Dylan Moran had barely got out his first punchline when the hysterical laughter started. The room felt ready to explode with anticipation when the scruffy-haired comic shuffled on stage for his first of three gigs, two of which sold out.
It wasn't hard to see why, even ifthose unfamiliar with his TV show, Black Books may have taken a little longer to warm to him.
Moran is a master of the metaphor, a frighteningly sharp stand-up whose writerly qualities pour into his live act. To him, the world is bursting with visual jokes and canny connections.
The German language, for instance, "sounds like a typewriter eating tinfoil being kicked down the stairs". A woman's brain after having kids is "like a plate of chips, and children's questions are the seagulls".
He is not finished with a story until it has been wrung of all its comic possibilities, many of which are fired off under his breath well after the laughter has died down.
That caustic play on words (think Blackadder belittling Baldrick) makes Moran an acquired taste. It wasn't until the second half, and a series of very funny gags about his children - and the often embarrassing origins of others' - that the whole room seemed to relax. But his superiority complex is part of what makes him so good.
It's doubtful he ever aspired to be a warm-comic. If anything, he goes out of his way to be the opposite, pointing out that he's a "colossal celebrity" who struggles to relate to Aucklanders who have crawled out of their homes in the mudflats to see him.
He's so famous he has surpassed the need to eat or live in a house. He and his contemporaries - like Van Morrison - simply stand there and have nutrients sprayed at them.
Fat people, gay people and fellow Irish people also came under his gloriously politically incorrect fire.
Pity the hapless heckler who dared take him on - Moran's response not only shut him up, it well and truly buried him. You probably wouldn't want to rub Moran up the wrong way. But you'd probably admire his putdowns if you did.
