"Life, beer, crisps, shite!"

"WHAT ARE YOU ASKING ME? WHAT? WHAT?”
An undoubtedly unkempt, and typically grouchy, Dylan Moran is speeding down an English motorway en route to Liverpool, in a car piloted by the promoter of his Monster II tour, attempting to talk to Hot Press on a phone borrowed from ‘Mick’, his friend and fellow passenger.

The three have already been travelling for four hours and Moran’s trademark irritability is obviously now running at premium. The line is clear as Cristal and I can hear him perfectly, but the Navan-born comedian claims not to be able to hear me.
“Sorry Olaf, I really can’t hear you,” he says more than once. “You’re going to have to SHOUT YOUR QUESTIONS!!”
Wonderful! Moran is renowned as a deliberately difficult interviewee anyway - surly, sarcastic and grumpier than Grandpa Simpson - so having to roar my enquiries down the line at him puts me at something of a disadvantage. Especially because I’m not entirely sure I believe him anyway.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the foppish 32-year-old is actually lazily reclining on a Merlot-stained chaise-lounge in his Edinburgh home, talking to me on a speaker-phone, and intermittently dropping the needle on the ‘Motorway Sounds’ groove of BBC Sound Effects Vol 12. It’s certainly the kind of thing that Bernard Black - the alcoholic book-shop proprietor he played in his surreal C4 series Black Books - would get a wicked chuckle out of.
One way or the other, though, the man’s on a journey. Lauded by the Evening News as “the Oscar Wilde of stand-up”, Dylan Moran is a comic whose career has meandered as much as the unfettered, whimsical monologues that first made him famous. Born and raised in Navan, he initially came to public attention in his early twenties when he won C4’s ‘So You Think You’re Funny?’ with a surreal, solipsistic and sparklingly original set. An old head on young shoulders, at the age of 25 he won the Perrier Award in 1996, with a hilariously world weary monologue worthy of a sozzled Sartre.
In recent years, he’s mostly swapped the stage for the screen, both big and small. Having shown up briefly - appropriately enough, as a book thief - alongside Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, he created some characters around his misanthropic stand-up routine and sold the show to Channel 4 in 2000. A well-deserved BAFTA later, Black Books has just finished its third and final series.
In between getting married, becoming a father and appearing intermittently on stages everywhere from Kilkenny to Montreal, Moran has also starred alongside Michael Caine and Michael Gambon in Conor McPherson’s The Actors and achieved critical acclaim in Simon Nye’s comedy drama How Do You Want Me? More recently, he popped up in the zombie spoof Shaun Of The Dead.
Right now, though, he’s on the phone and on the road. Apparently. . .

