Dylan Moran, Apollo

Dylan Moran is, as the ethnic stereotype would have it, a great storyteller. The Irishman doesn’t tell jokes with punchlines as such, rather he rambles on a bit and sort of makes his points along the way. As entertainment, then, his latest show, What It Is, is the sort where one smiles a lot rather than laughs out loud.

If that sounds undynamic, it is. Moran shambles on stage at the Apollo Theatre, hair already tousled and a glass of red wine in hand, but now minus the ever present cigarette of his formative comedy years, when he won plaudits galore, including the prestigious Perrier award at the 1996 Edinburgh Fringe at the tender age of 24, and later two Baftas for his Channel 4 sitcom Black Books, in which he played a unsociable, misanthropic bookseller.

Moran spends much of this show complaining about the ageing process. He’s just about to turn 38, for goodness sake, so what he’s going to be like at 48 or even 58 one can only guess. But that’s always been his shtick - dystopian, moany, irritated by the small things in life. He was born middle-aged.

He blends political riffs with everyday observational humour and some of his material, about the differences between men and women, the pain of getting older and feeling jealous of the young, I feel I’ve heard before, either from Moran or from other comics. But he manages to put a fresh or surreal spin on much of it and his language is often beautifully poetic. Describing Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi, he says: “He’s so contemptible, every time he sneezes an angel gets gonorrhoea.”

Much of the show is about a life unlived - “Some people watch their lives fly by... and hold the door open” - and even when making great fun of pretentious middle-class couples who fill every hour of the day doing things, he can’t help but contrast this with the mundane reality of his life. Much of his time, he tells us, is spent scraping dried cereal off the kitchen table.

And then he relays another snippet from his home life (which one assumes is real) that is so depressingly, horribly expressive of parents being irrelevant to their children that one can forgive the shortcomings of his show. On finding him curled up in her child-size bed one morning, with his “hairy arse falling over the side”, his 11-year-old daughter stood in the doorway and mouthed, slowly and deliberately: “Jesus Christ.” I feel his pain at that one.

It’s not a long evening - 75 minutes total stage time, plus interval - and some may feel short-changed both by this and Moran’s apparent disconnect with the audience, as there’s minimal interaction with them. But as underpowered as the show feels, a lot of his words stay with you long after you have left the theatre.

Dylan Moran continues at the Apollo Theatre, London W1 until 5 December. Book here