JAMES ROBINSON makes easy work of Dylan Moran’s hard reputation, interviewing a man who comes across as focused, polite and seemingly content – despite having made a living out of adding genuine comedy to being hacked off and generally hungover.


“IT CAN BE a little wearying banging the pot outside your own restaurant,” Dylan Moran tells me. You may well have laughed along with Moran’s gruff Irish creation Bernard Black on Black Books, but on his last trip to New Zealand Moran was as negatively profiled as he was positively reviewed. His caustic persona and dislike of interviews earned him a difficult name. Not surprising though for someone who created a character such as Bernard Black and who often responds to an audience demanding an encore, “what if I came into your work at a couple minutes before five o’clock and said ‘You know what, that photocopying is fantastic and I’d like you to stick around for another hour’?”

But if Moran’s reputation precedes him, it seems that he only seeks to confound this time around. Moran is focused, polite and he’s seemingly content for a man who has made a living out of adding genuine comedy to being hacked off and generally hungover.

He starts along the token path of relatively vapid appraisal of New Zealand’s beauty, “Waiheke and Devenport were beautiful.” But fans fear not, Moran has not gone soft. He spends quite some time with his laser pointer aimed at us. Much to his amusement is our consistent surprise at him returning a second year in a row. “Almost every single journalist I’ve spoken to in New Zealand says, ‘You’re coming back? So soon?’” He comments on Auckland’s “strange mix of civil obedience and anger” and local journalists’ fascination with the negative: “Every single one has asked me, ‘What’s the most terrible time you’ve ever had? How scared do you get? Are you anticipating basically soiling yourself? Are you going to die here?’ You’ve all given me the most unbelievable torrent of negative questioning I’ve ever encountered.”

He’d like to inform us that, “different countries meet up when you're asleep to laugh at you.” But it’s never nasty. He seems to be having fun. “With New Zealanders, it’s like you decided to go out late at the last minute, when you’re sick of staring at yourself in the shaving mirror, wondering why you're not as happy as you could be.” Even at his most cutting, Moran comes across as far more playful than pitying.

Moran is mindful of endlessly touring comedians, traversing the world with the same unchanging routine, “I don’t just want to stand there and have it come out of me like tickertape”. Returning fans need not fear a re-run, and new material has been written, but he is realistic about the potential for a comedian to repeat themselves: “It’s different stuff… but I’m the same. I’ve got a lot of new stuff, but if I do anything, and I’ve done that before, I don’t care.

Musicians peddle similar set-lists for years. “With comedy it’s not like it’s this record and this is the next record, it’s just in one big organic compost heap and I shovel it out.”

With Little Britain, Borat and Hot Fuzz British comedians seem to be taking over the world at the moment, infecting every crook of popular culture, endlessly quoted by all age groups – but Moran “doesn't really keep up with what’s going on.” And as for the much-hyped British comedy renaissance? “Well they say that every couple of years don’t they?” In fact the last film he claims to be truly enamoured with was The Forty-year Old Virgin, Moran has always claimed a love of childish and simple, if well done, comedy.

But it seems that British comedians keep heading for the big-time. Moran will soon re-team with Shaun of the Dead star Simon Pegg in Run Fat Boy, Run, directed by none other than Friends star David Schwimmer – whose canned comedic style seems a world away from the shambolic hilarity of Black Books. “It was great to work with Simon again, he’s very good at what he does. It’s a supporting part, I play his best friend, he’s a running a marathon and I’m telling him to how to run a marathon.”

So is Moran trading a wine bottle for running shoes? “No. There’s no running in the part. I was quite happy with that.”

Dylan Moran performs at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival in Wellington on May 15 and 16.