It's hard being a comedian these days. You can’t just turn up and tell any old joke off the top of your head. As a stand-up, you have to be very careful about what you say because comics are being cancelled left, right and centre.

From David Walliams and Reginald D Hunter in this country to Roseanne Barr and Kevin Hart on the other side of the Atlantic, comedians are losing work because of unguarded lines being viewed as offensive.

Does Dylan Moran, never a stand-up to mince his words, fear that a similar fate awaits him, then?

“No!” he exclaims in a tone that brooks no contradiction. “I do not worry about being cancelled because here I am in vivid, hairy, organic form, in my pyjamas!”

Talking exclusively to the Express in, yes, his pyjamas, Dylan continues: “This basket of worries is opt-in. You opt in to the fear. And once you start opting into the basket of fears available in the modern world, you’re finished, my friend.”

In fact, Dylan has far greater worries than cancel culture. He is much more concerned about the way technology has taken over our lives and is magnifying all our worst traits.

The comedian, who would be a card-carrying Luddite if Luddites were allowed to carry cards, observes: “This cancel question is an accelerated form of those old charges that were usually brought out against politicians or major figures.

“But now the grapevine has been weaponised, so you can booby-trap it and mess up anybody. That is a sad aspect of the way we live. We’re constantly taking each other down and sniping at each other online.

“People are freaking the hell out on the net, saying all kinds of things to one another that they wouldn’t dream of saying to one another in a room.”

Dylan is one of the most naturally gifted, eloquent and poetic stand-ups ever to grace a stage.

A master of language, the 53-year-old comedian is best known as a dazzling Perrier award-winning stand-up comedian, permanently baffled by the modern world. He is also celebrated as the creator and star of Black Books, Channel 4’s enduringly brilliant Bafta award-winning sitcom about a curmudgeonly bookshop owner.

Some comedians are concerned that their work is threatened by society’s current obsession with “wokery”. John Cleese, for instance, has railed against the “stifling” effect that political correctness has on comedians, asking: “Can you tell me a woke joke?”

The idea of wokeness killing comedy is not something that bothers Dylan, though. The Irishman asserts: “I don’t care about any of it. Nothing is killing comedy. Nothing is killing the novel. Nothing is killing music.

“It’s just that human beings are reacting differently to things that have been around forever.”

Again, Dylan lays the blame at the door of modern technology. He believes social media has whipped up a public sense of hysteria and made our judgment much more superficial and volatile.

“It is not controversial to say that our concentration is not what it used to be. That is the single thing that tells you the quality of our choices could be rather different to what we formerly enjoyed. We trust ourselves less for the wrong reasons.

“We trust ourselves less because we are carrying the aggregate picture of humanity that we see reflected back at us from these machines. They are showing us our habits, and we don’t like them. We don’t like to see that we are this cruel. We don’t like to see the truth about how we behave.”

Now Dylan's career has taken a very surprising turn: he has morphed from a successful comedian into a successful artist. Like his stand-up, his art is a beguiling mixture of humour, wild imagination, luminous colour, sharp observation, surrealism and intelligence.

Drawing on some characters from his comedy, Dylan creates visually arresting pictures of wise cats and dogs and oddball superheroes such as “Captain Quite Tired”.

There is a definite trend for comedians transitioning into art at the moment. Noel Fielding, Harry Hill, Vic Reeves, Jenny Eclair and Joe Lycett have all produced well-liked artwork.

However, is Dylan anxious that he may not be taken seriously as an artist and merely regarded as a dilettante?

“I couldn’t give a damn,” he replies with evident glee. “I’m not here to spoon-feed anyone or cater to the taste of anyone who walks in the door.”

What Dylan will say is that his move into art is no headline-grabbing gimmick; he has a lifelong passion for drawing.

“I don’t sit around developing my career. That’s not really my jam. I’ve just always had a pencil or a pen in my hand since I was little.

“I must have drawn nearly every day of my life because I don’t remember a time when I haven’t been doing it. It’s absolutely folded into the habits of my day. For me, it’s like brushing my teeth or putting my socks on. Art has been part of my life as much as words and poetry and yakking.”

To prove the point, Dylan was artist in residence at the Galway Comedy Festival last year, where he had an exhibition, led members of the public in painting a giant mural and (in a most unlikely move) conducted a life drawing class.

Now the first ever collection of his idiosyncratic yet captivating work, Characters And Creatures, is on sale at the Two Kats and a Cow Gallery in Brighton. One of the major subjects in Dylan’s art is cats and dogs. In one picture, a cat is salivating over a goldfish in a bowl and telling it: “Let’s talk.”

Dylan, who is divorced and has two children, explains the fascination: “There are lots of dogs and cats because our relationship with animals is great and they are so much a part of our lives. Animals are vital to me as a theme at the minute because of where we are with tech and the way we relate to one another through phones.

“There is all this talk about going to Mars, and I’m thinking, ‘Hang on a second, are we giving up on life on this planet altogether?’ I’m trying to make an argument for organic things being good news.”

Dylan regards art as a haven from the way in which technology now rules our entire lives.

“What I would say to anybody who’s reading this is, just get involved in the arts. I want to get people involved because I can’t stand the machine culture where we’re all just an organic adjunct to whatever bit of computer we have at the time.

“We have all become so disconnected and frazzled by the way we live now. We have been hammered and brutalised by our relationship with tech. We need to engage with each other more and spend less time on our phones.”

One OF the chief drawbacks of our dependence on technology is that it is ultimately a socially isolating experience. Dylan reflects: “It’s important to be honest about how good human contact is for us and how weird we are when we don’t have enough of it. I don’t think we have enough right now, and that’s why people are behaving in such a reactive and floridly emotional, paranoid way with each other.

“Social trust has just gone through the floor, and we need to get it back. But we’re not going to get back, I suspect, with any particular help from Mr Zuckerberg, Mr Musk or the rest of them.”

Technology is also to be the subject of one of Dylan’s possible future projects. He has had the idea of writing a musical, “set in space in a future where people are modifying themselves by injecting animal hormones – and then suddenly a squid woman bursts into song!”

Later this year, Dylan is also planning a return to the stand-up arena. He relishes the shared joy of live comedy.

He reflects: “Comedy is a social thing. It’s about shared laughter in a room. Why would I want to go into a room and make just 75 people laugh out of 100? I want to make everybody laugh. It’s about commonality. I’m not interested in your religion or whatever can be used to separate me from you. I’m interested in the human heart.

“That experience only happens when we are together. I have to bring myself to the moment, and not drag myself to the venue complaining that I’ve been on a train for four hours and that I’ve only had crisps for lunch.

“I have to find the sunshine. You try that sometimes on a wet Wednesday. It can be challenging. You’re digging for sunshine.”

“Digging for Sunshine” would be a great title for Dylan’s next tour, I suggest. “That’s not bad actually. Maybe I’ll run with that.”

For the time being, however, Dylan is eager to focus on his art, emphasising his delight that he has been able to diversify and express his creativity in another form.

“I’m very glad to have the freedom of movement to do something else. Because art is so natural to me, there’s a real pleasure in it. I would be troubled if I couldn’t do it. If I was ever thrown in prison, I would be very unhappy if they took my pencils away.”

Dylan Moran’s art is available for sale at twokatsandacow.co.uk