Basically Burns - Brendon Burns interview

Brendon Burns, the 2007 if.comedy winner, is back at the Fringe intent on a celebration of his greatest triumph – and a return to the daft, over-the-top comic audiences love

'I'M a Fringe comedian. This place built me," says Brendon Burns as we sail round Edinburgh on an open-topped bus, looking up at the castle and down at the crowds milling in the streets below. He claims he nearly didn't come back to Edinburgh this year, despite winning the if.comedy award (formerly the Perrier), the comedy world's highest accolade, in 2007. But I don't know if I believe him. Could he really have stayed away from this city, which has seen his biggest triumph – and which also helped bring him to the brink of disaster?

This year the Australian comic is playing the Assembly Rooms. Because he can. His show – and I'm not entirely sure this is ironic – is called Brendon Burns in F**K You I'm Brendon F**king Burns (Again) Part VI. The poster is plastered all over the Georgian pillars of the Assembly Rooms – "I bribed them," he claims. In the poster, he appears dressed as Conan the Barbarian, flanked by sweaty "slutty dancers".

"Last year the best piece of advice I got after winning the award was when someone came up to me and said: 'Don't forget to enjoy it'."

He has certainly made the most of it. He went on to tour his show, So I Suppose This is Offensive Now? around the world, and there are plans to take it to America next year. He has also signed a book contract for Fear of Hat Loss in Las Vegas, the tale of a drug-fuelled adventure in the American desert when he, The Aristocrats producer Paul Provenza and comic Barry Castagnola went in search of a photograph of perfect happiness. The book chronicles the road trip which was supposed to be part three of his Brendon Vs Burnsy stand-up trilogy before it all went horribly wrong.

As an unexpected bonus, Burns has also managed to hold down a relationship for the last 11 months, with a journalist called Laura. "I wasn't looking for anyone – but that's the way it is," he says. "When you don't need someone in your life they come along. I have never been in a stable enough situation in my life to be able to build something before."

We meet up over bacon sandwiches in the upstairs bar in the Assembly Rooms. He has just done the third night of his Edinburgh run, and things are beginning to take shape. "I feel like I have just realised what this show is about," he says. "At first I thought it was about talking to the guy in the audience who hadn't come before. Then I realised it is about the people in the audience who have been coming to see me for the last ten years. Last night I really felt like my people were there."

Perhaps surprisingly, Burns arrives in Edinburgh with an idea, but without a fully written show. He prefers to let the show build over the three weeks, which is why diehard fans, who also make a point of seeing him at Glastonbury, often book to see him on the first and last nights of the run.

"It was great last year after I won the award because the last night had been fully booked for ages," he recalls. "Everyone wanted tickets but they were all booked, and when I played that night the audience acted like it was their award as well."

He admits that the first couple of nights at the Assembly Rooms felt a bit strange, and he does feel a bit guilty about leaving the Pleasance, "because they put up with so much from me over the years".

The previous night's show, he tells me, was something special, thanks to the presence on the front row of a couple called Neil and Elaine, who have been coming to see him for ten years. Burns added an extra routine in praise of Elaine's dirty laugh. "I did that when she came to the show before – so she was getting a double laugh at that."

When Burns told the audience he had met a woman he really liked, Elaine in the front row lifted up her arms and cheered.

"That was real. She was really happy I was still on the straight and narrow and that the whole thing hadn't been a fluke. It wasn't bullshit. My girlfriend was really worried about me talking about her in the show but when I started getting that sort of reaction from the audience I felt it was one of the most romantic things I had ever done in my life."

Although he's been praised in the past for his autobiographical honesty on stage, he says the most important thing to him now is making people laugh, rather than exposing his innermost secrets. "At the end of the day the only way to be original is through personal experience. But the bottom line is I'm not going to tell some old Edinburgh couple anything they haven't already learned in their own lives."

You can see where he's coming from. When Brendon Burns did set out to turn his personality inside-out for the sake of his art, he ended up in The Priory with an addictive personality completely out of control.

In part one of his Brendon vs Burnsy trilogy he described breaking up with his fiancée and decided to pit his real personality against his comic persona. In part two he tried to get his girlfriend back – and to get his audience at Glastonbury high on mushrooms. And in part three he ended up in The Priory, getting kicked by horses in the name of therapy and becoming as mad as a bag of snakes.

He describes his 2006 show, which went into his mental meltdown in excruciating detail, as "one of the most terrifying things I ever had to do… I was doing stuff that was really painful to have to relive on stage".

Not surprisingly, he got a lot of stick for it. There was a lot of bitching about "rehab chic" – as well incomprehension from some quarters that former wild boy Brendon Burns had become a poster boy for sobriety. I don't blame him for not wanting to go back there. But I still maintain that show was one of the most amazing comedy gigs I have ever seen in my life. It was the sort of thing that can only happen once – an act of heroism. You were watching a person use all their intelligence, skill and humour to patch together a precious human life. It was life-changing.

You can understand why it's hard for Brendon Burns to see it that way, but he admits that a lot of people have privately told him they shifted their own attitude towards drink and drugs after seeing that show.

So what does he want to achieve this year? You can see he still can't shake off his competitive edge, despite winning the ultimate accolade: "I feel obligated," he says. "I want in five years' time for them to look at my work and say, 'We picked the right guy'." And although he is still determined to enjoy himself that doesn't mean to say he's entirely relaxed.

"I realise now I was apprehensive about coming back," he says. "I said to my manager I would only go back to Edinburgh if I had a funny idea. I said, 'I don't want to rip people off'. And then I started thinking, 'What could be more enjoyable than going back to celebrate?'

"As the year has progressed it has become more and more apparent that people want to see me celebrate. I have got what everyone dreams of up here."

When you think of it in those terms it all makes sense – the Conan the Barbarian costume, the "slutty dancers", the shouting and the chandeliers. And Brendon Burns's genuine hope is that his audience, old and new, will enjoy themselves as much as he does.

You can see why he's happy to return to fundamentals – to being the daft, over the top, ridiculous, shouty Brendon Burns and making everyone laugh. There's a sense of relief and of gratitude that, despite whatever he has put his friends and family through in the past, he has managed to come out into the light at the end of the tunnel.

It sounds obvious, but he seems to have learned not to take himself and his job too seriously. His show is called Part VI "because I'm just taking the piss out of myself, that I ever did anything as ludicrous as having a stand-up trilogy", he says.

"It's a frivolous job. It's a silly occupation and you have to appreciate there are a lot of people out there who don't have a silly occupation, who are spending their well-earned money on coming to see you and who want to laugh their asses off. What's so wrong with just allowing them to do that? And I need that girl in the front row to tell me what's funny. Because, left to my own devices, I'm just annoying."

• Brendon Burns in F**k You I'm Brendon F**king Burns (Again) Part VI is at Assembly @ George Street, 8:55pm, until 24 August.