Surprising as it may be too hear, considering he’s renowned for being one of the comedy circuit’s grumpier talents, but Dylan Moran can’t wait to see you.

He has been away from the live circuit for a while, but he’s champing at the bit to return. Of course, he’s a wonderful actor and writer, too, but you can’t help but feel stand-up is his first love.

He’s coming back to it now, and he couldn’t be happier.

He is appearing in Croydon this month, bringing with him his intelligent new show, What It Is.

It is the comic’s customary, dazzling display of virtuoso routines coupled with a scintillating use of language. Is there a stand-up alive who handles words in a more captivating way? Not for nothing has Dylan been dubbed “the Oscar Wilde of comedy.”

Unpredictable, bizarre, bleak, sometimes cruel and misanthropic, but above all painfully funny, he dissects the highs and lows of human experience with the sensitivity and intense perspicacity of a man who himself occasionally appears to be teetering on the brink of a precipice.

He’s a marvellously grumpy young man — and it’s that sensibility which invests his comedy with a rare edge.

In the run-up to the tour, Dylan is sitting outside a bar in central London sipping a cool drink. The comedian, who won both Channel 4’s So You Think You’re Funny Award and the Perrier, starts by expressing his excitement about returning to the stand-up arena for the first time since his sell-out 2006 tour, Like, Totally.

“I’m really looking forward to this,” beams the 36-year-old comedian, who hails from Navan in County Meath and is married with children. “I’ve been sitting alone in a room for many months now, and I can’t wait to get out there and try out all this new material. It’s such a great feeling when you discover other people are thinking about the things you’re discussing. Nothing beats it when the material really flies.

“When you catch a wave with an audience, you get such a buzz.

“It’s not like sounding off through a megaphone. Despite appearances, it’s a genuine conversation. If you’re the lead singer, then the audience is the rhythm section. There’s nothing like it.”

One of the predominant subjects in What It Is is the stress of our daily existence.

“The relentlessness of modern life is a strong theme in this show,” said Dylan, who has appeared in movies such as Shaun of the Dead, Run Fat Boy Run, Notting Hill and A Cock and Bull Story.

“We have a desperate need to distract ourselves with activity all the time. But why are we all so harrowed and worried all the time?”

With a wry grin, Dylan said: “It is, of course, terrific for comedians like me that we are so stressed. If we were all sorted, I’d be out of a job. But I think that if suffering is shared, it’s OK. We like it when people confide in us, ‘you’d have hated this, but it happened to me. You can probe me for all the details about how I lost my false teeth down the lavatory’. We need those stories about other people’s misfortunes to cheer us up.”

The comic, who also stars in the forthcoming movie, A Film With Me In It, carries on by asking, “was there a slight sense of disappointment in the media when Hurricane Gustav hit New Orleans and didn’t quite live up to its billing?

“There was a sense it would have been great TV. Three thousand journalists were poised in New Orleans. You wouldn’t get them poised in the beautiful blossom fields of Japan. We’re all ready to tune into a disaster. That’s just the way people are. But there’s no doubt, it makes for very good comic material.”

Dylan — who during the show will also range, in his inimitable, magnetic fashion, across such topics as politics, religion, celebrity and parenting — laughs the only thing concerning him about the tour is the prospect of going stir-crazy in faceless hotels during the course of the five-month jaunt around the UK.

“Come back and see me in a couple of months and I’ll be dribbling, senile and very, very violent. I’m sure a lot of mini-bars will have been thrown out of hotel windows by then. After five months on the road, I can’t guarantee I won’t go a bit Keith Moon.”

Yet, he is still thrilled to be on tour. “I love it,” he said. “It’s great when audiences seem to care about the same things as me. I think, ‘is it just me?,’ and it’s so refreshing when it emerges it’s not.”

Dylan Moran at Fairfield Halls, Croydon on Nov 13.