The tat princess

Occasionally she goes to that unit to visit and commune, like Miss Haversham, with her random tat: "It's a colossal waste of money," she admits, "but I can't get rid of it all." Bare Necessities is, she explains, a gentle exploration of our materialist habits. "But I don't want to say, Being poor is brilliant. We should all divest ourselves of our possessions.' I am the worst one for hoarding and wanting."

Porter is trying on a black mini-skirt with orange and lime fluorescent net frills, which slops halfway down her hips. Aged 35 and 5ft tall, she fits neatly inside a size eight, and some of the clothes I choose for her make her look like a kid who has been let loose in the adult dressing up box. In the early days of her career, Porter used her size as a gimmick in her act. "Looking back," she recalls, "it was awful. All about being 5ft tall. I was doing a sort of female Ronnie Corbett."

These days, her material is drawn from the full emotional span of her own life. In this sense she is a bit of a woman's comedian, though men make up roughly 50% of her audiences. "I do get a lot of gay men, but I think gay men always love to watch women being tragic." When she first started out, 14 years ago, she was reluctant to do any material about "being a woman". "There was a sort of backlash at that time against comedy that was perceived as being anti-men, against people like Jo Brand, who I think is brilliant. Then I realised there's a case for material on being a woman. Why not try to please your own gender?"

Her 2007 Fringe show, Lucy Porter's Love In, drew heavily upon her personal history of disastrous dates and romantic embarrassments: territory she revisits in The Bare Necessities. After all, she says: "How we feel about money is really all about relationships."

Porter's comedy is as much about delivery as content. On-the-verge of tears, sometimes smiling sweetly with big Bambi eyes, she delivers the filthiest lines in the primmest of manners, often topping off with a syrupy: "Ahhh." She can play the middle-class eco-cutie or the over-emotional hen night drunk.

Her own background is working-class Croydon. "I wish I could say we were landed gentry, but, no, my mum and dad are working class made goodish. I went to a state school and I think at one point we did qualify for free school dinners."

The day before our meeting, Porter recorded an episode of Mock The Week, the comedy current affairs news quiz. Shows like this represent the testosterone-heavy frontline for stand-ups, and they are mostly populated by smart, archly cynical deadpan men. Porter finds them tough. "Stand-up is quite gladiatorial because it's you against the audience. With panel shows, it's you and the other comedians as well. It's like you're being continuously heckled by your peers." Having done a lot of these programmes, she feels she is getting better at them. "But it's all about being ballsy. You have to be a bit blokeish. You have to talk over people."

Women, Porter remarks, are generally brought up to listen and wait for everybody to finish before they interject. Doing programmes such as Mock The Week, she quickly realised that if she were that polite, she would never say a word. Yet interrupting still goes against the grain for Porter. "You feel so rude. I come out thinking, I can't believe I was such a show-off."

There is, she says, a shortage of women willing to do those sort of shows, leaving anyone who does, to feel like a "representative of womankind". And though she now feels she has reached a stage where she is capable of holding her own for her gender, in Mock The Week, she is out-improved by show regulars Frankie Boyle and Hugh Dennis.

Given Porter's junk-hoarding habit, it's surprising to learn that she scripted the voice-over for the programme Anthea Turner: The Perfect Housewife. It was, she says, a bizarre experience. She recalls sitting at her lap-top in her "filthy, tat-filled flat", penning household tips such as, "Remember that DVDs are not an ornament - tidy everything away", then glancing around at her festering collection of used coffee cups. Her untidiest period was when she house-shared with a friend who had Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD). "Neither of us would wash up," she recalls, "so you would be eating your cornflakes out of a teapot, and saying, Look, we really need to wash up'."

At the moment, she is going through a "tidy phase", and putting Anthea's tips into practice. She lives with her boyfriend, Justin, a comic actor, and is enjoying playing the "wifey". Such orderliness, she says, is unlikely to last. "It's clearly not me. It's a bit 1950s Stepford Wife. I ironed a shirt. I made a dinner. I'm quite good at being someone else for a while, but then my true self will out."

Another slightly grubby area in her life is finance. When she was audited by the Inland Revenue, she was embarrassed to find herself trawling though old diaries, checking up dates of gigs, looking at pages marked with notes such as "period starts". "It really was a horrible thing. I came out of it thinking I had wasted my life."

In a Cancer Research charity shop, Porter pulls a pair of sequined shoes off the shelf and strokes them. "I do like a bit of spangle," she says. "I used to work as a researcher on Stars In Their Eyes and I've still got a bit of that camp in me." Porter wasn't always such an enthusiastic frequenter of second-hand stores. As a child growing up in Croydon in a family with few pennies to spare, she found wearing cast-offs acutely embarrassing. Today, she finds pleasure in recycling and saving. "I suffer terribly from Catholic guilt. I feel really guilty about how much money I waste. Throwing food away breaks my heart to the extent I will eat things I really shouldn't. I had a yoghurt the other day that was practically walking out of the door."

