There is a point in No Cure For Cancer, the bestselling video of Denis Leary's 1992 stage show, where he pauses in mid-rant for a calm, intimate reflection about his young son. "There comes a time after you have a kid, whether it's two days or two weeks or two years later, when you look into the crib and you think: oh my God, look at this - this cold, sober, empty little vessel waiting to be filled up with ingredients. And it's up to me and my wife, and we can fill him up with anything - love, or hate, or indifference. Oh my God, now I know why I'm supposed to have a responsibility to the planet, because I want him to have a better life, so maybe in 25 years, there will be a better world for him. You know, I never get involved with stuff - I vote but I don't get hands-on - and now I realise I gotta get hands-on to try to change the planet, so that maybe in 25 years from now, he can live in a world without war, in a country without colour, with clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. So that maybe some day he can turn to me and say `you know something, Dad, I really like this place' and I can say `well son, I did my best'."
There is a hesitant ripple of surprised applause. He seems lost in thought for a moment, then looks up and sneers. "And at other times I think, `hey, f*** him'." There is laughter and applause, this time relieved. "I didn't break the planet; it was this way when I found it, alright?"
The new, mellow Leary who will be in Dublin next weekend might not deliver that contemptuously cynical coda. A lot has happened in the intervening five years. His son is now seven and he and his wife have a five-year-old daughter too. And he has made money, become a film star, acting alongside the likes of Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Christopher Walken, Rosie O'Donnell and Sandra Bullock.
He is still famous, though, as one of the bad boys of comedy - an unrepentant, aggressive smoker who rails against the politically correct and "whining, f***ing maggots" who go to therapy, whinge about life not turning out the way they'd hoped ("shut the f*** up") and complain about their dysfunctional upbringing. "The Jacksons were dysfunctional? Not the Jacksons! Those people give each other new heads for Christmas!" Five years ago he was talking about how it's a good job Jesus died when he did "cos if he'd lived to be 40 he'd have ended up like Elvis. Oh yeah, he had that big entourage - 12 guys willing to do whatever he wanted. And he was famous already - if he'd lived to be 40, he'd have been walking around Jerusalem with a big, fat beer-gut and black sideburns, saying `damn, I'm the son of God, give me a cheeseburger and French fries right now!'." Leary comments wryly, "I'm going to hell for that one." All the while he prowls the stage, lighting up, inhaling, sipping beer, gesticulating, shouting, prancing, making sound effects with the microphone.
The guy from No Cure For Cancer was a man's man, a meat-eating ("meat is murder and murder tastes goooood") sport-loving anti-hero who talked about how the macho gene is so inbuilt in men that he couldn't even cry when his Irish father died of a heart attack in Kerry when he was over from the US on holiday.
Leary, a trained actor who was on stage from the age of 13, built up a big following for his workingclass, in-your-face comedy; it was dubbed Comedy of Hate by some but it was a breath of fresh air at the time and he was one of a new breed of comedian - tough, streetwise and foul-mouthed. The 1992 show, which he devised in London while stranded there for five months with his wife Ann after their first child was born several months prematurely, gave him a leg up into the big time.
The Hollywood shilling beckoned and a series of movies followed - The Ref, Demolition Man, Two If By Sea - signalling a different direction in the bad boy's career and reputation. He has called some of the directors of those films "f***ing morons". Mind you, the list of people involved in the films he has made this year reads like a Who's Who of big-league talent.
He insists that there is a continuity within his career: "I started working in the theatre, so I was doing it for like 20 years before I even tried stand-up, so I never even thought of delineating the two. I just started doing stand-up in New York to get stage time, so when I hit and I started acting it was just like second nature to me." Now he's back on stage after a long break from stand-up and his production company Apostle (Leary is a lapsed Catholic) is to release his new live album and video Lock 'n' Load in November. He has been accused of selling out to Hollywood and to commercial interests. He's probably best known here, aside from Cancer, for some Holsten Pils adverts on TV. He's certainly in the mainstream now and indeed his material for the new show indicates at the very least a new life stage. Now in his late 30s, he lives in New York's swanky Upper Westside with his family. "I think it's probably a better show. There's a lot of stuff about my kids, about bringing kids up in the '90s, so it's not an attempt to imitate No Cure For Cancer by any means."
