As I arrive at out hotel assignation Dave McSavage is in animated discussion with the hotel manager. It transpires that Dave has been asked to leave the bar on a previous occasion and the manager is wary of admitting him today. After he schmoozes the staff for several minutes we eventually retire to a quiet corner inside where I ask him what he’s done to alarm the staff?

“It was ages ago,” he explains in his patrician drawl. “I was with a group of friends and one girl was showing her breasts which I thought was a very nice thing for her to do but the manager disagreed and we had words. I may have been thrown bodily out. I don’t remember the details but it got quite ugly. I do remember the girl’s breasts were beautiful.”

What’s interesting is that McSavage’s unique charm has insured his re-admittance after what sounds suspiciously like an alcohol fueled near orgy which descended into fisticuffs. Anyone who has seen his live show will be familiar with the dichotomy at the centre of his persona. It’s an unlikely mixture of rudeness of cosmic proportions, social stereotyping that treads a fine line between highly offensive and just plain offensive and genuine comic brilliance. Operating largely without prepared material he uses his audience as his subject matter, flirting outrageously with the ladies and pouring scorn on the men. “Why would you bring a date to a comedy gig?” he asks one hapless gent. “It’s because laughter releases the same chemicals in the human brain as arousal and orgasm… So I’m turning your girlfriend on, really. And I’m not suggesting that you can’t make your girlfriend laugh… But not for as long as I can.”

Other subjects that frequently cause him to vent his spleen include the Dublin Inner City accent – “It’ll eventually evolve into a series of screeches’ – Dalkey’s young professionals – “They do fuck all but park expensive cars very badly and talk about cheese” – and the innate unattractiveness of Irish women compared to their Eastern European counterparts. Not surprisingly, McSavage occasionally puts his audiences collective back up, usually managing to win them over again like some kind of mad matador of mirth.

In person McSavage seems genuinely unaware that anyone might take offence at his gibes. “Of course I want them to like me,” he insists, “but I just go about it a little differently to most other comedians. Most people have a dark side and we’re not encouraged to share that so we deny it, but giving a voice to those emotions and concerns and desires shows them to be universal. Everybody gets pissed off by bad service, everybody feels lousy when the girl you really fancy doesn’t want to know, everybody, at least anyone with any sense, hates their job. But we don’t say this stuff out loud. I just express those feelings for the audience. And they laugh because they recognise themselves. And I probably shouldn’t say this but I am joking, it’s not supposed to be taken as my real opinion. Well, mostly not.”

Although he’s been performing comedy in Dublin for less than a year he’s been a street entertainer for most of his adult life. It seems a strange career choice for a priviliged middle-class boy whose father, Fianna Fail’s David Andrews, was in cabinet as Minister for Foreign Affairs?

“We didn’t think we were privileged,” he insists, “It was just how we lived. We certainly weren’t spoiled. In fact I think it may have been my dad that made me think about performing as a career. Because when I was a kid I was conscious of the buzz that surrounded him when he was out working or campaigning and I liked the fact that he was important. People knew he was ‘that guy’.The other thing is that I’d no interest in school or academic work so politics and business weren’t an option. So I’d no use for any privilege that might have come my way. And that made me feel quite defensive and alienated, I just didn’t fit in. And because I think my father would have been disappointed that I wasn’t a success at school I tried to impress him in other ways and I loved making him laugh. And that was a kind of approval. In a way my audiences now are like my dad and I’m still saying, ‘Look I’m fucked up but I’m funny so… please like me… The thing that got me playing guitar was that my uncle was Pete Briquette in The Boomtown Rats and Johnny Fingers was my cousin and I watched them get really big and thought, ‘Performing, yeah’.”

After a failed Leaving Cert he travelled widely in Europe, the USA and Asia working as a waiter – “I got fired for pulling a knife on my boss, but I’m sure I was joking” – a labourer and helping to build a food kitchen in Peru, where he was obliged to leave the country after contracting dysentery. While working as an English teacher he found himself busking for the first time in a Tokyo underground station.

“The first time I busked,” he remembers, “it was Golden Week in Japan, where everyone gets an extra month’s pay so I made a fortune. Basically I’ve been working as a street entertainer ever since. You won’t get rich but you can sustain a lifestyle. But gradually I realised that you made more money from making people laugh and when I came back to Dublin I decided to combine the street thing with the regular comedy circuit. The indoor stuff’s different because it’s a captive audience. And I’ve learned where the lines are, I think. I have in the past been punched on the street and one guy kicked my guitar in ‘cos I was singing to his girlfriend. And in Dublin I try to avoid the drunks and the junkies, though the homeless kids are really cool, they’ve helped me out occasionally when I’m getting hassle. So really doing indoor gigs is easier since comedy audiences have a better understanding of what I’m doing.”

McSavage briefly made the headlines in 1998 when the tabloids reported his arrest in Edinburgh.

“That was really just because they thought it would embarrass my dad, which it didn’t at all,” he recalls, “though he was concerned I was okay. I was in Edinburgh and another act set up right next to my patch and in order to keep the crowds interest I suggested that I was going to set my penis on fire. Well it did keep the crowd but somebody complained and I got arrested for obscenity and led away in handcuffs. And for protesting that in a cultural city like Edinburgh you weren’t allowed to say the word penis. Really, I think the cop just hated the fact that his city was full of fucking idiot performers, and you can’t really blame him.”

But did he actually intend to set his penis on fire?

“I honestly don’t know,” he muses. “Maybe I should think about bringing it back into the act.”