Porter is happy to lay out her personal dysfunctions for public examination. Most of them have already emerged in her comedy. Her romantic history, obsessive compulsive habits and untidiness, have all been mined for laughs. In a way, she says, the shows are therapy. One gag involved smashing a mirror every night in order to cure her superstitious streak. "When I started doing comedy I had all these rituals I had to do before I did a gig," she says. "I had to have my hair a certain way. I had to eat a banana. I had to find someone to give money to. The first time I smashed a mirror on-stage, I honestly thought the world was going to end. I was trying to cure myself. And doing that show really did help."

Her parents, who are devout Catholics, have never been to see her show. Even when they came to Edinburgh two years ago, they just sat outside her venue, then came in after the performance. "There's a tacit agreement between me and my mum and dad that it's not really for them," she says. And it's true that her comedy can be a little blue: that sugar smile disguising a gutter tongue. "They kind of know they would find it a bit uncomfortable," she says.

Yet her parents feature in most of her shows, in "a fictionalised version based broadly on the truth". A few years ago Porter told a horrible joke about them, which she now says was "completely untrue", but which ended up being quoted everywhere.

"I felt really bad. But they didn't appear to notice." The joke was so horrible, Porter doesn't want to repeat it now, but I suspect she may be talking about this one: "My parents had a typical Catholic wedding. My father was a repressed homosexual and my mother was sedated."

Given the amount of personal material she includes in her act, I suggest she must experience the occasional twinge of regret. "Yeah, I'm learning as I get older," she says. "I think there is a fine balance. You have to be 100% truthful to make it funny, but there are things I wish I hadn't put in."

After a recent show in Bristol, she received an email from an audience member who wrote: "Really funny. I just wanted to say, do make sure you keep something back for your real life."

A few years ago, Porter was cracking jokes about not wanting to have kids, with lines such as: "I haven't got any children because I haven't met the right nanny." Or: "If I wanted to be tired, nervous and broke I'd get a crack habit." She even talked in the press about how she was "too selfish" to have children, adding that the population was big enough already. In response, she received "weird, supportive" fan mail, expressing thanks and saying: "It's so good you've finally spoken about not having children." But now she is beginning to feel more ambivalent about the subject. "I still think I'm self-obsessed and narcissistic and all those things, but I see my friends' babies and I really like them. I'm now not so convinced I won't have them. But, I'm a stand-up. I'm allowed to be inconsistent."

The social crusader in Porter - which subtly comes through in her comedy - was evident from an early age. At 11, she read Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. After studying English literature at Manchester University, she considered becoming a journalist, but found in the end that it was "easier to do stand-up". A friend once told her she thought she had ADHD, because her conversations were almost always tangential and rambling. "I think," she says, "it would have been quite hard to hold down a normal job or have a normal life, but stand-up has allowed me to use these characteristics. It's the job that suits my mental illness."

She talks me through the emotional journey that a performance entails, from pre-stage nerves to euphoria. Before a gig, she often gets a sleepy feeling, which she believes is her body saying: "Don't do this." A nervous build-up follows, fear rising as curtain-up approaches. "But then the minute you step on the stage, it's the most blissful thing in the world because everything drops away," she says.

During her routine, Porter sometimes touches her hand to her chest, to feel her racing heart-rate. "Even though I don't feel panicky, I can tell the natural fight-or-flight response has kicked in. It's like being pursued by a tiger."

She can't resist confronting that tiger. Nor can she imagine ever wanting to stop being a comedian.

Her sister, a psychiatrist 10 years Porter's senior, has helped her understand the relationship she has with stand-up. "For me, stand-up is an addiction," she says. "It's the adrenalin, pure and simple. You do just get a massive fix." "I'm quite lucky." If I didn't do stand-up, I would probably be on heroin and crack."

Lucy Porter's The Bare Necessities is at the Pleasance Courtyard from August 1, at 7.40pm COMPETITION To be in with a chance of winning one of five pairs of tickets to Lucy Porter's The Bare Necessities, simply answer the question below: Q: Which venue will host the production of Lucy Porter's The Bare Necessities?

Send your answer, along with your name, address and daytime telephone number, to marketing@sundayherald.com, putting LUCY PORTER in the subject line by noon Tuesday July 29 at noon. Usual Sunday Herald competition rules apply. Tickets are for August 4, 2008 only. Prize is non transferable and cannot be exchanged for cash. The editor's decision is final.