TEARS OF A CLOWN AL Kennedy is an acclaimed novelist, so why is she so keen to stand up and tell jokes? She speaks frankly to Phil Miller about creativity, depression and the pain behind the comedy

On stage, Kennedy is not the serious, downbeat author her readers perhaps think they know. She is candid, conversational, political and sometimes just plain crude. In one recent show she spun out a joke about the dangers of oral sex in a moving car for five minutes, taking in southern rednecks, George W Bush, irradiated ordnance in Iraq, and a lot of surreal territory in between. Initially only performing five-minute sets, she has been gradually expanding her material, and a longer, onewoman show at the Edinburgh Fringe has been mooted.

When the news of her second career broke, Kennedy explained it was providing a "distraction" from other areas of her life. "I will be glad to talk about why I am doing this at a later date, " she said.

Now it is that later date.

We are sitting together in a busy cafe, not far from Kennedy's home in the west end of Glasgow, where she is sipping a large cup of chai latte. Born in Dundee in 1965, she has lived in Glasgow since 1996 and comes to his cafe a lot. She is recovering from an exhausting threeday writing jag, finishing an adaptation of some "big mad books" for a new television series, but her pale skin is immaculate and her large eyes are clear, bright and sharp. She is dressed in a striped top, jeans and smart brown shoes, and her formerly long locks have been cut to a neat shoulder length. She appears healthy and fresh, if oddly apprehensive.

The new voice in her brain, the voice she is using to make audiences laugh and to guide her on the stage, has a dual nature, she says. It is an "exaggeration"; a "cartoon" of her normal self. "On stage that is just a louder version of me, " she says. "It's like me talking to my friends when I've had a lot of coffee, or I'm very angry about something. You slightly make a cartoon out of yourself. But I'm slightly like a cartoon, so it doesn't matter."

Stand-up comedy is also a response to a crisis in Kennedy's personal life, one that seems to have floored her emotionally. Last year she lost the friendship of someone very dear to her. Who that friend was, she will not say. But the break came out of the blue and left her thunderstruck. Comedy - writing the material, then striding onto a stage and performing with a new energy and physicality in front of sometimes fractious audiences - was her response to the crisis. It seems she is still distraught about it, flattened by its impact. On her website, she admits her "sanity and cheerfulness are both hanging by a thread".

"This is not the best of times, " she says, her voice sad and resigned. "I had a friend, and we used to talk about comedy - I've always liked comedy, I've always watched comedy - and we had a number of years of swapping different things we loved, and that was very good. And now we don't speak. And it's rather bollocksed a lot of things that cheered me up. So I'm pissed off I don't have any fun any more, and I'm enormously pissed off I don't have the things that used to cheer me up. It's stupid, but I can't really watch them any more because they remind me of my friend." There is a pause, and then she adds: "When 50 per cent of your life has gone, it makes you realise how much you rely on somebody."

She looks deeply upset, and we move on. Later I broach the subject again. Will the personal crisis go away? Can it get better? "I have no idea, " she says. "I haven't got a clue. I never knew what it was about and I continue to not know what it was about. And I won't talk about it [again] in the future because this is not just about me. So you cannot do that."

Whatever the specifics of the personal rupture, it led to the new career in comedy. So surely something positive has come out of it? "Yeah, " she says wearily. "It's like I read in Private Eye that someone had written, 'Kylie Minogue should embrace the new perspective offered by breast cancer.' And I thought, 'Yeah, f- off.' With every cloud there is a lining of more cloud." She sighs, before adding: "You just go around doing the stuff that you do and eventually you realise you don't know how anything works, or why we're doing anything, and it doesn't matter because we don't know how it works and it doesn't matter anyway. The world is just lots of tiny people yelling at each other, to make sure they are there. We're all little tiny people - and beyond that, I don't know." She smiles thinly. "And this is me in a cheerful mood."

Finding that new comedic voice has, she admits, been a life-changing experience. "It's something that I haven't done for 25 years, " she admits. "One of the key things when you are starting out as a writer - it's a cliche but it's true - is finding your own voice. This is like a new register of that voice. I did not want to find it. It was because I had nowhere else to go. Or perhaps it is the same voice, with far too much coffee."

The cycle of performance - two or three live shows a week, as compared to one novel every year - is much quicker, and the energy required more concentrated. "It's more intense than writing a book. There is a level of concentration which is something else on stage, " she says. "You are thinking of what you are saying, what you are going to say next, whether you are going to muck about with it, and you have to react to the audience. Very young audiences may not like politics - sometimes they may not actually know what you're talking about. Some just want to hear knob jokes. Some actively don't, which is even more interesting."

Kennedy does not have any time for the theory that artists should suffer to create art. It is one of the oldest conundrums: is the mental anguish of artists worth it for the work that is produced? Is it, indeed, necessary? Would the poetry of Sylvia Plath be as powerful without the suicidal demons that drove it? Did the agonies of Vincent Van Gogh lead to his Sunflowers, or TS Eliot's unhappy marriage and loss of faith to The Waste Land?

Such darkness is not new to Kennedy, whose books are notable for their insight and keen description into the bleak shadows of life. Indeed, she admits - although, it should be noted, with a laugh: "If I got upset when I wrote every single sad part of my books, I would be constantly inconsolable."

