Did You Hear The One About The Irishman Who . . .

1996 has been a vintage year for Irish comedy and no mistake, what with Father Ted swallowing awards like Fr. Jack swallows drink, and Edinburgh once more succumbing to gaels of laughter, as Tommy Tiernan and Dylan Moran made it a double triumph at this year's festival, the former being deemed 'Best Newcomer' and the latter following in Sean Hughes' footsteps by winning the prestigious Perrier Award.

What's even more remarkable is that Tiernan and Moran hail from the same town and the same school, making Navan - heretofore more famous for material to stand-on rather than material for stand-up - an unlikely candidate for the title of Comedy Capital Of The Universe.

"Bizarre, isn't it?," says 25-year-old Moran, on the eve of a homecoming tour which this week brings him to Dublin. "Tommy was either a year or two ahead of me and there was another guy in Tommy's class, called Willy Byrne, who is one of the funniest people I've ever met, just naturally gifted that way. And he's now in 'Jesus Christ Superstar' in the West End. So that school, Navan St Patrick's Classical School, obviously went through some kind of warp over that couple of years."

I take it that it was an unusually creative environment then?

"Not at all," he demurs, "and that's why it happened, I think. It was actually a classic, middle-Ireland, draconian, theocratic, bigot-riddden hell-hole - but one of the English teachers was quite into drama and drama workshops. So when you're 13, 14, 15 and you're going up to Dublin to arse around in the National Youth Theatre, and you're coming from the kind of education system where you're surrounded by people who are being forced to be dentists - it was like a glimpse of the promised land and people responded really hungrily too it. It was so refreshing and such a relief, even though we only did it a few times."

Such liberating excursions appealed, in particular, to the smartalec in Dylan Moran.

"I was always a bit of a show-off, the class clown in so far as I would be told to shut up a lot," he reflects. "I don't think I was particularly funny but I was very keen on finding new ways to waste time. In fact, I didn't go to school a lot of the time at all - I'd say I missed at least a third of my education overall. Partly that was through being ill sometimes with chronic bronchitis and partly it was using that just as an excuse not to go. I spent a lot of time in bed."

To confirm that his absenteeism had, at least, some basis in genuine medical fact, Moran proceeds to wheeze spectacularly for the benefit of the tape. "I'm a wreck," he admits, after getting his breath back and lighting up a fag. "And, no, I shouldn't smoke. But I'm not ill, I mean, it's not glamourous at all. I'm just . . . not very good at jumping."

Although naturally bright, articulate and a voracious reader, "mindsweeping everything", Moran was not academically inclined, happily bailing out of secondary school before the Leaving Cert and eventually taking his A-levels up north. Then, as pals were going off to university or entering gainful employment, he found himself faced with the realisation that his career prospects were "absolutely zero". So what else was a poor boy to do but head for the bright lights? Or, as he puts it: "I was signing on in Navan and decided to expand my global domination plan by moving to Dublin and signing on there instead."

And then, one fateful night, he discovered his destiny in the form of a small room in The International Bar on Wicklow Street. For a guy who'd spent a year drifting aimlessly, it was something in the order of a Damascean revelation. Ardal O'Hanlon, Kevin McAleer, Barry Murphy and Dermot Carmody - this was the class of person who opened his eyes and tickled his ribs.

"That place, The Comedy Cellar, should be a shrine," he says. "I went there one night, for no particular reason, and I was really impressed. I was expecting some kind of lame undergraduate revue but they were so good, so fast, so funny, so intelligent and yet so loose with it as well. I was doubled-over and I'm not a big laugher."

That was the first live comedy show Dylan Moran had ever attended. At the second one, a week later, he was up onstage himself.

"I was shitting myself but it was totally exhilarating at the same time," he says of his debut. "The thing was that I was driven, because at that point in my life, I had nothing to do and nowhere to go. So this had to work. And it did. Buzz is the wrong word. It was a real charge, a fire throughout your ego. It wasn't about building a career. It was just about trying to be really good at showing off. Saying 'look ma, no hands'. People always say that stand-up comedy is a very hard thing to do - and that's what made me want to do it."

Regular appearances at the venue ensued, giving Dylan some much-needed focus in his life.

"There was a feeling that it was important," he observes, "because, as I say I didn't have much else to do. But then, if I knew that I was going to be on next week, I didn't need much else. I wouldn't go nuts on scripting but I would polish things, try to make them as pithy as I could. And knowing you were going to do it - I can't tell you how exciting that was. Even if it was only going to be ten minutes on stage, to be that focussed when otherwise you were just buzzing around Dublin, drinking, smoking joints, staying up till 4am, shopping in the all-night shop - no cohesiveness, no parameters to your life, nothing, except a meandering existence - so to be that focused, that keyed in, it meant that for 10 or 15 minutes you were completely in control of your destiny. However you did, it was all because of you."

Moran did very well, as it happened, but how exactly did he go about making the folks laugh?

"The only thing I can see that I did then that I still do now - and which makes me laugh - is somebody not being able to do something that they're supposed to be able to do. Whether that's fixing a plug or articulating how they feel about being alive. I don't even know that I would edify it by saying it was observation it was just . . ."

A hunch?

"(Laughs) It was exactly that. Totally instinctive. And then, as time went by, you would see someone else do something very similar to what you had done, not because they'd ripped it off, but because you hadn't properly phrased a phenomenon. Because what it's about then is not looking for something to talk about but how to put it - that's the key thing. And that is a big division, I think, between British and Irish stand-up."

So it all comes back to language?

"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.