. At the 1999 Edinburgh Fringe, he behaved so strangely on stage one night that Scotsman reviewer Dan Rider was almost fearful for him. 'Something, somewhere, had gone very badly wrong. Here was a man apparently on the point of a genuine nervous breakdown,' he wrote. 'For, while his act has always been shambolic, this went far beyond. So lost was he in himself, so destructive was this material that there was no pretence at disguising it with faux the-show-must-go-on professionalism. There were some desperate pin-dropping pauses early on, before Moran, with a weary but barely-caring apology, produced his cheat notes from a pocket. What followed proved painful for nearly everyone present. Sure, the diehards continued to bray appreciatively, but Moran had lost it and he knew it. As the silences became more acute and the material more offensive an palpably unfocused, the dark side took over - bestiality, terminal illness - long, rambling and often offensive monologues that alarmingly appeared not to be part of the show but more one man's private, very troubled stream of consciousness, accidentally aired in front of hundreds of barely believing witnesses.'

Some comics are very good at making a not very successful night work,' says Moran, 'and some comics are good at making a good night better, and I've always been one of the latter. I can't make a bad night work; I can't do it - it takes a different set of abilities. If I'm at a dinner party and decide that everybody there is a complete fuckwit, then I'm not going to make any effort. But if somebody is saying something remotely interesting, then I can talk. But I need something to work off - a full room or whatever. If you don't like the audience, sometimes you dig your heels in and make it worse. You will be talking about wolverines eating chicken wire and then say it was raspberry-flavoured chicken wire just to piss them off more. If you just decide you don't like these people - which happens - even though you can't see their faces, you have decided that you know them; they're all shits. They all work in the same insurance company. I hate them all. Fuck 'em. And then sometimes, as Max Wall used to say - Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, you've been 50 per cent.

There's one thing people often forget to mention about performance and that is that it's a physical thing. There was a time when the only actual exercise I ever got was performing. That was the most moving I did all day - to keep talking and moving around the stage. And acting reminds me of the importance of actually being able to get erect in the morning, to be able to breathe and talk and clean the snot and sleep from your face before you go out there. There are very simple things like that that are glossed over. People talk about the background, and what's rising up out of the subconscious and so on, and what possible elements are you struggling with that mint this material that you came out with, but a lot of it is simply about how many pints you've had, or whether you had a curry an hour before.'

Working in TV, where his immediate future seems to lie - as well as starring in How Do You Want Me?, he also co-wrote Black Books with Graham Linehan for Channel 4, starring Moran and English stand-up Bill Bailey as booksellers - gives him a stability his life lacked before. His long-term future could go in any one of a number of creative directions. More stability came from his marriage in 1997 (in a peculiarly Dylanesque scenario, the wedding was in London while the Princess of Wales' funeral was going on around the corner) and the birth of his daughter. He has accomplished a lot in a few years, but nothing has equaled the thrill of those first days in Dublin. 'The most fun I had, the most pleasure, was in the early Comedy Cellar days. And what matters to me is being able to still walk into the Cellar and make people laugh.'