OLAF TYARANSEN: Tell me about your new show Monster II.
DYLAN MORAN: Sure . . . [long pause] It’s got bits of the old one in it because . . . [longer pause] I’m getting it taped in Dublin. I’ve never had a record or a tape out. So it’s kind of time I did. Em . . . ACCHHHH!! ACCHHHH! [suddenly erupts into a coughing fit that, alarmingly, lasts a full 30 seconds]
That’s an impressive-sounding cough you’ve got there.
Thanks! That’ll be my DVD extra - ‘How To Build Your Own’! But I have all this material from the past 10 years, that relatively few people have seen, actually. And this is the biggest tour I’ve done by quite a long way. I don’t know why, actually. It doesn’t make sense because I should have been out there doing it, but I just didn’t. I was doing other things - I was writing, I was acting...
How long is it since you’ve been on tour?
It’s about eighteen months. I’ve only done three tours and the last one played to just a few thousand people. This one is playing to . . . I dunno, loads more. Em . . . Em . . . Sorry, I’m wittering but the stuff will be from over the last few years. And there’s loads of new stuff as well, of course.
What kind of material?
What do you mean?
Well, what are your themes?
Well, you know, it’s stuff. [Impatiently] Life! Beer! Crisps! Shite!
Will the smoking ban effect you?
It certainly will! It’s nonsense! What are you supposed to do with an old Brian Friel play or a Chekov play where somebody’s having a pint or a fag? What are they supposed to do with that? It’s absolutely crazy! Even in New York, which is a totally smokeless town pretty much, I could smoke on stage. The thing is that everybody can talk till they’re blue in the face, but everybody knows that it’s nannyism to completely say that it’s not possible anywhere. I should be allowed to do whatever it is that I do in the show. As long as I’m not actually garrotting somebody or something on stage. It really pisses me off to be honest.
You’re living in Edinburgh these days. Do you get back home to Navan much?
I do but not . . . Em, I do from time to time, but not like every fortnight. But of course I visit Navan, yeah.
You’re married now, aren’t you?
I don’t talk about any of that stuff. Sorry. I don’t talk about any of my family, relatives or any of that stuff. I’m the one out there doing the stuff and there’s no reason why they should be dragged in.
You went to the same Navan school as Tommy Tiernan and Hector O’hEochagain. Are you still in touch with them?
I bump into Tommy from time to time but I haven’t seen Hector in years. We knew each other very well so we’d have no problem talking to each other. We were friends in school but . . . You know, I’d be happy to bump into either of them. I hear Hector’s doing very well.
When did you first realise that comedy could be a serious career for you?
Well, I never thought that this was gonna be my career, when I was twenty-odd or whatever I was.
Did you go to university?
No. I signed on, farted around, smoked hash, wrote toxic poetry - did all that. I was the usual sort of young eejit trying to find his métier, or whatever the word is.
When was your first stand-up performance?
Fuck, I don’t know. Em . . . I was twenty I think, in the cellar of . . . I don’t know. It was probably about . . . 1990 . . . something.
You made your cinematic debut in Notting Hill . . .
Well, I was there for a blink so. . .
Is acting something you take seriously?
No, it’s just another gig as far as I’m concerned. You know, it’s a different kind of gig, but it’s a gig. It comes along and the script’s good - great! But I’m not hawking around on the streets looking for scripts.
Do you have an acting agent?
No. I have an agent. I don’t have an acting agent. My agent does everything.
Any funny anecdotes from the set of Shaun of the Dead?
No - I don’t do funny anecdotes from sets.
Any regrets that Black Books has finished?
Regrets? No, I’m delighted. I mean, it was great fun to do, we had a blast and we got out while it was still good.
Have you heard that there’s going to be an American remake of Fr. Ted?
No, I’ve never heard anything about it before.
Apparently it’s going to star Steve Martin as Ted and Graham Norton as Dougal.
Wow! [genuinely shocked] Are they? As a movie? Oh right, a TV series. Em... it’s funny to imagine. I can’t imagine anybody else being Dougal except Ardal. But Americans do that, don’t they? They rebuild things. I don’t know what to say. Good luck to them.
Is it true you’re writing a novel?
Everybody’s writing a novel, Olaf! I’ve been writing since I was a teenager so I’m always writing. Em . . . yes I am. There’s stuff going on, but there’s not much point talking about it. It’s a bit like saying I’m painting the living room but you can’t see it till it’s finished.
Are you a disciplined kind of worker?
I have spells when I’m very disciplined and then I have times when I’m not quite so disciplined - when I take the peanuts out of my hair.
Who do you read?
Pinter has always been important to me – and Don DeLillo is somebody I’m always talking about. I like Saul Bellow a lot. And Roth.
A lot of Americans . . .
Yeah. I’m reading a bit into the history of the States at the moment as well. I’m very bad on history and I’m trying to correct that.
Have you done the New York leg of Monster II yet?
Yeah, I have. I’m going back there for a month – which will possibly be extended to six weeks – in June.
What kind of reaction did you get?
Well, I went for a week and I got asked back so. . . it was a blast.
When was the last time you had a fight?
A physical fight? I think I was 12 and I hit somebody because they were hitting somebody else. But that’s the nature of violence - connection. And then they hit me back and they were better at hitting people than I was.
Were you a target for bullies at school?
No, I was too big. There was too much of me to be a target really. I think they like dinky targets. I was rubbish at fighting, but there was quite a lot of me so they left me alone.
Have you ever had any nasty tabloid stories written about you?
No. I think one of them called me a. . . this was years and years ago...what was it? ...one of them called me a yob or something. Ha, ha, ha!
They must have heard about that fight when you were 12.
Maybe, yeah.
You had a reputation as a bit of a boozer years ago and your Bernard Black character in Black Books is certainly one
Well, I drink, you know. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it too much. I just do it and I carry on. But, you know, I’m walking and talking. Good enough for me!
Does booze help you come up with material?
It’s part of it, yeah, but it’s part of the culture of Ireland and Britain, in particular. Everybody knows that there’s a vast difference between the continental’s attitude to. . . just the way to live. Probably the Scandinavians are more like us, but even they would be more restrained.
Do you keep up with the Irish news?
No, I find it very hard to keep up with Irish news a lot of the time, actually. It’s so inward-looking a lot of the time, it just bores me. I dunno, it just seems like it’s trying to. . . find itself a lot of the time.
[HotPress briefly fills him in on McDowell’s citizenship referendum]
Well, I think all of the European countries have got the heeby-jeebies about immigration because of the freedom that everybody has within the EU and, also, it’s a constant - there’s never a shortage of refugees in the world. So they want to nail it down and nail down their policies a lot more. You hear about it all the time over here. You know, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are just constantly scare-mongering and they really do make it sound like Invasion of the Body-Snatchers. There’s a lot of hysteria around.
It’s really hypocritical of Ireland to be against this stuff, though, because everybody in Ireland comes from a Johnny-in-New York diaspora, you know.
Anything else you want to get off your chest?
Not really. Except that obviously I’m really looking forward to doing the Dublin shows. I love playing Dublin, that’s why we’re taping it there for the DVD. We could have done it in London but the crowd in Dublin is just unique.

Dylan Moran plays Vicar St on May 27 and 28