But he insists that the new Denis Leary is still angry: "Anger is definitely a part of it. I never get the `comedy of hate' thing. Anger and frustration are what make things funny, and fear. Those are bigger issues and issues that tie into comedy, so those words don't bother me. When people start throwing things like `comedy of hate', it's like, OK, it's real easy to tack something onto somebody but I think if the thing has any staying power it proves itself, you know."
Things that make him mad these days include, well, "the plethora of coffee joints where you can get every kind of coffee except coffee-flavoured coffee - the frappochinos and the cappuccinos and the moccachinos, and the idiocy of things like Riverdance and the astounding success of that and how it's become the Irish-American dream of what Irish dancing is. To me it has nothing to do with Irish dancing whatsoever. It's like flamenco dancing, you know, but it's like this gigantic, humungous entertainment industry now."
His new show also deals with "bringing up kids and how difficult that is nowadays . . . I don't think I even wrote most of the stuff about them, I'm just reciting true events about them destroying expensive items of furniture and just some of the incredibly - stupid to us but to a kid doesn't make any difference - kind of stuff they do, like putting sandwiches into VCRs, putting the phone into the pool [I don't ask if it's his own pool or a public one] and drawing on cars with rocks." Hardly the stuff revolutions are made of, but then his material was always basically observational with a high shock value. However, the impression was of an unfocused, scatter-gun kind of anger, almost wholly lacking in political content. He was sometimes accused of being unduly influenced by the late Bill Hicks but Hicks, who also roamed the stage chain-smoking, specialised in icy, controlled rage about American society and institutions. It is unlikely that he would have gone to Hollywood: "it's spiritually and emotionally dead," Hicks told me when he visited Dublin in 1992. "They are worshippers of money," according to Bill Hicks. "With art you may not get paid till you're dead. With showbiz you never get paid. You die owing." Alas, there was no cure for cancer for Bill and he died, owing nothing, last year.
These days Denis Leary, who wanted to be "Tracheotomy Man" so he could smoke two at a time, is cutting down on cigarettes, though he says he hasn't got the time to worry about the effect on his voice; it has a hoarse quality, but he sure can belt out a song. Whatever about the singing, he reckons the comic streak certainly comes from his Irish roots. He grew up in Worcester, Massachussetts, the son of Irish immigrants John O'Leary (the O was later dropped) and Nora O'Sullivan who emigrated from neighbouring farms outside Killarney in the 1950s. "And now my Uncle Dennis, who is an O'Sullivan, has retired and so my cousin Mulhall, who is an O'Leary, is actually running both farms. So it's actually like both families are finally really joined at the hip." When his father died in Kerry, "he was actually laughing at a joke as he died. He was a really funny guy. It's definitely an O'Leary and an O'Sullivan family trait. Both sides of the family are full of great story-tellers so that is definitely where it came from."
He and his family come to Kerry most years for the month of August. "I have a ton of cousins. You come for a month and you still can't visit everybody. That's how I got involved with trying to raise money for the Kerry Cheshire Fund (he's donating part of his Irish fee to the charity), because my cousin is so involved in that, so every time I go back I can't help but get sort of involved in it with him. But it's good, at the same time; it's really making connections with with your second home. And it's our generation, because it's all my cousins, who are my age or slightly older or slightly younger. Now we all have kids so now we are all in the same boat, on different sides of the Atlantic . . . "
There is, he reckons, a "definite Irish sense of humour. I don't think anybody handles sarcasm as good as we do and I don't think anybody handles the sort of highs and lows of black humour the way we do. I think that's sort of innate. I hate to make a cultural line in the sand but that is just the way I've found it to be - the Irish have the gift. It's probably the long dark history of tragedy and misery and the fact that with the Irish weather you only see the sun in fleeting glimpses. It just tends to build up a good sense of humour somehow."
Denis Leary is in the Olympia, Dublin, next Friday, Saturday and Sunday (see Weekend 4)