'That was a joke I made'

Today, after years of writing jokes for other people, the comedian Paul Whitehouse is famous in his own right. The downside seems to be that drunks holler his catchphrases back at him in pubs, and his marriage has dissolved. The advantages in his case are less clear.

Fame normally rounds off people's edges and confers a certain patina of smooth self-satisfaction. But not with Paul Whitehouse. He is too nervy, too self-conscious. There is no quiet confidence, no smugness. He doesn't even sulk.

Nor does Whitehouse even look the part. He is skinny, with a worn, rather lined face and speaks broad Estuary English with 'f-in' 'ell' or 'innit?' in nearly every sentence.

Periodically he lapses into one of his many funny voices or says, in a way that sounds a bit desperate, "Look, that was a joke I made!" or, "Look, almost a joke there," or, "Humour, see! Humour!" So, no patina here.

Whitehouse is still very much a backroom boy at heart. We meet in a suite in the Langham Hilton Hotel, near Oxford Circus, which Whitehouse has booked for our interview. It is not what he likes to do, but, as he points out, "a suite at the Langham isn't exactly the coal face."

The expense of the hotel is probably justified, as Whitehouse's output is prodigious: this autumn he seems to be everywhere. From October he's touring Britain with The Fast Show, the comedy sketch programme that first made him famous.

He has a book coming out - an autobiography of Ron Manager, a sentimental, semi-senile football pundit, who is possibly his favourite character. And he has just finished filming a second series of the BBC2 comedy drama Happiness, which he co-wrote and in which he stars.

Not that Whitehouse is complimentary about his own work. The Ron Manager book - which is one joke stretched out for 224 pages - he describes as "a curate's egg", and then he drifts off into a reverie over whether there is such a thing as a curate bird.

As for Happiness, he explains that on uninspired days, "What we [would] do is write crap, put a bit of 1970s music over it and hope that nobody noticed."

This isn't entirely fair. Happiness, about the mid-life crisis of Danny Spencer, an emotionally dysfunctional children's writer, is a well observed, cleverly constructed drama. But it is part of the new trend for complicated, uncomfortable 'almost funny' humour that makes viewers squirm in their seats and give the occasional wan smile.

It is also a far cry from the laugh-out-loud surreal sketches of The Fast Show where, just with the help of a silly hat or some hair gel, Whitehouse was transformed into an oleaginous gentleman's outfitter ("Suits you, sir,") or a drunken QC ("I was verr verr drunk,") or a naive Mancunian teenager ("Brilliant!").

"I used to be very funny," says Whitehouse in a rather matter-of-fact voice, "but I used it all up in my characters. My sister said recently, "You are not funny any more." Hahaha! And, to a certain extent, I think that's true."

Whitehouse started imitating accents and doing voices when still a small child. His family were originally from the Rhondda Valley in Wales, but they moved to Enfield, in north London, when Whitehouse was four, and his father, Harry, found a job in personnel at a chemical company.

Whitehouse's parents were keen opera-goers, and his mother, Anita, worked as an understudy at Covent Garden. Whitehouse says he was more interested in music than comedy, though even that 'was just an average teenage attempt to latch on to rock and roll as a means to get laid'.

He thinks perhaps the only thing he really has a talent for is singing. In the late 1970s Whitehouse went to the University of East Anglia, where he played in a couple of bands and, rather as an afterthought, it seems, read Development Studies.

After a year he dropped out and moved back to London, but he kept up with his university friends Charlie Higson (co-creator of The Fast Show) and Dave Cummings (who would later co-write Happiness).

Whitehouse got a job with the environmental health departments in first Enfield then Hackney. He says he was too low down the hierarchy to do check-ups on dirty restaurants, so instead he just answered the telephone.

At this point Whitehouse sits forward on the sofa and picks up an imaginary receiver: (Bureaucratic weed voice) "Yes, hello... Pharaoh ants? Yes, we can come round. That'll be next year. Morning or afternoon? Can't be more specific than that."

After several years Whitehouse ditched his council job and set himself up as a plasterer, working with a friend. "We used to go fishing together, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to get out of Hackney Council. We could do a little bit of plastering, earn a bit of cash and go fishing. Simple pleasures and hard work and killing fish."

And in the evenings Whitehouse met up with his mates in the pub. His old university friends had also gravitated to Hackney, and the group now included a slightly younger man called Harry Enfield, who was starting out as a stand-up comedian.

Enfield asked if he could borrow one of the characters Whitehouse "did" in the pub - a Greek Cypriot kebab shop owner called Stavros. The two men began to collaborate, and Charlie Higson joined in.

Inspired by his day job, Whitehouse came up with the idea for Loadsamoney, the loutish, cash-waving plasterer who became an archetype of the Thatcher years. By 1987 Loadsamoney was a regular on Channel 4's Saturday Night Live. The character made Harry Enfield famous and launched Whitehouse as a comedy writer.

