GAGGING ORDER

So, yes, just a mouth. The only significant thing about it is that it's there in front of me. On display. Not hidden away. As we sit in London's Groucho Club this morning, The Boy With Tape On His Face hasn't. He is untaped. He is tapeless. He is naked, you might say.

Or, if you prefer, he is revealing his secret identity. Because I'm not talking to The Boy, I'm talking to his alter ego Sam Wills. Who not only has no tape on his mouth, he also speaks. Something The Boy never does.

"I think a lot of people fill in the blanks naturally," he says in a New Zealand accent little weathered from half a dozen years living in the UK. "I think people become their own storytellers, which is a lot of fun."

We are discussing the power of silence. If you haven't seen Wills's alter ego – and after he won the Panel Prize at last year's Foster's Edinburgh Comedy Awards and Best Breakthrough Act in the Chortle Awards the year before, as well as selling out shows during the festival for the last three years, that's fewer people than before – his act is all about audience interaction, comedy props, a kind of sweet innocence and no words. Not one.

"There are a lot of people who read into the show way too much," he says. "People send me messages about the theme of the show I never thought of." He remembers his first show in which he ends up trapped in a snow globe at one point. "One guy said it showed we were all trapped into a society. And I was like 'this is just me being silly'. It's just purely about being silly and having fun."

Wills is good at having fun. He's been a comedian, a street performer, a juggler, a teacher of jugglers. And now a mime artist. Not the hippest thing in the world really. Mime, I tell him, makes me think of David Bowie at his most foolish, of Kenny Everett in tights and a top hat with a flower on top. "When you say the word 'mime' you always have the image of the stripy top, someone walking against the wind, somebody wearing tights. And it's the worst thing possible. But I never consider myself a mime. I've been labelled that. But I don't do any mime at all. I'm a prop comic and I do interactive comedy."

But your act is all about the face, I point out. It's all about your eyes. Isn't that mime? "But I can't go on stage with just my face. Some people can go on stage with just their face and deliver their material. But for me I've got to go on with a sound technician who I've primed up with a certain number of music cues at the right point and props and a plan for the audience. So I structure my gags around what I want the audience to be doing, and the props and the music. And then the final instrument is 'oh, I'd better put my eyes into it'. But because that's something the audience are looking at so much they think, 'oh, it's all done with the eyes'. That's maybe the biggest misdirection of all."

There was a time when Wills didn't shut up. As a street performer he says his spiel was "relentless". And as a comedian he talked and talked and talked. The Boy was born out of that in a way. In 2005, he won an award in his native New Zealand for a show he did called Dance Monkey Dance, which, he says, was all about his feelings of being something of a performing monkey.

"I did these shows where I talked a lot and I did a lot of tricks, so I felt like the audience were coming along, grinding the organ and I would dance for them. Winning an award kind of proved a point. 'You just want me to dance more. This is ridiculous.' So that's why The Boy character came out."

Actually let's rewind just a little. Before The Boy emerged, Wills decided to be a street performer again. That's what first brought him to Edinburgh. He'd lost the joy for comedy. He started squeezing his body through a tennis racket instead. It was a good decision. In 2007 in the city he met his future wife.

"At the time she was a street-performing opera singer. It was a bit like beauty and the beast. We met on the Royal Mile, shared our first kiss in Hunter Square. And the joy is every time we go back for the Fringe, that's our anniversary."

That was the year he started thinking about The Boy. Three years later he came back to Edinburgh with the tape on his face. And the city welcomed his closed mouth with open arms. "It's been really good to me. It's been incredibly good to me." It gave him sold-out shows, even comedy awards. That must be nice. "It's one of those things where I have to remind myself that awards don't matter, because they aren't important."

There speaks someone who has won an award, I say. He laughs at that. "But when I write shows I'm not writing them with the intention of wanting to win an award. That would be mental. But it's nice to get the nod occasionally."

In the last few years New Zealand has cultivated a form of comedy that is maybe best described as quirky. Think of The Flight Of The Conchords. Wills is in that same tradition.

"There's some odd little routines coming out of New Zealand and I think that's because there's more stage time and less comics, which is brilliant. You get a chance to really play. There's no real pressure, whereas over here there's so many comics wanting a spot. I spoke to an open spot guy the other week who'd waited six months for his five-minute slot, and when you're waiting that amount of time you're not going to risk anything. You go out there and you do 100% tried and true best bits and pieces."

Wills starting performing at the age of 12 when he got a Paul Daniels magic set as a going away present when the family left Dunedin. He moved to a small town where there was one clown. He became his apprentice. "The dream was to be a Las Vegas juggler."

He found out about a circus school in the next town up and decided to enrol to learn every aspect of juggling. I want to believe, I tell him, that this means he ran away to the circus.

"I ran away to the school. I didn't quite make it to the circus. I think real circus life is hard. It's really hard. It's way too much work."

He studied juggling, acrobatics and clowning and then started teaching in the school. Then he met a sword swallower in Christchurch "and he just opened my eyes to a world of odd tricks. His trademark routine was he could swallow an electric bread knife."

By this point Jim Rose was an influence. Wills did shows where he'd hammer nails up his nose, eat marshmallows out of rat traps and walk on broken glass.

Eventually he moved in off the street into a casino and did five years of comedy before deciding to become a street performer again. He wanted to perform at Covent Garden and someone told him about Edinburgh. He came, did both.

But the idea for The Boy had developed just before he left New Zealand. He'd gone on stage one night, ruined the idea by talking to the front row, then came back the next night and did it again. He found some gaffer tape and stuck it across his mouth. Et voila. But it was when he moved to Britain that the idea really took off. It was where he truly boyed up.

How do you handle hecklers if you can't talk. "There's enough gaffer tape for everyone," he laughs. "Heckling the character is the equivalent of kicking a puppy. There's no satisfaction in it."

This will be the fourth year he's played The Boy in Edinburgh. In October he's booked himself into a studio to write a new show. "I'll just go into this room and I'll just play for a month and revert back to a genuine nine-year-old boy. I'll just muck around."

You'd think you'd need an actual nine-year-old boy for company.

"I tend to do that with my nephew back in New Zealand. When I go back I hang out with him and we play around. But the downside is he's getting older so it's changing the nature of the show. He's 13. He's not interested in Darth Vader or gunfights. He's interested in girls. And I'm not sure I'm ready for that kind of show yet."

The question now is will The Boy grow up? "I don't know. I never intended it to be the job. It was a five-minute sketch to get rid of the boredom and it's become this thing. I think when it becomes work, that's when the tape will come off."

The Boy With Tape On His Face: More Tape runs at the Pleasance Courtyard from August 3-24, except August 12 and 13, at 9.40pm