You take your tours all over the world. Do you end up tailoring it much to different international audiences? I’ve had a show in the West End: quite a few have come from Sweden, quite a few from Germany, quite a few from Estonia. Those people are fantastic linguists anyway, and they’re wonderful audiences. Do you prefer playing a six week residency to travelling around? When it comes to putting a DVD together, you seem to get very involved. Your discs in the past have been very, very tightly edited. Are you very hands-on with it? Well, yeah. The editing is really important, you know. I don’t want to watch loads of reaction shots of audiences laughing, and then the guy and the girl up there with her hands on her hips smiling. I don’t want to see that. Well, yeah, that’s what I think. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, because I want the thing to be live, I want it to be a bit dirty! Do you miss the anonymity of the earlier parts of your career, where you could walk onto a stage and people wouldn’t be expecting the guy from Black Books, or someone they’ve seen on a DVD? That you could just hit it all again from fresh? Yeah, well there’s a certain rapture in that, all right, because people didn’t know what was coming. I remember once standing up there in my coat, I was doing a gig at a club in London, and people started shouting out “Big Issue” before I’d even opened my mouth! I was glad that they considered me to be strange and possibly a bit weird, down on my luck or whatever. Because it means you can mess with people’s expectations. That’s something that comes across with your stand-up: that you present an image, but when you really look at what you’re talking about, it often tends to be important stuff. You don’t talk about trivia for the hell of it? Well, no. I talk about whatever’s on my mind, what strikes me, what I’m thinking about, you know? I think that you want to get the man. But the thing is, when you’re making something that’s a challenge for yourself and a reward for anybody’s who’s going to enjoy it, is what’s your tech, what’s your approach, what’s your method? Because that’s where the fun and enjoyment and the pleasure of the thing is. The difference between Miles Davis playing a trumpet and anybody else playing a trumpet, you know? So you listen to Miles Davis, and you get a pretty good idea of how he feels about certain things, I think. Certainly, the subtlety of what he feels. And what he feels and what he thinks is not going to be different to what a lot of other people feel and think. It’s just that he’s got the tech, as I’m calling it, to put it out onto the air. I think they’re just looking in the wrong direction. If I tell you that my kitten died when I was 8 or that one time I got lost in the park, or I realised at 21 that my life was going in the wrong direction, or whatever it is, it’s not important. Because the thing is what is important is what’s in the work, what’s coming across in the work. That answers all those questions before they’re asked. You’re inevitably talking to people about who you are. You try and talk about the world, but people are always putting themselves in between themselves and the world. What you try to describe is what’s common to everybody. But being human, you inevitably end up describing your view of it, more than the world. You know what I mean? Yeah! It’s a sausage machine. You’re going to get sausages out of it, but nothing else. It’s like when people say “Well, if you want my opinion”, as if they actually ever give you anything else! Comedy has got much bigger business over the past five to ten years. There are panel games, there’s Live At The Apollo, and yet you’ve steadfastly stuck to pure stand-up. You’re not interested in the other stuff that much? By the fact that you can do six weeks in one venue, and keep filling it, you’re finding that when you get down to it, that’s what audiences want too? Yeah. That’s the flipside of people knowing who you are, and not knowing who you are. I guess that’s why people come along, and a lot of them will be people coming back from other times when I’ve been out. There are a lot of people out there, so not everybody wants this dusted down, sanitised TV form. They want to hear somebody doing it for real. Well, yeah. I write all the time, but you just want to be careful what you put out. That’s all. You want to have the confidence that you’ve done what you need to do to it, because otherwise it’s an exercise in vanity. You just have to be careful about it, so that’s why I’m being slow about it. I won’t go through all the usual Black Books questions, as I suspect you got those a lot… I do want to finish on one utterly trivial question, going against everything we’ve talked about so far. Which is what’s your favourite cake? Oh, well, that’s a good one! Let’s see. It’s so complex! There are so many levels. I’m actually thinking about it now! There’s a lot to be said for a nice pecan pie. No, I haven’t! Is it in there? Yeah. Dylan Moran, thank you very much. Dylan Moran’s new DVD, Off The Hook, is available now. Here’s a clip…
