DARA O Briain can remember being on the Dart in Dublin as a 14-year-old and having "to fake laughter while reading Woody Allen's anthology".

"These two women, these two well-to-do south Dublin women, get onto the train and sit down beside me," he continues in that barristerly, impeccably vowelled manner of his.

"They start having a conversation. One woman says to the other one, 'Oh, that's a beautiful coat. Where did you get that?' 'Oh, I got this in Aqua Scrotum,' the other answers.

"I started to laugh, because even I at 14 found 'Aqua Scrotum' funny. The woman was looking at me," he explains, adding he had to hold up the Woody Allen book and pretend that he was laughing at that -- "and not that she thought the name of the shop was Aqua Scrotum and not Aquascutum" the high-end fashion label.

"Then we had a discussion about how amusing Woody Allen was," Dara continues. "So Woody Allen got me out of a hole in a wall that another 14-year-old's pretentious book -- like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance -- wouldn't have."

Now 23 years later, Dara O Briain has just released his own book of laughter-inducing observation and wisdom, Tickling The English, subtitled "Notes on a country and its people from an Irish funnyman on tour".

From the comfortable seats of the Merrion Hotel, we can just about hear the mass protest, organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, outside on Merrion Square. When asked, Dara says he has "absolutely no idea" what his father, a trade union arbitrator, would have thought of it all. "I was going to pop my head around the corner, but I thought it might look a bit weird."

There is laughter in his voice when he recollects when Ireland "had money and hearing people saying how much we had changed and what a disaster it was". He wonders whether those same people could be tracked down and asked: "Is this better? Are you enjoying this?"

I am enjoying this. He is huge fun to be around for even an hour. Dara O Briain grew up in Wicklow and went to school in Dublin. Asked what he was like in school, the presenter of Don't Feed The Gondolas, The Panel and Mock The Week says that he "wouldn't have been class clown or anything like that. I was quite shy in school. I was awkward and gauche and self-conscious like every 15- and 16-year-old is."

Growing up, Dara would fall on the floor at home watching Steve Martin on TV with an arrow through his head. Dave Allen and sheep in lifts would equally do the trick. "Eddie Izzard was a massive influence," he says.

And why did he want to make people laugh? "Because it's a rush."

So is going down the mountain on a bobsleigh or doing heroin, I jest.

"But you can't do that for a living," he quips.

Has he done heroin? "No, I haven't. If you could send me a bag of skag -- that would be fantastic. Sitting in front of a load of people making them laugh is great. You create something in your head, an idea, a juxtaposition, a run of words, and you deliver it to 2,000 people. That is a rush."

England's reaction to the recession is intriguing to him, he says, "because in England, unlike in Ireland, they think they deserve it. They didn't enjoy the boom years because there is a kind of deep-seated desire for rationing in England among a certain political class. They admire the post-war generation."

As an English woman, what does your wife think of the book?

"There was nothing that particularly surprised her. I don't think necessarily that she would appreciate me describing it as a 'porny country'," Dara says, referring to Britain's culture of Page 3 "glamour" and ostensibly reductive magazines like Loaded and Nuts.

Dara mentions a speech by a certain Irish topless model about empowerment. He says that it was "depressing" and cringeworthy in equal measure.

"God love her. You're going to live to 80," he says. "Why pick something that leaves you finished when you're young? This thing about 'I'm doing this because I have the right to do this' is ludicrous. No, you are not empowered. You are w**k-fodder. It would be more depressing if anyone actually believed it.

"It's the same with kids doing The X Factor. Kids doing The X Factor try-outs go, 'If I don't win this, my dream, I don't know what I'll do with my life.' Get a life."

Dara would rather pose with his big wibbly wobbly man-boobs in the Sun than talk about his private life.

The Irish media wrote that Dara married his wife, Susan, a doctor, "in secret" in 2006. He finds this almost as hilarious as the woman on the Dart 20 years ago.

"It was around the time of that nascent Irish celebrity industry," Dara says, "where people were being in VIP magazine for free in their house and missing the point. In Hello! and OK! they charge; it is part of their job.

"It is the single most tragic thing," he adds, continuing that "around about the time that all that s*** was going on, it was nice to sidestep it. So it was funny for me to read that I got married in secret.

"I was going, 'No, I just didn't f***ing sell it.' It is a bit like the fame thing really. People presume that this is how you do it. I have become more stuck to my guns about never going on about private stuff because it is fun as an intellectual exercise to conduct this without ever mentioning my private life."

You should make things up about your private life and never correct them.

"Michael Gambon was great for doing that. He would bring around a signed photograph of Robert De Niro, 'To Michael. From Bobby.' He wrote it himself. He also used to say that he used to be a dancer but he fell into the orchestra pit and could never dance again.

