Words: Bill Dunn Photograph: James Burns

Mixing a love of the absurd with bleak alcoholic self-hatred, Dylan Moran is one of the funniest comedians to emerge in the past 10 years. He excelled in Simon Nye's brilliant series How Do You Want Me? and wrote (with Father Ted's Graham Linehan) his own hilariously stupid sitcom Black Books, in which he stars with Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig. The second series features guest appearances from Johnny Vegas, Ricky Grover and Rob Brydon.
Esquire met up with him at the Oxford Arms in Edinburgh.

A Drink With Dylan Moran

Esq: What are you drinking?

DM: I'll experiment with half a Guinness, please.

Esq: Are you really as full of self-loathing as your on-screen and live stand-up persona would seem to indicate?

DM: Aren't you full of self-loathing? You might as well be ahead of everybody else.

Esq: How did you develop it?

DM: I just became aware of myself. You work with what you've got. And what I've got is a whole lot of self-hatred. You can never have too much self-hatred.

Esq: The nihilism and drinking is incorporated into your Bernard character in Black Books...

DM: Yes. All right. OK. Self-hatred and ravenous dipsomania. But Black Books is more of a three-hander. Tamsin´s character has developed. She's a very clever actress - she can do all sorts of spins on words like “and” or “but” that put whole other meanings on them.

Esq: Your character is also very childlike.

DM: Yeah. It's quite a simple programme really And childish. And stupid. And that's very much intentional. I'm a great fan of childish, stupid comedy. It's a very simple thing with a small brain and three arseholes.

Esq: How Do You Want Me? was great too.

DM: Yeah, but Simon [Nye] is a really proper writer.

Esq: I'm surprised it was on so late.

DM: I know - that's the BBC. I mean, they put on Seinfeld and Larry Sanders at about five in the morning, don't they? They bury some of the best programmes. It's the mysteries of scheduling. If it were Fantasy Island for Interior Decorators, they'd put it on for about three hours, peak time.

Esq: Tamzin Outhwaite swimming with otters...

DM: Or the guy with the hair.

Esq: Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen?

DM: Yeah. Him and his talking about muslin and ...18th-century shoelaces. I don't get it. I mean, there's only so many things you can do with a garden, you know? You can put flowers in it, or concrete it over. And then they leave and the poor sods are living in some Arizona porn hotel. They talk about sitcoms being escapist , but I can't think of anything more escapist than that. It's some retreat into a weird kind of fantasy world
where all you've got to worry about is Snookums having enough double cream and having the right kind of aspidistras.

Esq: It's fear, isn't it? Lock yourself in at home and it'll all be OK.

DM: Yeah. There's two poles - you've got these terrifying documentaries about people whose skin falls off for no reason and Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, or you've got floppy people with 400 teeth in their head and three yards of hair showing you a particular kind of azure tile. So if anything half-right comes along, it looks far better than it actually is . [very long pause] That doesn't sound too negative, does it? [laughs]

Esq: Where are you from?

DM: Meath. A flat place that's heavy on cows.

Esq: Has it changed much?

DM: More people, more roads and less cows. People are gradually taking over, wresting it away from the control of the cows. The whole bovine faction seems to have fallen apart.

Esq: Do you like coming down to London to film Black Books?

DM: London's fine, but there's a whole raft of skills you have to absorb if you're going to get around without killing anybody, or starting screaming at bins. There's a fine line between yourself and the man you're walking around to avoid because he's busy screaming at a bin. Cash point not working, taxi doesn't turn up, your zucchini doesn't arrive on time, and there you are - you're out there... is very fragile, it could all go at any time.

Esq: There was this pub in Clapham which used to be full of old shouty Irish guys. They all wore suits, even if they'd been on a building site. It was a uniform, the one multi-purpose suit.

DM: Well, that's not true - often they'd have two. They wear the jacket from one and the trousers from another. That's a very Celtic look, it signals your unavailability for work. If you wear the matching suit you could possibly get hired in some capacity, but if you wear the brown trousers and the blue jacket it means you have somewhere to go; you have appointments with other similarly dressed men to discuss the possible
fortunes of some horse in the 3.40. Suits are the cornerstone of any self-respecting man's wardrobe. Good for hod-carrying, sleeping in...and you look good in court.

Esq: That pub is in All Bar One now. Where do all the shouty-mad Irishmen go?

DM: Ireland. It's like Barcelona and Stuttgart and bits of London and Gdansk. It's just a European city, Dublin. It's now the centre of the world for mini-breaks. All the things that you would have identified with Dublin - the constant drizzle, the mist, the boys chasing after a horse in a field, have all gone. All the boys in the field are now heavily enmeshed in IT.

The second series of Black Books starts on Channel 4 on 1 March