"All the time for me," he concurs. "I don't think stand-up is a particularly complex medium at all. It's very ad-hoc, very raw, and it has a very limited range. But within that you can do very powerful things. It's like rock music - the range of what you're going to be able to create is not great compared to, say, classical music. What you can do with an electric guitar and a set of drums compared to what you can do with an orchestra - everyone knows the difference. Similarly in stand-up, there are so many nuances you're not going to be able to access that you could with a book."
Interestingly, Moran's own freewheeling comic philosophising has frequently been praised for its literary, lyrical flow.
"For me, it's more the way people talk that is rivetting," he responds.
"Again, the Irish have much more acute sensitivity to the play of spoken word. And I think that's why Eddie Izzard is completely exceptional to the current crop of English stand-ups. Although he's not at all exceptional in the lineage of great English humorists - people like Wodehouse, Waugh, Pinter and Peter Cook. But, in general, English people need a mediator. They will go into a pub, sit down, and pay four or five quid to watch somebody hold forth. That would never happen in an Irish pub because people are holding forth all the time."
The garrulous Irish - a bit of a cliche, no?
"It's not a cliche," he insists. "I live in London and I'm very much aware all the time that it's not my natural milieu, that I've transplanted myself to an alien environment and done as much as I can to adapt to a sensibility that is not only different but absolutely contrary to the one I like and am used to. Which is one that is much more lateral and silly and warm. You may not be aware of this, but the ease of this conversation, largely because we're both Irish, compared to an interview with a British journalist, is immense. And I find that very odd for me to be saying, because I don't have any time for nationalists or people who are insular or who radiate hate towards anything that's different. I mean, I'm fascinated by English people and by English humorous writing, which is much more sophisticated in some ways than Irish humour, which is kind of loose and flapping in the wind. It's the difference between a bog and a privet hedge."
Indeed. Perhaps the very landscape has something to do with it. Personally, I've always preferred the wild, untamed countryside of Ireland to the strangely manicured, neatly signposted countryside of England.
"Yeah," Dylan laughs, "like a signpost saying 'Nice View'. My girlfriend is from Scotland and we were up there again recently and I always immediately click in. And I think that's one of the reasons that Irish people get on so well at the Edinburgh Festival. John Hegley called it 'The Harvest' which is exactly right - 'this is what I've got to show for the year'. But when I go up there, the mental landscape, the terrain of people's souls, is so much more recognisable to me."
In London, Dylan Moran may sometimes feel like a stranger in a strange land but once he'd decided to give comedy his best shot, the move away from home was unavoidable. The limitless possibility for expression in The Comedy Cellar might have been a fine and inspiring thing, but the tiny venue was never going to butter his bread.
"The most imaginative thing you can possibly do with stand-up in Dublin is to starve," he points out. "I just don't understand why some promoter, someone like Vince Power or Pat Egan, hasn't cottoned on to the idea of one central large-scale comedy venue in Dublin. And it doesn't have to be Temple Bar - it could be anywhere. Because there really is a wealth of extraordinarily talented performers - which is why Irish comedy is now an export."
A word about our great national broadcasting service at this point, perhaps?
"RTE have never caught a boat in their lives," he says. "This is just a particularly plush one that they've watched sail away."
Dylan himself sailed away at the age of 21, his first gigs in London secured with the help of comedian Dominic Holland, who "made ten phone calls for me and that made a world of a difference." Introductions over, it was up to Dylan to do the rest onstage, beginning with unpaid five-minute slots that made him feel like he was starting all over again.
"I found it fairly horrible initially," he says, recalling that those first London gigs either went "very well" or were greeted with "absolute mystification." An early boost came when his prodigious talent won him the 'Best Newcomer' award at Edinburgh, the same honour which, three years later, would be bestowed on Tommy Tiernan. Otherwise, it was all about standing-up to be counted.
"I played absolutely everywhere," he sighs, "I went to every barn, well and pigeon loft in the country. I once went on in The Erotica in Paris, the club where Jacques Brel first performed, and most of the audience had English as a second language - being Swiss, Americans and the like. So there was a delay on the laughs, such as they were; it was like being on the phone to Australia. Other times, in England, I played to audiences of five or seven."
As if the road to establishing himself wasn't already strewn with enough obstacles, Dylan managed to make it even more complicated for himself. While no-one on the comedy circuit doubted his ability, there was a period when his fondness for the booze grew to such an extent that it alarmed friends and alienated some fellow professionals. Around that time, this journalist recalls an admirer of Moran's remarking: "He's fucking brilliant - but he's in danger of drinking himself out of a career."
The man himself now admits that his intake got so out of hand, that he sometimes went onstage drunk. There was his first night supporting Jenny Eclair, for example. "The first thing I did when I walked out was fall over, trying to get the mic out of the stand," he recalls. "Or I'd go on supposed to be doing 15 minutes and wind up doing 45, talking total gibberish." It even got to the stage where, in order to camouflage the excesses that were gaining him an unenviable reputation, he occasionally incorporated the pretence of being drunk into his act.
Fortunately, Dylan came to his senses before it was too late and now confines his drinking to social situations. His stagework, clearly, is much the better for it. This year's victory in Edinburgh confirmed his status in the eyes of many as a stand-up second only to Eddie Izzard - with whom he is often compared - while he was recently belatedly honoured in his homeland with the ultimate seal of approval, an appearance on The Late Late Show.
Which is not to say that the man himself places much store in such apparent milestones. Unimpressed with the ritual progression of comedy "stardom", which sees a funny guy emerge from the clubs, win an award, do a beer commercial, star in a sit-com and finish up making shite movies in Hollywood, Dylan Moran seems altogether more excited about being rewarded with a column in The Irish Times. There's long been a novel in progress too, but then, as he points out "who hasn't got one that they've been working on for years!" Better to write the damn thing than talk about it, he suggests.
Meantime, it's what Dylan Moran has to talk about which is spinning minds and causing ribs to ache, as he winds up his current Irish tour. And not just what he has to talk about. As another towering genius of Irish comedy might almost put it - it's the way he tells it.
Liam Mackey