She has had suicidal thoughts. In her 1999 book, On Bullfighting, she wrote of an aborted attempt to throw herself from her fourthstorey window. Wracked by physical pain in her neck and back, partly the result of an undiagnosed slipped disc, and devastated after the death of her beloved grandfather, she reached a point where she could not write. She managed to get to a window in her flat and prepared to jump. Luckily, somebody somewhere nearby was singing a song. It caught her attention and she decided against jumping. The song? Mairi's Wedding.

The sudden appearance of the saccharine folk song saved Kennedy's life, a moment she put down to "divine intervention". Such moments, I hazard, are the kinds of crises that often lead to artists creating great work. "No, crises are never worth it, " she says firmly. "I lurch from one crisis to another. I am living one, and I would quite like to never have crises any more." Perhaps she agrees with Eliot, who wrote: "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates."

As she speaks, Kennedy is firmly in control. She is not an emotional mess. She does not cry or even raise her voice. She appears strong and resilient. Perhaps the gruelling stints of comedy are working as a kind of therapy: those who suffer loss or separation often fill their newly found spare time with new pursuits. "Is doing comedy working?" she says. "I don't know. It's occupying my mind. I really needed something to occupy my time, something where I could not think of anything else - and when you're running through your set you can't think of anything else."

Does she enjoy being a stand-up? Is she scared when she steps up on the stage? Writers, after all, are not renowned for being extroverts or show-offs. It comes with the profession: long, long hours spent alone,this, in turn, only serves to make the eventual tragedy even more heartbreaking.Kennedy obviously loves comedy: its heroes, its history, its theory. Her mood lightens immediately when we start discussing comedians she admires. We share affection for the work of Bill Hicks, and I mention the skit where, high on drugs in the back of an "intelligent" car which informs him with a mechanical tone that "the door is ajar", he is thrown into existential turmoil because he cannot understand how the door could be a jar. Kennedy laughs heartily.Energised by talking about more of her favourite comedians - Steve Martin, Chic Murray, Eddie Izzard - we walk to Kennedy's elegant top-floor flat, where

she lives alone. When she is writing a novel, I ask, where does the satisfaction come from? The writing? When it is completed? Or even when it is published? "I've yet to find out, " she says. "It just passes the time. I have no other way of earning a living. There is a satisfaction in doing something, so you don't have to do it any more. It's nice if someone else likes it, but that has so little to do with you - it has a lot to do with where they were when they read it, how they felt when they heard it. I'm unemployable, really - I have no other options. I have a predisposition to write. But with the comedy,if 'last year' had not happened, I would not be doing it. I would not have any desire to do it."Perhaps she is performing not for the thrill, but for the acknowledgement and comfort of receiving warm laughter. She mutters that laughter is "fake", then adds: "Laughter is all kinds of things.

Laughter is fear; laughter is identification; laughter is feeling you are clever; laughter is saying that you got it; laughter is being with your mates; laughter is being drunk. It is acknowledgement that you are depressed. It is all kinds of things. The comedians I laugh at, it's because they are saying something that I understand. It is recognition."She is happy (and, I think, pleasantly surprised by that) when she is hanging out with other comedians, and enjoys their company. Yes, she says, comedy at the highest level is "nasty and cut-throat" - but then so is the world of literature. "If you compare the support you get as a writer just starting out and a comic starting out - well, there's no comparison, " she says. "A writer doesn't get any support. But with comedy, you cannot do it without support. You write your own material, of course, but you need other people too. As a writer you

don't get any feedback."Besides her increasingly busy comedy schedule, Kennedy has a novel to finish. She has been researching it for four years and has spent a year and a half writing it. She normally paces the time between her novels with a collection of short stories, but she dived straight into this, her first period novel. It is set in and around the Second World War, and the main character, Alfred, flies bombers over Germany. She has called it her "war book", and says it will be released in the spring of2007. It is based partially in and around Staffordshire and the Black Country, where her grandparents and parents originally lived. Although she will not give the plot away, the survival rate of the bomber crews was low. She is currently on the final pages, where "everything goes downhill".That, however, is not a reflection of her own life, she says. Nor does it mean, in her view, that

her feelings matter. She says she wants to keep the divide between her private life and her professional life intact."It's not about [yourself], it's not about you, " she says. "It is all about someone you will never meet: the reader. I saw the cast of [the comedy show] Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps talking about their show on television the other day and they said, 'Oh, we have a great time on set, such a laugh.' And you think, 'Yes, you do. That's why we, as viewers, do not."She laughs at this, and gamely begins to pose for photographs against the blood-red walls of her study. She wonders whether she can pose with a black bag on her head. Oddly enough, the photographer says no.It still seems incongruous that this withdrawn, softly spoken writer is risking her emotions - and her reputation - in the notoriously challenging, exposed arena of live comedy. But Kennedy seems impervious,

impregnable and tough, despite all the selfdeprecation, the mordant quips and the sarcasm. "It's not about my emotions - they are not important, " she repeats. "It's about the effect you have on the person experiencing whatever you do. That is all that matters."