Dry humour

This Edinburgh will be different for Jim Jefferies. For a start, the famously hard living Australian comedian is bringing his pregnant girlfriend over from the States, where he now lives. He will also have a writing team in tow for his FX television show Legit, commissioned the week we catch up. On top of this, he can't get blind drunk like he used to.

 “I would like to get up at 4pm and go to bed at 8am the morning after- that was my Edinburgh day," he explains on the phone from Miami, where he has been gigging, "I have been trying to be a good guy and avoiding the scrapes I used to get myself into."

This more sober approach started after his last Edinburgh show in 2010, the frankly titled Alcoholocaust. I forget that Jim is only 35 and that, in Edinburgh terms, this could be considered bailing out early. It's commendable, of course, but will it leave a pint-sized hole in his comedy? "Of course, I am worried about losing my edge. Giving up drinking and drugs, to a certain extent, your stories become a little less interesting. You don't get yourself into as many scraps when you're not going out as much."

Jefferies contends that he's weathered the storm of contentment and that it's the next show that worries him, not this one (named, appropriate to his life's latest milestone, Fully Functional). "I am planning on being a poor father, so I think I will get some good stories out of that. Also, I am looking forward to my parents being more senile. I ran out of stories about my childhood and now family routines are starting again, with both my parents in their 70s and going slightly crazy."

It's hard to imagine such an easy talking man ever drying up, but there's another threat to his shtick aside from sobriety: his celebrity.

Settling in LA has changed everything for Jefferies, and success with Legit will inevitably consolidate his break. "LA is a nice place to live. Rhys Darby lives round the corner and he has a great big swimming pool; you just don’t have that in the UK. Everyone has two living rooms and a dining room here; I don’t know what to do with the space and it's still cheaper than buying a place in London... I'm going to sound like a rich prick aren’t I?"

The enjoyment Jefferies soaks up from the California lifestyle is all the more satisfying because the US validated him in a way that the UK never did. "The UK never made me a citizen. I was there for nine years but kept getting six month visas. It always bothered me that if I got drunk and disorderly or caught with a gram of coke in my pocket, I could be kicked out at any moment. Now, as a resident somewhere, I feel more comfortable."

Jefferies is keen not to get too comfortable though, in case boredom creeps in.

"I don’t want to be Russell Brand or Ricky Gervais and talk about celebrity shit, though I know it is hard not to talk about what surrounds you. I always liked Billy Connolly when he was a welder, now I am not into it him anymore. I wanted to hear more about being poor than the fact he met Michael Palin at a party." 

Limiting himself to one celebrity story in Fully Functional, Jefferies promises variety. "There's a sex story about a threesome that went wrong, a story about disability, a routine about religion and some cock jokes." 

Loyal fans won't be left wanting. Meanwhile, his act has gone down well with his growing American fanbase. Even in the one celebrity story involving meeting Paul McCartney and Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, he “comes out of it looking like a dick.” For him, the heroic status is one of the great divides between US and UK comedy – one that he has now crossed. “I think US comics find the sensibility of British comics refreshing, but I figured out that they are very big on “hero comedy.” You tell a story and, at the end, you say some thing really funny and everyone else looks like an idiot. British comedy is where someone else says something funny and you look like the idiot. I much prefer not coming out squeaky clean.” 

Given that this is a man who has used his routine about taking a friend with muscular dystrophy to a brothel as the basis of his new sitcom's first episode, it's doubtful anyone will see Jefferies as squeaky clean. I'll drink to that, even if he can't.