Humour. It s a serious matter.
Jack Dee, the Jesus of Cool, the original sarky git with bad attitude and a rabid put-down line in sharp suits and sharper hooks, gives his trademark fright-smile and says, Ten years in comedy, and I still can t find anything funnier than a fart. The matrix for Snide Sods Behaving Badly smirks, and elaborates the theme. Farts are God s little gift to us. We ve all got arses. And they make funny noises. I wish I could grow out of laughing at farts. But I probably never will . . .
To Victor Lewis-Smith (of the Daily Mirror) this is a midget terrier in a flashy suit. Well so far, so half-right. We re in an unappealing dressing-room, dour and well-used, at the Nottingham Royal Centre. It has all the ambience of a 1950s British Rail waiting-room, with not even a lurking special effects penguin to be seen! It s a few tick-tocks to showtime. And Jack s still in his pale Chinos with his deep bottle-green shirt.
We ve done five-and-a-half thousand miles so far this tour, in the car . . . and we ll have done a hell of a lot more by the end of it. I count off 40-plus more or less one-a-night shows strung out through February and March, culminating in five Irish dates from the 2nd April, including one at the Dublin Olympia. After that comes The Grimleys, an hour-long TV special for Easter Sunday with Jack acting alongside Nigel Planer ( He was moaning that he didn t enjoy doing it, because he had to cover himself with cold gravy ), Samantha Phwoar-factor Janus . . . and Noddy Holder!
He pulls two tubular chairs together, scrunches up on one, stretches his legs across the other.
In a way, my stand-up is a diary of my life. And when I look back over the recorded stuff I ve done, I think it s actually quite a good diary of what I ve been doing over the last six or seven years. On stage there s nothing to hide behind. And there s no grey areas. You are totally naked, metaphorically. So the technique is to caricaturise an aspect of yourself. Then give that part of your character a voice. Allow it to speak. It is a part of me. If it wasn t, the audience wouldn t buy it. But I allow that monster to come out and be there on stage for two hours each night. Then I put it back in the box.
Jack Dee s on-stage monster can be a truly awesome adrenaline-pumping experience. But, post-penguin ads (for John Smith s Bitter), it s now also developing a more soft-centred line in cuddly routines about Mystic Meg and the Lottery ( Money can t bring you happiness . . . unless you spend it on booze and prozzies! ), about the cute things his two small daughters say . . . and, quelle surprise, even a Jimmy Savile impression! Since when was that cutting-edge? But tonight s diary entries from this earnest sawn-off stand-up with shotgun-vitriol style hits all the right chuckle-muscles, and sometimes draws real blood.
But are there subjects that comedy should not deal with? Subjects that are too dangerous?
I think there are subjects that one knows instinctively are not going to yield any comedy anyway, and even if they did, I wouldn t want to tap into them, he concedes. I m responsible, during the time that I m on stage, for the level at which the audience thinks. You can lead them down the path where it s nothing but dick jokes, and that will get laughs. But to me, that s not really what the point of being a comedian is about, which is to share what you really think with people, and not just go for the knee-jerk reaction.
There s a school of joke-ology which says that all humour, even in so-called politically correct comedy, sparks off victims and stereotypes.
Yes, it s certainly true that the new comedians still have their targets. And you could put forward a very reasonable argument that their targets are just as unfair as anyone else s. The old school had their targets and they were very self-righteous about other types of targets. You have Bernard Manning saying (in gruff wheezy mock-Manchesteroid), I ve never joked about handicapped children in some kind of high-and-mighty tone, as if it s OK to call someone a nigger, but in the same breath they say they d never tell a joke about the handicapped. As if one justifies the other.
I ve been aware that there is an element of that, and that there are taboo subjects in the new wave of comedy. That s something I ve tried to break down. I very deliberately take on a couple of sacred cows in the show tonight as you will see. But it s true. I can t say, for instance that I wouldn t do racist material, or I wouldn t be sexist without eventually becoming a hypocrite because I might also, at the same time, do jokes about . . . say, aristocrats, then somebody will come along after the show and say, Why do you pick on those people just because of how they were born?
Humour. It s a serious business.
But, with the Irish dates impending, how about some platitudes about how much Jack Dee loves Ireland and the warmth of Irish audiences? He laughs for the first time during the interview.
It s funny you should say that, actually, because I do . . . n

Jack Dee plays the Concert Hall, Limerick on Wed 2nd April; Connolly Hall, Cork on Thurs 3rd April; The Forum, Waterford on Fri 4th April; and the Olympia, Dublin on Sun 6th April.