Words flow from him constantly as though he is reaching for golden coins out of the air, and scattering them across the table, certain they will always be there for him. He’s the son of a poet, Lynda Moran, who died last year. “My mother was an incredible user of words. She was amazing.” He’s suddenly, briefly, very emotional. “And she was very funny. She wouldn’t have three words together without a joke in there somewhere, you know.”

He remembers her kicking his bed as a teenager, telling him to get up because Brendan Behan’s widow, Beatrice, had come to visit. Writers, not religion, were revered in their house. “Words were living things to me, growing up,” he says. “They’re like creatures, organisms. They’re not man-made things. They’re like beings.”

He became the youngest ever winner of the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1996, aged just 24 – and he knows well what the absence of the Festival for the past two years has meant for young comedians. “It’s a great place for learning, because you cannot stay in control of whatever jalopy you’re riding for three weeks. There was a place when I started, they called it ‘the bear pit’ – a lot of people throwing plastic glasses.” He compares it to “jumping off a platform with a vine around my ankle”.

He’s just turned 50. It doesn’t faze him, he says, although “you get to a certain number on the chart and everything becomes about the body, which is why the great secret of having friends as you age is learning how to complain with jokes. How do you suffer entertainingly? It’s the only thing you have to do.”

His shows are always live, he says, because he can’t remember a show from beginning to end these days anyway. So every show is unique. He gave up alcohol a few years ago, leaving behind a half-cut persona that he had been curating for the best part of three decades.

“The thing is, booze is only interesting when it’s a problem,” he says. “When it’s so-and-so turned up at four in the morning with a bag of apples wearing a cowboy hat.

“I actually had some drinks recently, and that was really interesting,” he adds. “Alcohol is amazing stuff. I haven’t had it in years. That’s a trapdoor to the dark. You can even land into specific rooms [within your mind], if you know which drinks and what order to do them in.”

He went into school drunk a couple of times, he tells me. “Obviously, I was trying to be as much of a pain in the ass as possible to signal my general disapproval of the surroundings.” Back then, he hoots wistfully, he was a “rainbow goth”. “I had a knee-length, rainbow-coloured chiffon scarf that belonged to my mother, a very long black cardigan, an almost as long red cardigan. I wore both with the scarf and red brothel creepers. And I had huge hair that went up like this…”

He got a few desultory GCSEs. “I didn’t care about staying there. And when I got booted out, I went up north – I was also kind of chasing my girlfriend at the time who was a student at Queens up in Belfast – so I went up there and pretended to do some A-levels.” After that, “when I was 19 and everybody I knew was at university and I wasn’t, I was going, ‘What the f— am I doing?’ But I was already writing by then.”

Famously, seeing Ardal O’Hanlon perform at a comedy club in Dublin when he was 20 convinced Moran that he could do that, too. “All I knew was I didn’t want a job.” But it was arriving in London and seeing comedy clubs springing up everywhere that changed his life. He was performing every night of the week. “It was like being allowed to be a professional footballer.” Fame soon followed: Black Books, with Moran playing rumpled, contrary bookshop owner Bernard Black opposite Bill Bailey and Tamsin Greig; then a memorably gory role in zombie comedy Shaun of the Dead; global stand-up tours.

He has conspicuously avoided the panel show circuit, though. “It’s a rigged game,” he says. “It creates a style of comedy, I would argue. It’s very masculine. It’s very gag heavy. And I just find it desperately insecure. It makes me a bit sad. It’s like somebody making a very loud noise every few minutes to state that they’re alive.”

Would it be a fair assumption that he won’t be following Bailey onto Strictly Come Dancing? A head cock suggests I’ve got this wildly wrong (nb Strictly bookers). “I do like dancing. A lot. I don’t know about the whole thing of, like, waiting to be judged and everything. I’d probably get in a fight with the judges pretty quick. ‘What do you mean, it’s only a seven? Come here, I’m going to make you eat your sequins, you p—-.’”

He gets out a sheet of paper and asks me what I want from comedy. “I want a lot,” he says, “I want redemption. I want to be saved. I want to be told everything’s going to be alright.” He starts drawing what looks like a big top. So what do I want from comedy? I feel like a kid being asked what I want for Christmas. The answer’s obvious: a surprise! And with Moran, there’s no danger of anything else.

Dylan Moran’s UK tour ‘We Got This’ starts March 6 (dylanmoran.com).‘Stuck’ is on BBC Two later this year