"I am at my career peak. It couldn't get any better. Last year I had my own series, I played the Albert Hall, I won broadcaster of the year. Never Mind the Buzzcocks was the number one show on BBC2. I had a successful radio show. Now I'm going on tour and I've got my own show on TV. What else could I want?"
Mark Lamarr pulls on his cigarette. He chain-smokes throughout the interview, keeping the adrenaline up, the edge sharp. What else could he want? The smile fades as he says: "To write funnier jokes".
That old Woody Allen line. In Stardust Memories, aliens arrive on earth and Allen asks them: "What's the meaning of life?" "Write funnier jokes," one replies. Good point: for a comic there is nothing more important in life. And, for the moment at least, Mark Lamarr is a comic.
"I suspect that little need to be funny will go. It generally does - very few comics have that sort of longevity - but it doesn't seem to have gone yet. To niggle, that's the important thing for me. Seinfeld said the comic's mind is always active and always irritable, and I think that's true. You're always thinking `What's the angle here?' "
Lamarr is always trying to work out the angle, both to questions and his own answers. Typically, he will puncture his own rhetoric half way through a reply. Just after happily listing his achievements, for instance, he looks grim: "I've always thought I've got another two or three years on television because I'm relatively successful. But I'm not needed, I know that. Cilla has got a much brighter, more secure future than me. Television is something to do for a little while, then it's back to my job."
He's irritable, endlessly doubting, even self-doubting, as he reckons a comic should be. But hardly the angry young man he's been described as. Before he arrives for the interview, I set aside the obvious questions: what does he look like after he's just washed his hair? Bobby Charlton? A guitarist from Genesis? I wonder which chair he will take. Will he sit opposite, confrontationally? Or alongside, chummily?
In fact, he sits at right angles, so that he can monologue into the middle distance. But now and again he will throw a sidelong glance and, between the 1950s throwback quiff and the sharp suit, that baby face looks vulnerable, imploring. It seems he wants to be liked. He clearly has his good side: a few days after we meet he has his trademark quiff chopped off for charity.
Here comes one of those glances now. "I lacerate myself all the time. Morally, as a human being, I'm full of guilt. I don't know where that comes from: I wasn't brought up Catholic or Jewish. Even when I do something good, it's never good enough." He looks into the middle distance again, blowing smoke, undermining what he's just said. "I sometimes blow my own trumpet. I'm good - I know I am. There's no point me being humble about it."
Lamarr is back to his job, the stand-up circuit. He started in Swansea; 40 gigs later he'll hit Bedford. (On February 26th he's in Dublin.) A grim way to spend February, March and April? "It's not grim compared with 10 people in a room above a pub in Hackney that I used to play, and be desperate to play. I'd be excited about it all week. I'd be so excited to hitch up to London for no money and sleep on a friend's floor."
That was 15 years ago. The youngest of five children, Lamarr (originally Mark Jones) was born in Swindon in 1966. His mother was a cleaner, his father a maintenance engineer in a cake factory. He left Swindon with a rockabilly quiff, the badge of a kid brought up on estates where you belonged to a tribe or you were nobody, and a desire to spit in the eye of the careers officer who told him his dream of being a journalist was "a little bit far-fetched". He never went to college. "When I was 19, I was performing at university. I was younger than the people I was performing to. It sounds like I'm doing the university-of-life line now, but that's my job - being a comic - and you wouldn't learn how to do it other than by playing at university."
Do you perceive yourself as a workingclass bloke with a chip on his shoulder? "Up to a point, yeah. But `chip on his shoulder' is a reductive term for someone who cares about where they come from. You never get `chip on your shoulder' about the upper classes - you only get it about black people or the working classes. Yeah, I'm pissed off about things, loads of things. The world isn't perfect. Comics should be poking at things - that's what good comedy is." Poking at things? "If I want to do something about menstruation, then I should be allowed to - more so if that winds women up."
Lamarr is nonetheless amazed to have been accused of misogyny. "In the last month - I swear this is true - I've been called a feminist, a misogynist, gay and homophobic. I can at best be one of those things; I doubt if I'm any of them. But I haven't got the cunning to fight the public perception of me."
It's the misogynist jibe that really irks. "People say, `You've made fun of Caprice and Gail Porter' and I think, `Well, not only are they not examples of great womanhood, but I've never made fun of them for being women. Ever.' I make fun of people, you know? It would have been sexist not to make fun of Gail Porter posing nude. To treat someone as different and inferior because of their sex - that's sexism. If that's laddism then I am laddish."
Still, there has been a gynaecological theme in Lamarr's stand-up that can come across as a hostile obsession. In his 1997 show he imagined the Queen drunk on gin, posed naked for a photographer. That would be his dream photo for the £50 note. He also told the story of a woman comic who, during her act, repeatedly walked past a table in a short skirt, while a man hissed: "I can smell your c**t." For a moment, it seemed there might be a revenge punchline coming, the woman getting her own back on the heckler. Instead the heckler's female partner was portrayed as complicit, collapsed in laughter. What Lamarr seemed to like about the story was that the woman comic was trapped, unable to publicly rebuff the heckler (since it had been whispered) and unable to escape the abuse. Why tell such a story?
During a warm-up gig in Northampton for the new tour, Lamarr unleashed some of his new material about British hostility to Europe. "I'd set it up as obviously as I could, saying that in two years we won't be able to wake up with an alarm clock in the mornings, we'll have to have Alpine horns and an oompah band, we'll have to ski down the High Street, have sodomy with our boss, live off Battenburg and shrews and taramasalata. It was very obvious where I was coming from: I was attacking that Little Englander mentality. And people in the audience were yelling: `Yeah! Bloody right!' I had to stop and say: `I can't believe you've missed this point.' " Forty nights of such misunderstandings: it could be a good tour.
Why do people take him for a misogynist and all the other things he protests that he is not? "A lot of the time I think it's a problem with my mode of voice rather than what I actually say. People want to assume that I'm a working-class lager lout and that's fine." Is it? Isn't Lamarr just affecting to be sanguine about something that must hurt? Again, the reflex self-criticism: "I have to accept that, and I do it myself. That's the price of doing what you do in public." You come across as aggressive. "Well, I think I am. But what I always think is, how does that manifest itself? It manifests itself in humour. It doesn't manifest itself in hitting someone. W.C. Fields used to joke that anyone who hates children can't be all bad. Does that mean he hated kids? It's a joke, for f**k's sake."
Mark Lamarr plays The Olympia Theatre, Dublin next Saturday