"People will say, 'Oh I read a Barry Egan interview, where you dabbled in heroin.'"

Apropos of Jimmy Carr's recent un-PC/sick joke ("Say what you like about the servicemen amputees from Iraq and Afghanistan but we're going to have a f***ing good Paralympics team in 2012"), Dara says he feels disability jokes are "a cheap holiday on somebody else's misery".

He adds, however, that he had a guy at a gig in Aberdeen and "I said to him, 'What do you do?' And he said, 'I don't do anything.' And I could see that he had that clear tube over his neck and into his nose. He had cystic fibrosis.

"Now, I've done a gig for that and I have a friend whose child has cystic fibrosis. I know a tiny bit about it but enough to go, 'Let's just address it. Let's just go: How are you? Have you got the tank or the thing underneath? How are you doing for air? Does it help you at the bar? Can you smash your way through the crowds?' I ended up having a laugh just with your man."

Wouldn't they prefer that than being patronised and treated like a poor little baby?

"Yes, they do," Dara claims. "The only thing is, there is no hard and fast rule. There are times where you should address it and there are times where someone will go 'Do you mind not bringing it up?' The problem is that this gets reported back to somebody and a journalist will ring somebody up so they can get their reaction.

"We are grown-up and we are all adults," Dara continues, "and adults will say things that are ambiguous. It would be more worrying for me if there were just a set of rules because this is the kind of shite that gets the Nick Griffins of this world and British National Party saying, 'Well, if black people say the N-word, why can't we?'"

Dara wrote a recent piece in the Guardian about footballer El-Hadji Diouf, who was alleged to have said to a ball boy, "Throw me the ball, white boy." "I wrote essentially that I'm not feeling that as an insult. It has no historical resonance. I don't feel put down by it.

"I'm sorry. I don't feel that's racist because I don't think it has any power. People were going, 'Oh that's disgraceful. You are condoning racism.'

"If you said, 'Paddy', I'd be irritated, but 'white boy'? People like hard and fast rules so they can join in being offended as well. 'I demand my share of being offended!'"

He says that he does not get much begrudgery from Irish people who are offended by him going off and becoming famous in England. "I'm not just being f***ing bland, but I have not received too much grief. You see occasional tweets on Twitter when it's like, 'Well, he seems to love England more than his own people.' His own people? What the f*** is that about?

"In some ways, comedically, I find the show works best -- bizarrely -- in Glasgow or Belfast, or other cities which also straddle the Anglo and the Irish. So being in the middle of those cultures particularly resonated there. But Celticness doesn't particularly infuse what I do, even though I am obviously from a very Irishy Irish background, but I was never a mystic with that spiritual element of it all," hesays with a laugh.

He says his relationship with England would have been the same one that all Irish people have growing up as a child, "as our historical nemesis and I hope the football team loses etc".

Because his wife is English, he says, it is a pretty unhelpful attitude to be carrying around with you, so pretty quickly you drop that and you deal with things on a more normal level.

"This doesn't mean that come the World Cup in South Africa next summer, I'll be draping myself in the Union Jack," he says with a laugh.

Possibly because his grandmother's ghost would haunt him if he did. "She was 100 when she passed away. She was in the old IRA," he says. "There were medals. There were pictures of De Valera. We never really explored it too closely in the way that you don't because they are family.

"And then, when she passed away, more of the stories came out. And there were genuinely exciting stories: tales of her lying in ditches while British soldiers were over the other side of the hedge. She was apparently a messenger for battalions in Shankill and Bray and then never spoke of it again, essentially, in a way that her generation don't. World War One veterans in England didn't really speak. They just went off and didn't go on about it."

Dara brought a one-man show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival a few years ago that, he says, contrasted granny's heroics with the triviality of Irish people banging on with "crass stories" of swimming with dolphins in Dingle. "I broke, as they say in showbiz circles, with that show."

I ask the master comic are there Samuel Beckett-like instructions on how to stage comedy: pause, walk three metres to the left, stand still, then look straight ahead...

"There is a touch of that," Dara replies. "All laughter is a release of tension, and, whether you create it intellectually or whether you just pause, it creates tension.

"In normal conversation laughter is a release of tension anyway. People laugh at things that aren't necessary jokes. They just laugh because it is a social mechanism. In telling a joke you are just aping that.

"And onstage is the best feeling in the world where you sufficiently telegraph the jokes so that the audience are having it unreel in their own head and you know that they are ahead of you. They then just enjoy you telling the joke that they know you are about to say.

"That's a really good feeling. The audience can see where you are going with something and they start to laugh, and you pause and you let them laugh."

And if they don't laugh?

"I speed up. You ditch the f***ing pauses at that stage!"

Tickling The English by Dara O Briain. Penguin, €23.45

- Barry Egan

Sunday Independent