YOU would think your average healthy young 24-year-old who has just won a big, screaming award would have better things to do with his time than sit in a draughty dressing room talking about how Anglo-Saxon literature throughout the years has imposed false levels of awareness on British drama (quoting from Chaucer to illustrate his point) and then elucidating on his Marxist analysis of stand-up comedy (the commodification of culture and all of that), but then Dylan Moran isn't your average 24-year-old.
It's not so important that Dylan is the youngest ever winner of the Perrier comedy award at the Edinburgh Festival - and just to put it in context, this is an award that Eddie Izzard, Victoria Wood, Jo Brand and Jack Dee were all nominated for but never won - but it is important that he was rewarded for introducing the notions of literacy, intelligence and cultural awareness into an area that usually rewards people who tell jokes about the size of Linford Christie's penis - which is hardly a contribution to the art form.
"All that `big willy', lavatorial, Carry On stuff that informs most of British comedy barks back to the notion of `vile bodies' in the literature and the lack of a real spoken culture, which has a lot to do with the British class system," says Dylan, in his neutral Irish accent. "Anomalies to this are people like Billy Connolly who grew up in a Scottish working-class area and would hear great stories being told around him every day of his life, but there's still too many people doing material about how they can drink 17 pints of beer and still `get it up'.".
He sighs, looks around the dressing room he's sharing with Jimmy Cricket (sad Northern Irish comic). spots one of Cricket's inane props and sighs again in an exasperated way.
"If you think about it, it's really no coincidence that London [where he now lives is the most unfriendly and alienating place in the world end is also the comedy capital of the world [London has more comedy clubs per head of population than anywhere]. People seem to have more of a need for comedy these days and that says a lot about the culture, how we commodify it and sell a comedy gig to people for £8 a go. In this respect, stand-up is the ultimate commercial theatre."
It should come as no surprise that when Dylan slopes on to stage every night the first thing he says is: "Jokes? Sorry, I don't know any." He goes on to talk about how our own communication systems fail us, how he attempts to reconcile his id and ego structures, how he deals with the late 20th-century media onslaught and just about anything else that happens to be drifting in and out of his head. It's all open-ended, loose and rambling, full of non-sequiturs and shot through with the sort of humour that you previously only found in books.
Ironically, Dylan has little formal education. An only child who grew up in Navan, he "absolutely hated" school and left at the age of 16 before doing his Leaving Cert. "It was pointless staying on, the only thing that kept me there so long was that I did a lot of school debating and also I enjoyed annoying the teachers . .. I remember once asking the religion teacher was is true that the Protestant Reformation was founded on an anal fixation? I left shortly after."
WITH "no qualification. no training, no nothing" he set about finding a job. not the easiest of tasks, given his temperament. "I just can't do it . . . I've only ever had one job in my life and that was when I worked as a florist for a week. I'd lie awake in bed having heart palpitations because I just couldn't deal with the people . . . I did also work as a bouncer in Dublin, for the sum total of an hour, but on the first night I overheard some of the customers on the way in and they were talking about whether they were going to settle for just a small fight or engage in an epic battle. I decided to go home.
Although always "interested in the atrical and showy-offey things" it wasn't until he went to the Comedy Cellar in Wicklow Street (Ireland's longest running comedy club, which was also the birth place of Ardal O'Hanlon) in 1992 that he realised what he wanted to do, and crucially how he would go about doing it. "The first time I went into the Comedy Cellar, I felt that I had come home. I'd look up at acts like Mr Trellis and think `I want to do that'. So I went home and wrote a sketch about a conversation between two cats, came back and performed it."
From word go, it was quite clear that he was embarrassingly talented and that he was capable of pushing stand-up comedy into areas it had never been before. Within weeks, he won a local Dublin comedy talent competition, then moved to London. "I was 21 when I moved over and knew nothing about how comedy worked outside my experience in the Comedy Cellar. I found it strange going to work for Englishmen - I actually had to look at people just to see how they did things, I had to learn the whole protocol of the business." It didn't take him long and within 30 days of his arrival in Britain he went up to Edinburgh 1993 and won the So You Think You're Funny competition in one of his first ever British gigs.
Called "the new Eddie Izzard" (a comparison he finds "extremely tedious") he became the most talked about comic on the professional London circuit as award upon award fell his way.
With such unnatural amounts of raw talent, the only question was how, and when, he was going to fulfil his potential. After winning the 1993 award, he dismayed everyone by opting to drink away his talent. "I got drunk for a whole year" he says matter-of-factly. "I remember being on a British tour with Jenny Eclair and at a gig in Glasgow one night, I was so out of it, I fell over the moment I arrived on stage. It had to stop".
By winning the only award that matters, he has finally started to realise his potential and given his tender years, he is capable of bigger and better things. "I'm not a careerist comic" he says, "and I've been thinking about moving into theatre, I've been thinking of doing more journalism (he's already written for the Irish Times and the London Independent) and I've been thinking of taking the gags out and writing some serious stuff".
For a man who rarely smiles, there's an ever so slight upturn of his lips when he begins his walk out onto the stage again, pauses for a moment, looks back over his shoulder and says "Winning the Perrier means absolutely nothing to me. All it means is that I've nowhere else to go in terms of comedy. I'll see what else there is . . ."
