Something different - Andrew Lawrence

One of the edgier acts on the comedy circuit, Andrew Lawrence is turning his bilious wit on society's obsession with self-improvement. His girlfriend and family must be relieved, but what about us, asks Jay Richardson

BEFORE I meet Andrew Lawrence, I watch him perform as part of The Dark Show at the Kilkenny Comedy Festival. He has been coerced by other acts, and audience expectations, into delivering his most depraved material. So he ridicules his girlfriend, brutally threatens his family and elicits laughter simply by mentioning Joseph Fritzel.

It's a superb showcase of his "greatest hits". It is also a decidedly niche performance that's unlikely to feature on Live At The Apollo anytime soon. "I guess that dark stuff comes easiest to me and when I started out it was that material I was mostly doing," reflects the man who named his last two Fringe shows How To Butcher Your Loved Ones and Social Leprosy For Beginners And Improvers. "Some of it was a bit harsh though, a little Jim Jeffries. All that anti-girlfriend stuff I don't tend to do any more. My parents aren't all that bothered. As long as I'm paying my bills and have enough money to keep my mind, body and soul together, they don't mind. But if they were coming to a gig, there's specific material I wouldn't do. The way Adam (Hills] introduced me (in Kilkenny] made it quite difficult to be honest, I had to play the weird freak. But nowadays it's much more toned down and I'm very much more myself."

Sitting opposite me with a cup of tea, his red hair recently cropped short and wearing a smart but staid jacket, the slight, thoughtful Lawrence, 28, looks every inch the librarian he once was. His new stage persona is a truer reflection of the real person behind it, so you're likely to see less of the growling, homicidal misfit denouncing his parents and an unfeeling world this summer. This interview, meanwhile, is one of the first he's conducted "out of character" and so there will be no berating "the Edinburgh C***s Festival" and the if.comedy panel for overlooking him (he has been nominated twice, for newcomer in 2006 and for the main prize in 2007, but hasn't yet won). Only those cold, black eyes – like those of a shark – behind his spectacles, occasionally underscored by a mischievous grin, suggest the serial killer manqué.

I delicately phrase a question about his features. "I played up to looking odd earlier in my career," he admits. "But I reckon I look pretty normal and it baffles me that journalists write so much about my physical appearance. Then again, I talk about it in my act and make a lot more of it than there actually is. It's very easy to make people see things if you come on and say 'I've got a creepy face'. There's a very small percentage of comedians who are attractive enough to go on stage, say that and have the audience dispute it."

He's intrigued by comparisons to the late television comedian Charlie Drake, "because I've never watched him, though he looks like one of my uncles, so maybe there is a facial resemblance" and frustrated by those with Michael Crawford, to the point where "I have to acknowledge that I sound like him at the start of my set because I've had so many people shouting out 'Frank Spencer!' Obviously, your voice sounds different in your own head, but even speaking in mine is a curiosity for some people."

Lawrence was an intensely focused cross country runner in his youth. He would train six days a week, two hours a day, and regularly attended the Fringe while studying English at St Andrews University. He also taught himself to play guitar, and his twisted songs won him the BBC New Act of the Year award in 2004. "I remember going up to Edinburgh the year before I did my first show, which was very musical and I had long, crazy hair," he says, "Seeing Tim Minchin performing his dark songs with his crazy hair and thinking 'F***, I have to change my act'. He's an amazing musician, so much better than I could ever be. You see people like that throughout your career, those who make you feel you've got to improve or change what you're doing.

"Comedians who are great musicians make me feel like a fraud, though having said that, if you can write funny lyrics it's about the comedy really, so I might come back to it. But the guitar was a crutch and it was nice to get rid of it. After two or three years as a comic, you start doing what you want to do rather than what comes instinctively. I don't know what the rate of progression is, but I feel that year on year I'm getting better and becoming more versatile."

He increasingly strives to perform material "that hits home with everybody" and recalls a rude awakening he endured in 2005. It was only his second year of stand-up, and he was playing the late-night showcase Spank at the Underbelly, when an aggressive challenge to an audience member ended in an ungainly scuffle.

"I was still new, maybe only performing three nights a week," he explains. "I was having a difficult time in my personal life and wasn't focusing coolly. I'd been used to everyone going mental for me and went on doing very self-indulgent, esoteric, poetic stuff that only a few people were really going for. And then I just got mixed up with this guy who wrestled me to the floor. It was inexperience that made me get him up on stage, because you should never do that, especially with someone who's quite angry and drunk, in the dark. There was an article about it in The Times that poked fun at me a bit which was quite unpleasant."

This was the same Spank run that saw Australian comic Steve Hughes heckle Lawrence to leave the stage and let him finish a show after the younger stand-up had overrun his 12-minute slot by half an hour – "You may want to close a set at 3am mate, but I don't. F***ing get off!" – and the same Edinburgh where he played Darren, the much-maligned offspring of Ian Boldsworth's Yorkshire blowhard Ray Peacock, in Ray Peacock & Son. As with his role of Marco, a Christian builder in the Johnny Vegas sitcom Ideal, he is refreshingly candid in describing these collaborations as "not my cup of tea", though Ideal "has a lot of people I really like and enjoy as comedians, and as a sitcom on BBC3, it could be a lot worse".

You sense that he puts far greater trust in his own comedy instincts. A series of snarky, five-minute Radio 2 skits on the arts, hastily written and recorded in a week earlier this year, were born from working with a group of producers that gave him almost free rein with 20 weeks of podcasts to accompany the Channel 4 reality series Shipwrecked last year.

"Half an hour each week slagging off the contestants," he recalls. "It was all improvising and there was so much to work with, just these horrendous people. I really enjoyed that.

"I'd love to do a television sitcom, not a traditional one, but a half-hour with loads and loads of different characters. But I'd never be allowed, because you're always beholden to meet producers halfway. Unless you do something great first."

Expectations are high for his new Fringe show, an attack on society's insatiable desire for self-improvement and realisation called Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! but he seems determined to confound them.

"The material I'm doing this year is more along the lines of social commentary," he says, "about this strange idea that you can achieve anything you set your mind to if you work hard enough. Which is just not true. As human beings we attribute value to something in accordance with how rare it is. But by that reasoning, and with six and a half billion of us on the planet, we must consider ourselves to be pretty worthless. Trying to elevate ourselves above everyone else by striving to own the best home or looking the best is misdirected and extreme ambition that can't really bring you purpose, value or any sense of happiness in life."

He acknowledges the personal contradiction with a twist of the old familiar self-loathing. "Certainly, like anyone I want to do something worthwhile with my existence. But it's tricky with this job, because it's an embarrassing, self-indulgent, pathetic job in a way."

• Andrew Lawrence – Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! is at the Pleasance Courtyard until 24 August. Today at 9:45pm.