Arts: 1996 Perrier Award winner: 'Hangovers come in queues working an array of evil magicks on our crumbling lobes'

HELLO

The lights are on in the glass village of performers and media in Edinburgh. Everyone watches the waking giant psychopath that is the festival. You can be repulsed or entranced but you can't look away. The dam breaks but slowly, names and faces appear, often in the same room. I arrived with 35 minutes of new material, a powerful dread of disappointing my producers and a dose of what used to be called the "loose goose". (That's a hair- trigger intestinal system to you, Jack.) Edinburgh is an examination of conscience. Have you done any work? Is it any good? And if you have been there before, what will you say to the person you married / divorced / trepanned last year?

THE SHOW

At the beginning of the run it was a mess, in the middle it was a mess, it's still a mess. I've ad-libbed enough to have 15 minutes of passable new stuff. But I keep forgetting where I am at crucial points. In effect, the audience is listening to someone talking to a box under a bridge. A rolling biblical tirade interrupted by a series of identity crises. As the days go by, I am inching into ever weirder zones of knackeredness. At the end of the Festival, I will have performed 45 times in 24 days. Whenever anybody important is in, like a member of my family or my girlfriend's family, I am so nervous, I can barely dislodge my tongue from the roof of my mouth.

HELP - WHAT'S HAPPENING? I

Both E (my girlfriend) and I dip in and out of strange states of awareness. You can feel like a new-born tiger at noon and then like Methuselah at five past. Hangovers come in queues working an array of evil magicks on our crumbling lobes and deep-fried eyes. We sneeze, blink, light-up a fag and walk into the relentlessly soft meltdown of everything normal - every day is a new page in the murkier parts of Revelations.

THE PRIZE

A panel decides that I am the winner of the fizzing water prize. I have to accept it and say something witty. I only came to the ceremony to support and cheer for the other nominees, including Rich Hall and Bill Bailey. Roughly 19,000 photographs are taken of me saying "... umm... well..." I am mostly composed of champagne at this point. Everybody manages to kiss me whilst stuffing a business card in my pocket. I concentrate on getting violently drunk with obsessional dedication because I am already violently drunk. On the way home, we buy crisps and microwaveable "food". E finds me the next morning at 9am on the sitting-room floor eating Pringles and reading the Yellow Pages.

THE PRESS

In the Express, I am a bewildered hayseed; in the Scotsman, I am an encourageable drunk; and in the Irish Times, I am slightly more eminent than Jesus Christ. The Irish Times stop the presses because another three Irishmen win the first three places in the "So You Think You're Funny?" competition. The winner, Tommy Tiernan, is from my home town of Navan, County Meath. This sends the local paper into a frenzy. We went to the same school and were co-participants in Guinness and adolescent sneering. The Meath Chronicle, unaffectionately known to Navan's population, go and ask my parents questions. I fax them with some irritation and ask them to leave my family alone. One more flash of the photographer's bulb and my skin will shimmy down and hang in a hoop around my ankles.

THE JOKE - WHAT'S HAPPENING? II

After tonight's two performances, I'm a little tired - one more and I'm home. But it doesn't go like that: in the course of my last gig of the night, I make a joke about prejudice using the word "nigger". A black woman leaves. A couple of other people follow her shortly after. I carry on. The explosiveness of the word is beyond my control, I have misjudged my phrasing, explanation and inflection and so offended a group of people including fellow performers. My clever-cleverness has achieved the reverse of my intent - I had wanted to make people laugh at bigotry and they took me to be deriding colour. I state my case to the affronted performers but they explain that the use of the word is unacceptable by a non-black person in any context, unless it is explicitly condemned. This is probably the most depressing incident of the Festival for me and probably the most valuable.

THE END - GOODBYE

It's the last few days and everybody wants to go. We're too tired to even raise an eyebrow in recognition of one another. It's been compelling in so far as watching yourself being operated on would hold your attention. All we have to deal with now is the sudden burst of the bubble and lurch downward clutching our heaving hearts and spent livers into the pitiless leer of London, coming up sharp at 12 o'clock. People, get ready.

Dylan Moran will appear in 'Pick of the Perrier' on 29 Sept, Her Majesty's Theatre, London

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