Interview: Sean Hughes He is not Hamlet...

BECKETT, Joyce, Heaney, Kundera, Orwell and Living Marxism - this isn't an interview, it's a Socratic dialogue. OK, so the collected works of Morrissey are bandied round too, as is Mork & Mindy, but could it be that the rumours have a grain of truth? Is comedy the new academia and Prof Sean Hughes our seminar leader?

Well, yes and no. True, his current show, Alibis for Life - which Hughes is taking to Ireland this weekend and Australia later in the spring - sounds like an up-market self-help manual. By the same token, the 32-year- old Irishman is more than capable of looking after himself in the company of Mark Lamarr and Phil Jupitus at the rougher end of the comedy playground in the current series of BBC 1's Never Mind the Buzzcocks. The aloof, enigmatic Hughes deigning to illuminate dreary panel-game TV with his off-beat insights? Or is the self-confessed fan of Morrissey and Julian Cope attempting to carve, in emulation of his heroes, a niche at the centre of popular culture marked "maverick outsider"?

It's eight years since the Dublin-bred comedian won the Perrier Prize in 1990. Hughes's clever-clever deconstruction of sit-com conventions, Sean's Show, attracted cultish devotion and critical ire in equal measure over its two series in the early Nineties. You couldn't help but see in Hughes's shambolic affability the most appealingly off-the-wall flatmate you never had, but while most of his idiosyncrasies were charming - the trademark "Hiya!" or duets with talking spiders - the amiable slacker ensured his darker fears and sexual neuroses got a look in too. As Hughes remembers it, occupational security saw to it that the nice guy - the Hughes who didn't alarm his audiences with images of himself "at home, full of self-pity, masturbating into a jar" - came first. "Because you're no good at stand-up when you start, to get by at first you need to get people to like you," he explains. "So most comics start off all likeable."

Alibis for Life takes to its logical, dark conclusion the sense of intimacy (endearing or egotistical, according to taste) fostered by Sean's Show, Sean's Book (the TV show's spin-off book of poetry and scribbles) and Hughes's own frank, unguarded presence on stage. It's strong stuff. Segments entitled "Disharmony" and "Cynical Home Truths" deliver what Hughes calls "rabbit punches to the head" and, importantly for the Irishman, deal in an emotional frankness with which the English have still yet to get to grips. "Irish culture is more to do with honesty than anything else," he insists, citing Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. "During the knee-jerk reaction to Lady Di's death people said that the English were finally learning to deal with their emotions, which was a ridiculous thing to say about crying over a stranger."

Grinning, Hughes confesses that the cool reception initially accorded Alibis for Life "cheered me up. I think comedy's an ideal opportunity to comment on society." It's a tribute to Hughes's one-to-one likeability that this seems far more pompous read than heard: "I want to battle against society," he declaims with mock-gravity. "God, that's going to sound crap in print." Nevertheless, Hughes, with unfashionable intensity for a late Nineties comedian, rounds on New Labour's introduction of university tuition fees, the targeting of musicians on the dole, media manipulation and goes so far as to make the lofty suggestion that comedians take up the baton of public morality that poetry dropped about two hundred years ago.

"You'll get competent comedy today but you won't get anyone like Jeremy Hardy, Mark Steel and Mark Thomas having a pop at society," he regrets. 'Now, it's "Oh, look at my coat!" and people say "Oh, look at the coat stuff! Put him on television and give him his own coat show!"' Grumpily paternalistic in his attitude to the "bland" current crop of comedians (though he admits "Johnny Vegas is very good"), Hughes believes he's matured beyond the hurly-burly of comedy fashion and quaintly claims to belong to "the underground". Whether you're meant to take this at face value or as canny career posturing is hard to tell.

"There'll be a new order coming out in comedy again," he declares. "I can't wait until the young bucks come and say 'Who are these people? Their comedy's rubbish.'" If this too sounds hollow, you can't really blame print this time. Surely Hughes himself, along with the Dees and Eltons, would be for the chop too. "Well, hopefully not - I'll remain on the periphery," he says. As evidence of his "underground" credentials, Hughes points to his refusal to do adverts or voice-overs, a principle which he rightly reckons costs him hundreds of thousands of pounds a year.

Neither is novel-writing particularly lucrative, he insists. "They want to get it out of their tiny minds that comics writing novels do it for a big pay-day." The Detainees was six months in the writing and Hughes is hard at work on The Death of Culture. The former's blackly comic narrative tackled the death of childhood, according to its author, and his second novel takes on yet another Big Theme. "What fascinates me - and this is where the idea for the novel came from - are suicide statistics and the whole idea that 'Oh, he killed himself'. Well, society itself kills these people because they find society so unliveable that they have to take their own lives."

When he tells you that people write to tell him that Alibis for Life helped them break out of dead-end relationships, you can see why. "Our parents lie to us when we're kids and tell us we're going to find the perfect partner, get married and have kids. In actual fact, love doesn't really exist - it's just tolerance or loneliness." Might it be possible that he just hasn't met the right woman? Still, it's good to know that Hughes the man has lost none of the ability for angsty teenage theorising of Hughes the boy.

The new, serious, depressed Hughes has also developed a marvellously superior attitude towards his audience, whom he has often chided for, of all things, laughing in the wrong places. "I'm just saying that, you see this crap joke? No thought went into it, but the stuff earlier on? A little bit of thought went into it. And it's letting them into the ins and outs of the craft, a little comedy secret." How do you know your audience doesn't have an inkling already? "Unless you're a real aficionado, you're not going to realise it's all rhythms." And with that, the outsider leaves me with the sort of joke he wants people on the inside to laugh at. "The first time I tell you this joke, you won't get and I'll have to tell you again: a skeleton walks into a bar and says 'Can I have a pint of Guinness and a mop, please.'"

If you didn't get a copy of the comedy tape featuring the work of Sean Hughes on the front cover of today's Sunday Review, then please call 0171 292 2220