It is strange how, all at once, someone’s time comes. A time when everything they do or say seems to chime with the nation’s mood. But it’s rare, in our accelerated culture, for that person to have any maturity, experience or wisdom. Today’s favourite flavour is always instant, and our need for overnight gratification sucks the life out of youthful creative muppets like a nation of zombies desperate for brains to keep the hunger away.

Thankfully, there are still some people who have lived a little before their pay cheques look like spaghetti hoops spilt in a line. Bill Bailey may have grabbed his place in the nation’s heart courtesy of television’s Black Books and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, but he put in years on the stand-up circuit, and even in obscure French theatre companies, before the full glare of the spotlight hit him. Which is probably why, when we meet for an interview over lunch, he chooses an unpretentious west London cafe that serves a decent steak, rather than the latest high-concept Soho bistro with a PR in tow.

I must confess, however, I’m a little surprised when he orders the steak. Red meat? But look at his hair. Look at his dope-smoking gags. Look at his West Country origins. This man screams hippie. He even lived on a canal boat when he first moved to London, for heaven’s sake. Surely the lentil dish appeals? Bailey laughs at my error. “Nobody ever quite gets me right,” he says. “I’m a little bit odd. People think I was a hippie, but actually, I was a punk. I’ve always felt a bit dated or anachronistic. That’s why I called my new stand-up show Part Troll. It’s about being an oddity.”

Part Troll is itself something of an oddity. If today’s comedy is either dark or surreal, Part Troll defies both trends with a great, sweeping concept album of a show. It ranges across highbrow philosophical ideas, breast gags, slapstick, exceptionally skilful music humour (including a Portishead version of Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah that’s worth the price of admission alone) and a surprising amount of fairly barbed anti-Bush material.

Politics, I murmur. Isn’t that a bit risky for a sitcom star? “When I started out,” Bailey explains, “I was doing 320 gigs a year. I’d come back, play cards, sleep most of the day and do more gigs. Now, I have the time to think about the things that piss me off, and I can get quite passionate. Plus, I have the skill to weave them into a comedy context. It’s true that it’s a conscious thing for today’s comics to try not to appear political, because it isn’t very cool. But, as I said, I’m a bit out of sync with the times.”

So out of sync is he that, in many ways, the 39-year-old Bailey could be accused of the opposite of dumbing down — smartening up. His comedy is complex, laced with intellectual references. Take his “Three men walk into a pub” jokes. The story of how they became staples of his live shows begins with the collapse of Bailey’s first comedy venture, a double act called the Rubber Bishops. The Bishops played in and around Bath, London and Edinburgh from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s. In 1994, however, the other half of the pair — Martin — quit for a day job and Bailey decided to make a go of it on his own.

He found it terrifying. Comedy clubs that had always booked the duo became hostile and suspicious, with some telling him he would have to start right back at the beginning doing open spots. Salvation came when one club, the notorious Jokers, in Southend, was struggling to find a closing act for its particularly ugly Friday-night audience.

Bailey, however, needed the work: “I was so nervous, I gabbled through a load of the material from the double act and then realised that the punch line was Martin’s. And I couldn’t remember what it was. The Jokers audience can sense weakness, and a bloke yelled out, ‘Oi, tell us a joke.’ I didn’t know any, but in panic, I started, ‘Three blokes go into a pub.’ There was an immediate, tangible silence. So I just made one up. I was buying a bit of time, and I said, ‘Three blokes go into a pub. Well, I tell a lie, there were four, four blokes go into a pub. Well, all right, there were five.’ And it expanded into all the blokes in the planet and got a big laugh. Which was my moment of epiphany — I can just make things up.”

Since then, he has dropped a “Three blokes go into a pub” gag into every show as a tribute to the moment it saved his comedy life. In Part Troll, the three blokes are the Holy Trinity, and Bailey manages to slot Werner Heisenberg and the uncertainty principle, as well as a Remains of the Day-themed pinball machine, into their boozer. “Yeah, I guess that’s the ultimate one,” he grins.

But why aim so high with the gag, I venture. Does the comedy crowd not yearn for material about self-loathing, masturbation and ladies’ breasts? “I find that, as I ossify and harden, I can identify the things I cannot bear,” he says quietly. “One of those is anti-intellectualism. I really can’t abide it. I thought: is there some way I could make this my agenda, without becoming preachy and unfunny? So I thread philosophy, religion, history, language, all the things that interest me, into the show. I see it as a challenge to try and make them funny.”

He rises to that challenge, capable of riffing on Buddhism in the same way Billy Connolly riffs on farts, but delivering twice the laughs. It’s this love of intelligence that fuels his political material about President Bush. Bailey loves America. His favourite comic (Bill Hicks), authors (Thomas Pynchon, John Steinbeck, JD Salinger, Elmore Leonard, James Ellroy) and pop music (Red Hot Chili Peppers, Queens of the Stone Age) are all American.

“Every American I’ve ever met has been, without exception, polite, interested, tolerant, thoughtful and sensitive.” He stabs his steak with a hint of venom. “It’s a very forward-moving, scientifically rigorous, challenging, adventurous, exploratory nation. And it’s suddenly ruled by this narrow band of inward-thinking, self-regarding, anti-intellectual idiots who live entirely for money. I hate that.”

At this point, it should come as no surprise to find that — with his comedic mission, a father who was a doctor and a mother who sang and played music — Mr Bailey is extremely well educated. He studied at a school in Bath called King Edward’s, which taught him Latin, one of the things he appreciates most about the place. “It seems such an odd, perverse thing to do, yet it actually gives you a love of the way you construct a sentence,” he says, “the whole architecture — the words to use, how to pace them and how to use the possibilities of nuance.”