Proven in Britain, Two Comics Try to Take New York Dylan Moran likes to start with a pang. In his last two stand-up shows, Mr. Moran, an internationally popular comic who has been making a determined push into the American market, began with a greeting, then an anguished stammer, before mumbling the same sentence: "I don't know." It's a modest introduction, but a calculated one. A sardonic mop-haired Irishman, Mr. Moran, 41, is establishing a tone and a persona. He's thoughtful, ambivalent, mildly embarrassed by the attention. And while he is going to spend the next hour or so telling jokes, he has more on his mind than laughs. Or at least, that's the image he projects before the punch lines fly. In a show last year at Theater 80 - a Manhattan theater much smaller than the ones he is used to playing in England, where he broke through a dozen years ago with the sitcom "Black Books" - Mr. Moran quickly pivoted to a one-liner about his inability to cope with daily life: "Days are a stupid length, you know, they're just long enough to get regret, then you have to go to sleep." He is one of two comics arriving from across the Atlantic within the next month with new shows. Daniel Kitson, an Englishman who has built an American following through performances at St. Ann's Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and alt-comedy rooms, brings his latest effort, "After the Beginning. Before the End," to the Barrow Street Theater on July 7. Mr. Moran begins his first North American tour this month, stopping at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on Wednesday. Mr. Kitson and Mr. Moran are both highly verbal, rumpled comics who have had great success performing stand-up in theaters. While Mr. Kitson is more reclusive, neither is particularly interested in using the Internet for comedy. Mr. Kitson has a more personal style, while Mr. Moran holds forth on current events, gender and national politics. But they share a searching, shambling delivery. Partly because they work in theaters, where there is less expectation of rapid-fire punch lines than in comedy clubs, they are comfortable going long periods without a laugh. That's not the only cultural difference. American comics who cut their teeth in clubs can be just as smart as their counterparts across the Atlantic, but they are less likely to flaunt it. Mr. Moran, by contrast, comes off as cocktail party rogue, standing onstage holding a wine glass. The title of his last show stems from a quip by the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser. A colleague had said that while a double negative equaled a positive, a double positive is never a negative, and Morgenbesser offered as a succinct rebuttal, "Yeah yeah." That kind of obscure, borderline pretentious reference tells you Mr. Moran isn't aiming to be an Everyman. He is at his best creating ornate sentences whose similes and strings of adjectives have a propulsive momentum. And his stand-up shows typically involve a process in which he grows more animated, slurring more and loosening up. He begins as a quiet neurotic, but evolves into a loudmouth near closing time. His early awkward movements are more compelling, and his political points are generally sharper when made in understatement rather than bluster. Wondering about female Islamic suicide bombers, he starts the joke loudly, then delivers the punch line in an offhanded aside: "Men are promised 72 virgins. But I bet women are offered something much more modest: Flexible working hours, decent child care, something like that. His jokes have the rambling feel of a free-associated yarn, but there's a sturdy structure that keeps him moving from topic to topic. Occasionally, he would benefit from more time thinking through a subject to get a more original perspective. However debonair and erudite he might come off, the intellectual foundations of Mr. Moran's jokes are often predictable and mundane. The English are emotionally repressed, the Irish emotional and Americans are fat. The left is dull and the right is cruel. Country folk lead worse lives. Religion is just panic about death. Technology is the new god. Once Mr. Moran begins, you have a good idea what his take will be. The suspense is how he gets there. In "Yeah Yeah," he basically does the same "men are brutes" bit that Tim Allen does, except instead of imagining men as grunting apes, he imitates the monster from Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" (although the joke would work better if he imagined women as the monster's creator, not the author). His skewering of heavy metal makes a boring point, but in the roundabout, baroque style of a pub philosopher. "Its look is a kind of argument, an argument against Darwinism," he says. What the people involved are saying is that attraction is not necessary for reproduction. On the comedian Marc Maron's podcast, Mr. Moran mused that there were two comedic approaches: the kind that digs into the "stuff of life" and the kind that dances away from it. He seems to see his humor as the former, but that doesn't appear to be where his gifts lie. Moreover, you need only to look at the brilliant work of Mr. Kitson to see it's a false choice. With formal daring, his comedy can be elusive and discursive, but in a style that also illustrates the way his mind works, not to mention his philosophical outlook. His shows are built on a respect for complexity and uncertainty. The form telegraphs an awareness of the inability to have all the answers. In his evasions, I would argue, he still captures the stuff of life. Put another way, Mr. Kitson doesn't tell us he doesn't know. He shows us. Dylan Moran's tour continues on Friday in Boston and Saturday in Philadelphia; dylanmoran.com.