Later, when Enfield got his own shows, Whitehouse started to perform as well as write. Physically he was the perfect foil: whereas Enfield is big and beefy, Whitehouse is as light as a bird. Enfield's features are too big for his face, Whitehouse's are too small. Enfield always looks like Enfield, Whitehouse always looks like someone else.

Soon Whitehouse was everywhere, branching out to work with Jonathan Ross (One Hour with Jonathan Ross) and Paul Merton (The Paul Merton Show) and pretty well everybody else within a certain comedy circle. Finally, in 1994, Whitehouse and Higson were commissioned by BBC2 to create their own sketch show.

The result was The Fast Show, a great success, gaining, over three series, first a cult following and then a mass audience. The show was more offbeat and chaotic than, say, Harry Enfield's work, with the humour moving further and further away from simple gags and straight jokes.

Whitehouse says he learnt from Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer that, in the right hands, essentially unfunny things could be made funny. But unfunny things could also remain unfunny, and sometimes the performers have clearly enjoyed themselves too much. Like Monty Python, The Fast Show has whole sketches that make nobody laugh.

But the show did introduce a panoply of memorable characters: Fat Sweaty Coppers, the Pub Bore, the Deaf Stuntman. Whitehouse has a particular fondness for characters - such as the drunken QC Rowley Birkin, or the absurd Channel 9 newsreaders - who speak gobbledegook.

And today, as he sits on the hotel sofa eating a banana and talking, talking, talking, all these characters re-emerge. He changes tone. He puts on different voices. He is so involved in the sounds and gestures and wordplay of conversation that it is often hard to get straight answers.

So where, among all the voices, is the real Whitehouse? Look no further than Danny Spencer in Happiness. Whitehouse wrote Danny's lines for himself and doesn't seem to have to act at all to play the part.

The similarities are many. Danny has a coterie of mates who meet up in the pub every night. Whitehouse has what he calls a "legion of friends" who, if not in the pub every night, seem to spend their lives employing each other. At awkward moments Danny, like Whitehouse, has a tendency to resort to speaking in silly voices.

Danny has ambiguous feelings about women, so does Whitehouse. Danny's marriage was failing; Whitehouse left his wife, Fiona, in autumn 2000 after filming the first series of Happiness.

Danny owes his success to the Plasticene bear that he created, but he wants to be famous in his own right and feels overshadowed by his bear, which gets all the plaudits. Whitehouse spent years writing for the far more prominent Harry Enfield, and there might be a slight edge in his reference to Enfield's "bloody-four-million-pound-palace-in f-in'-Notting-Hill."

There are, however, occasional anomalies. Danny, for example, has a hopelessly low sperm count, but Whitehouse and his ex-wife have two daughters (Sophie, 9, and Molly, 7). Whitehouse explains the low sperm count: "We thought it would be quite funny."

Then he pauses and adds, just a little tetchily, "It wouldn't be funny if it was a woman, though, would it? If a woman's fertility was in question, we wouldn't laugh, but if it is male, we have a right old laugh about it."

Then Whitehouse pulls back his hair, to show how it is faintly receding at either side of his forehead. "See! I have to learn to live with that. If this were a female problem, there would be endless magazine space devoted to it, but as it is just a bloke you go, 'Aaah haaa!'" he says, pointing his finger.

I point out that his old age is still a long way off, but Whitehouse quickly interjects. "I am 44. That is fairly old, isn't it? I mean six years and it is all over isn't it? Drool, piss and incontinence." A pause, and then he adds, a little bleakly, "That was close to humour!"

This cheerless perspective is typical. We don't, Whitehouse believes, improve with time. According to him people don't learn much from their experiences - and that is why Danny, from the day of his wife's funeral onward, is "on a slight downwards trajectory".

Is the same true for Whitehouse? Is he at his peak, just waiting to slip slowly downwards? Now, when he says he has run out of characters and can't envisage a third series of Happiness, there must be a question as to what he'll do next.

I suggest acting. After all, he is a brilliant mimic, and Johnny Depp - who played a cameo role in an episode of The Fast Show - has called him "the greatest actor of all time". But Whitehouse shrugs.

He says actors have to 'emote', and anyway he likes the writing because (another shrug) "nobody bothers you, you know, and you can just sort of get on."

And there is another reason: this quirky, twitchy man simply has too much sense of the ridiculous. He has, it turns out, already accepted his first small Hollywood part. He is to be a stage manager in Neverland, the new Miramax film about JM Barrie.

"I don't know where to f-in' start. In this Neverland I have to say, 'Oh, Lord!' at one point, when this kid has an accident. I am terrified! How am I going to do that without laughing, or doing it in a funny voice?"

• The 'Fast Show' tour begins in Portsmouth on 1 October and runs until 23 November; telephone 0906 558 1058 for details.
  • 'Marvellous, Isn't it?' (Headline, £14.99) by Ron Manager, aka Paul Whitehouse, will be published on 7 October and can be ordered for £12.99 plus £1.99 p&p from Telegraph Books Direct.