"What am I?" queries Dylan Moran, half exasperated, half cut, 'neath a lank straggle of fringe and fag smoke. "A random bag of tits. A duvet that smokes and drinks."

As self-analysis goes it's fairly trenchant but altogether apt.

The dissolute Irish comedian, appearing as part of the Glasgow International Comedy Festival and best known as the star/writer of C4's Black Books, has cultivated one of the most wrought-iron personas in contemporary comedy, a character so expertly rounded and parlayed it's difficult to imagine him as anything other than the dipsomanic cynic he inhabits on stage and screen.

Those who know him only from Black Books won't be disappointed by his onstage peregrinations, seeing as Bernard Black and Dylan Moran live are basically one and the same.

With cigarette and wine glass in hand, gently reeling with a vague alcohol-induced stagger (presumably faked), Moran presents himself as someone who would really rather be something - anything - other than a man expected to make a roomful of strangers laugh.

Yet, like any drunk granted the luxury of a large captive audience, he'll be damned if he's not going to tell you exactly what is wrong with the world and the people who ruin it.

His style is languid, rambling, yet Moran always just manages to remain in control. He comes across as an articulate humanist turned sluggish and misanthropic through a mix of frustration, disbelief and alcohol, his despairing, can't-be-bothered style belying a keen intelligence and a rare gift for language and surreal extrapolation.

Despite the fact that one of the new routines in his current Monster tour totters around the conceit that he doesn't care about anything anymore, it's clear that he actually cares very much indeed.

Although perhaps not enough to do anything about it. A true spokesman for a generation, then.

Soon to be seen in British 'zomromcom' (as in zombie romantic comedy) Shaun Of The Dead, he broadened his range in the much-underrated comedy/drama How Do You Want Me?, wherein he made for an engaging romantic anti-hero, and in the Michael Caine co-starrer The Actors.

But it's live where he's at his gloriously despondent best.

Paul Whitelaw